Bachelor of Science In Food Processing Engineering personal statement example

Personal statement example

Every Saturday morning for six weeks last year, I weighed slices of tomato on a kitchen scale borrowed from a neighbour who sells groundnuts. My aunt sells tomatoes at our local market, and in the glut season she loses a large share of her stock to softening and mould before she can sell it. She already sun-dries some on a mat by the roadside, but dust settles on them, goats sometimes reach them, and when it rains everything must be rushed inside. I wanted to see whether a simple covered dryer could do better.

I built a tent dryer from a wooden frame made of offcuts from a carpenter's shop, clear polythene sheeting and a raised mesh tray cut from an old mosquito net stretched over wire. I painted a board black for the base so it would absorb more heat, and left gaps at the bottom and top so that air could flow through. Each Saturday I sliced tomatoes to roughly the same thickness, placed one batch in the dryer and another on my aunt's open mat, and weighed both every two hours. The covered batch lost water noticeably faster in the afternoon, and the slices stayed clean. On cloudy days, however, the difference almost disappeared, and twice the inside became so humid that droplets formed on the plastic. Widening the top vent helped. I recorded everything in an exercise book and plotted the results by hand. The data was rough, because my scale only measured to the nearest five grams and slice thickness varied, but it showed me that drying depends on moving moist air away, not only on heat.

This connected directly with my school subjects. In Physics we studied heat transfer, and I could see conduction from the black board, convection through the vents and radiation through the polythene working together. In Chemistry, learning about enzymes and microbial growth explained why the slices that dried slowly at the start were the ones that darkened or spoiled. Elective Mathematics gave me the tools to calculate percentage moisture loss and compare drying rates. I began to understand that processing food safely is an engineering problem as much as a biological one, and that small design choices change the result.

Working on my aunt's stall at weekends has taught me other things. I handle money, talk to customers and notice what they choose. Buyers press tomatoes to judge firmness and reject bruised ones even when the flavour is fine, so I learnt that quality is also about appearance and handling during transport. I have watched traders pack produce into baskets in ways that crush the bottom layer, and I now wonder how packaging and cold storage could be made affordable for sellers like her.

Outside school I repair mobile phones for friends and neighbours, replacing charging ports and screens with a cheap soldering iron. It has made me patient with small, careful work and comfortable taking things apart to understand them. I also play draughts at a spot near our house, mostly against older men who beat me more often than I beat them, which has improved my ability to think several moves ahead.

I want to study Food Processing Engineering because I would like to understand properly the processes I have only tested crudely: drying, preservation, packaging and the design of equipment that can be built and maintained locally. I am curious about how to measure moisture accurately, how to scale a process from one tray to a factory line, and how to keep costs low enough for small producers. My dryer was a simple experiment, but it showed me I enjoy working through a practical problem methodically, and I am ready to build on that with rigorous training.