Earth Science and Physical Geography BSc (Hons) personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

From the school bus each morning I can see the gravel bar under the bridge in our village, and over two years I have watched it change shape. After a run of storms one February it grew by several metres and a young willow that had rooted on it vanished. I wanted to know how a river that looks almost still in August can move that much material, and why most stones on the bar are pale sandstone when the hills upstream are capped with darker gritstone. Questions like these sit between geology and geography: the rocks supply the sediment, but slope, rainfall and channel shape decide what happens to it. That is why I want to study Earth science and physical geography together rather than either alone. I am drawn to how processes I can watch over a season connect to ones that work over millions of years, and I like that answering them needs fieldwork, chemistry and maths at once. I want to learn to map, sample and model a landscape well enough to explain it rather than simply describe it.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

My A-levels in Geography, Chemistry and Maths each feed this interest. For my Geography independent investigation I tested whether clasts become smaller and rounder downstream along a six-kilometre stretch of our local beck. I measured the long axis of thirty clasts at each of eight sites and scored roundness using Powers' index, then used Spearman's rank to test the trends. Size fell clearly downstream, but one site broke the pattern just below a tributary that drains a quarry, which led me to discuss sediment inputs rather than treating the river as a single system. Chemistry has given me a way to think about weathering: a rate experiment reacting marble chips with hydrochloric acid at different concentrations made carbonation feel less abstract, and I could see why limestone areas respond so differently to acidic rainwater. In Maths, working with logarithmic scales helped me read the Hjulström curve properly and understand why fine clay can be harder to erode than sand. Outside lessons I read Marcia Bjornerud's Timefulness, which argues that people would make better decisions about the environment if they had a working sense of geological time. It changed how I look at the gravel bar: something that moves in a single winter is also part of a much slower story.

What else have you done to prepare outside of education, and why are these experiences useful?

Last spring I spent four Saturdays helping a local rivers trust with its riverfly monitoring. A trained coordinator carried out the timed kick-samples while I held trays, sorted invertebrates into groups and recorded counts on the survey sheet. By the last visit I could reliably separate cased caddis, mayfly nymphs and stoneflies, and the coordinator let me check my tallies against hers. I noticed that a riffle downstream of a field drain had fewer stonefly larvae, and asked why. She explained that fine sediment clogs the gravel these larvae depend on, which linked directly to what I was measuring in my own project. I also work Saturday mornings in a garden-centre café, where I open up, set out the counter and handle the breakfast rush. It is not related to my subject, but it has made me organised and calm when several things need doing at once, and I was trusted to train two new starters last summer. My main hobby is climbing. I train at an indoor wall twice a week and have been on club trips to gritstone edges, where I learned how much the texture and jointing of a rock affect where you can place your hands. Being outside in all weathers, paying close attention to the ground and recording things carefully are habits I already enjoy, and I want to build on them through a degree that combines both disciplines.