Advanced Manufacturing Technology & Systems Management MSc postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

At the sheet-metal firm where I work as a planning assistant, the real production schedule lives on a whiteboard beside the press brakes. The planning software says one thing; the whiteboard, updated in marker by the shift leader, says what is actually happening. Part of my job each morning is reconciling the two, and that daily gap between planned and real is the main reason I want to study advanced manufacturing technology alongside systems management.

The company makes stainless steel extraction hoods for commercial kitchens, mostly one-off or small-batch orders. I joined fourteen months ago after graduating in Product Design Engineering, expecting to work mainly with drawings. Instead I spend much of my time chasing material, checking whether laser-cut blanks have reached the folding area and re-sequencing jobs when a customer moves a fitting date. Over the first few months I noticed that our two press brakes lost a lot of time between jobs, because tooling was set up from memory and sometimes had to be changed twice. I suggested we photograph the tooling arrangement for our twenty most common hood profiles and keep laminated set-up sheets at each machine. My supervisor agreed to a trial. I did not measure the effect rigorously, but the operators started using the sheets without being asked, and set-up queries to the office became much less frequent. Reading about Shigeo Shingo's single-minute exchange of die afterwards showed me that I had stumbled on a small part of a well-developed method, specifically the idea of separating preparation that can happen while the machine is running from work that requires it to stop. I would like to understand that kind of improvement systematically rather than by instinct.

My degree gave me a good grounding in materials, CAD and manufacturing processes, though it leaned towards design. My final-year project was the most production-focused part of it. I designed and tested a simple fixture to measure warping in nylon brackets made on the department's fused-filament printers, using a dial gauge on a printed jig so that every part was held in the same position. Comparing parts printed at different bed temperatures and orientations, I found that orientation affected flatness more consistently than temperature within the range I tested, although my sample of around forty parts was too small to say much more. The most useful lesson was how much the measurement method mattered: my first jig version gave readings that changed depending on who loaded the part, and redesigning it taught me more about repeatability than any lecture had.

Since starting work I have tried to fill gaps in my knowledge. I have read Goldratt's The Goal, which made me look at our laser cutter as a possible constraint, and I have taught myself basic discrete-event simulation using free software, building a rough model of our cutting-to-folding flow. It is crude, but it helped me explain to my manager why releasing more jobs to the laser would not get hoods out of the door faster. I would like to develop these skills properly, particularly in production planning, automation and how digital tools can link the scheduling system to what is happening on the floor without replacing the judgement of experienced operators.

Outside work I climb at a local bouldering wall two or three evenings a week, and I cook for my two younger brothers on the nights my mother works late shifts, which has made me fairly good at planning meals around a fixed time and whatever is in the fridge. Neither is connected to manufacturing, but both keep me patient with problems that need several attempts.

I am applying for postgraduate study now because I have enough practical experience to know which questions I want to answer, and not enough theory to answer them well. I want to return to industry able to close the gap between the whiteboard and the plan.