Master of Science in Applied Animal Biology (MSc) postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Most Saturday mornings at the farm supplies counter where I work, someone asks me which calf milk replacer to buy. The question usually sounds like one about price or protein content, but the follow-up questions are often more revealing. Should calves be fed twice a day or three times? Is it worth buying a second hutch so two calves can be kept together? I can answer the product questions from the labels. The others led me into my undergraduate dissertation, and they are why I want to study applied animal biology at postgraduate level.

For my final-year project I compared locomotor play in pre-weaned dairy calves housed individually or in pairs on my university's teaching farm. I recorded behaviour for two hours each afternoon over three weeks and scored running, bucking and jumping from the footage using a published ethogram. Before I began, my supervisor suggested that I and another student score a sample of clips independently. Our agreement was lower than I expected, mainly because we disagreed about where a short trot ended and a run began. We rewrote the definitions with clearer timing criteria, and our agreement improved. Pair-housed calves in my small sample played more often. I was careful in the write-up to present this as consistent with earlier work, not as proof. Twelve calves on one farm, with housing that could not be fully randomised, cannot support a stronger claim. Even so, the project showed me how much work lies behind turning what a stockperson notices into evidence that someone else can trust.

My reading has shaped how I think about what to measure. Marian Stamp Dawkins's Why Animals Matter argues that welfare questions can be framed as two practical ones: is the animal healthy, and does it have what it wants? That framing helped me explain to myself why play interested me. A calf can be healthy and growing well while still lacking something it would choose. The Five Domains model, with its attention to positive mental states as well as the avoidance of suffering, gave me a vocabulary for this. I have also become aware of how hard positive indicators are to interpret, since play can fall when an animal is unwell or underfed, so a low score does not always point to the same cause.

For the past eighteen months I have also done relief milking on alternate weekends on a 150-cow farm near my home. The work is routine: preparing teats, checking for mastitis, moving cows through the parlour and noting anything unusual for the herd manager. Over time I have learned to notice which cows hang back at the collecting yard and which ones flinch at a particular gate. These observations are no substitute for systematic study, and the decisions belong to the farmer, not me. They have, however, made me think about how welfare research reaches people who make daily decisions with limited time and money. Answering questions at the counter has taught me something similar. Advice is only useful if it fits the realities of a working farm.

Outside work I play hockey for a local club and help run its junior Sunday sessions. Organising drills for twenty children has improved my planning far more than any spreadsheet, and the club gives me a life away from animals and coursework.

At postgraduate level I want to develop stronger skills in experimental design and statistics, especially for repeated behavioural measures, and to study how housing and feeding systems affect young animals' welfare. I would bring careful observational habits, practical experience with livestock, and a realistic sense of the farms where research findings ultimately have to work.