Magíster en Ciencias del Movimiento Humano postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

On Saturday mornings, before the climbing gym opens, I set new routes on the bouldering wall. The part I enjoy most comes later, when I watch customers try them. A move I designed as a simple reach to the left is solved by one climber with a high foot and a slow lean, and by another with a small jump. Both reach the hold. Neither does what I expected. Over two years of setting I have come to see each route as a question about movement, and the climbers keep answering it in ways I did not plan. I would like to study those answers properly, which is why I am applying for a Master's in Human Movement Sciences.

My first degree was in Physical Education teaching. The courses I valued most were motor learning, biomechanics and exercise physiology, partly because they changed how I ran practical sessions during my teaching placements. Reading about Nikolai Bernstein's degrees of freedom problem, the question of how the nervous system coordinates a body that can perform the same action in countless ways, gave me a vocabulary for what I was seeing on the wall. Karl Newell's model of constraints, which describes movement as emerging from the interaction of the individual, the task and the environment, made me think differently about teaching. I began to ask what I could change about a task, rather than only correcting a pupil's technique.

For my undergraduate thesis I studied landing mechanics in fourteen adolescent volleyball players at a local club. Using two smartphones on tripods and free video analysis software, I measured knee flexion angles and visible knee valgus during drop landings, before and after six weeks of warm-ups that included landing drills. The equipment limited what I could claim. Two-dimensional video cannot capture rotation accurately, and calibrating camera angles on a crowded sports hall floor took far longer than I had planned. Still, I produced a clear protocol, reported good agreement between my repeated measurements, and the coach kept the drills in the club's warm-up afterwards. The project showed me that I enjoy careful measurement. It also showed me how much more I need to learn about laboratory methods, kinematics and statistics to answer questions with confidence.

Since graduating I have worked as a PE assistant at a municipal secondary school. I support lessons for classes of up to forty pupils, prepare equipment and run a lunchtime basketball group. Large classes have taught me to organise space quickly and to notice which pupils avoid moving at all, often because they feel clumsy rather than unwilling. Several of them now come to the lunchtime group regularly, and I find that more satisfying than any score.

Outside work, I help my parents with deliveries for their bakery on weekday afternoons. I plan the route, load the trays and keep the accounts for regular customers. It is ordinary work, but it has made me reliable with schedules and comfortable with numbers, which helped when organising my thesis data.

At Master's level I want to develop rigorous skills in motion analysis and research design, and to understand motor control theory more deeply than my undergraduate reading allowed. I am particularly interested in how variability in movement can be functional rather than simply error, in learners of different ages and abilities. In the longer term I would like to work at the boundary between research and practice, perhaps designing evidence-based physical education or training programmes, and to keep asking why two people reach the same hold so differently.