Applied chemistry postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

The kettle in the staff room at the water treatment works where I am a laboratory technician grows a crust of limescale every fortnight, and someone always descales it with citric acid from the canteen. It is a small, homely piece of applied chemistry: a carbonate deposit, a weak acid, a little fizzing and a clean element. A large part of my job is the same reaction written much bigger, and it is that move from the beaker to the plant that I want to study properly at postgraduate level.

I graduated with a 2:1 in Chemistry, and my final-year project looked at whether tannin extracts from chestnut and mimosa could slow the corrosion of mild steel in dilute hydrochloric acid. I measured mass loss over several days and used potentiodynamic polarisation to compare inhibited and uninhibited samples. The extracts did reduce corrosion at higher concentrations, but my results varied more than I expected between batches of extract. I traced part of this to how long the solutions had stood before use, and I added a fixed preparation schedule for the later runs. The variability did not disappear, so I reported it honestly rather than averaging it away. Writing that discussion taught me more about the limits of a method than any of my cleaner practicals had.

For the past two years I have worked at the treatment works, where I run routine tests on raw and treated water: pH, turbidity, hardness, residual chlorine and aluminium from the coagulation stage. Most days are routine sampling and logging, and I value the discipline of it. I have become the person who keeps the titration procedures up to date. When a new batch of reagent gave hardness results that drifted slightly high, I ran it against a reference standard alongside the old stock and showed the supervisor the comparison before we changed anything. The fix was simple, but it came from treating each reading as a measurement rather than a box to tick.

The work has also shown me how much chemistry sits just outside my training. I can measure residual aluminium, but I understand only in outline why coagulant dosing changes with raw water temperature and organic content, or how process engineers decide on a dose. Talking to the operators has given me a working vocabulary, not real expertise. I want a programme that joins analytical chemistry to process chemistry, materials and environmental applications, and that would let me return to questions like corrosion inhibition with better instruments and a stronger grasp of surface chemistry.

Outside work I coach a junior badminton session on Saturday mornings at a local leisure centre. It has nothing to do with chemistry, but planning drills for twelve children with very different abilities has made me better at explaining things simply and adjusting when an explanation does not land. I also keep a sourdough starter, which my colleagues regard as an unregulated microbiology experiment. They are probably right.

In my own reading I have worked through sections of Fontana's Corrosion Engineering to revisit the electrochemistry behind my project, and I follow the trade press on water treatment, particularly discussions of membrane fouling and scale control. I am drawn to research on greener inhibitors and antiscalants, because my project left me curious whether plant-derived compounds can be made consistent enough for industrial use.

I bring a solid undergraduate foundation, two years of careful routine laboratory practice in a regulated setting and the habit of checking the method before trusting the number. I am ready for the step up in independence and depth that postgraduate study demands, and I would like to spend it on chemistry that ends up somewhere in a pipe, a tank or a kettle.