Circular economy postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

The cheapest cordless drill I took apart for my final-year project had twenty-three screws in four different sizes, two of them hidden under a rubber grip glued in place. Getting to the battery contacts took me just over eleven minutes and a heat gun. The most expensive model took under three minutes with one screwdriver. That gap, between products that can be opened and products that are designed not to be, is why I want to study the circular economy at postgraduate level.

My degree is in mechanical engineering, and for most of it I thought of design in terms of strength, weight and cost at the point of sale. My individual project changed that. I bought three second-hand drills from online listings and timed repeated disassembly to replace the motor, switch and battery terminals, recording each step, tool change and component damaged along the way. I scored them using a simple repairability checklist I adapted from published criteria for products such as smartphones, and wrote up where the scoring seemed to miss things, for example that a glued component counts the same whether it is a cosmetic trim or the part most likely to fail. The project was modest, but it taught me to measure something people usually argue about from instinct.

Alongside my studies I have worked two days a week at a community bike repair co-op, first at the front desk and later helping members fix their own bikes on the open workshop evenings. I am not a professional mechanic, but I can true a wheel, replace a bottom bracket and explain to a nervous first-timer why their brake pads need changing. The co-op runs on donated bikes, and sorting them taught me practical lessons about value: a frame with an obscure headset size might be perfectly sound yet nearly worthless to us because parts are hard to find. Standardisation, I realised, is as much an economic question as an engineering one.

I also volunteer at a monthly repair café in a church hall, mostly on small appliances. Over a year I started keeping a notebook of what came in and why it could or could not be fixed. Missing spare parts and sealed casings came up far more often than any lack of skill among volunteers. That pattern made me curious about the parts of the system I had not studied: procurement, extended producer responsibility, business models built on leasing or refurbishment, and how policy can change what manufacturers find worth designing.

My reading has followed that curiosity. Cradle to Cradle by Braungart and McDonough gave me the distinction between biological and technical nutrients, though I found its optimism about eliminating waste entirely harder to square with what I see in the co-op's scrap bin. Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economics was useful in making me ask what growth is for, rather than treating it as the default goal. I want a course that lets me test ideas like these against evidence and real organisations.

Outside work and study I play bass in a ceilidh band, which has nothing to do with sustainability but has made me reliable about turning up, carrying heavy kit and adapting when a caller changes the set halfway through. I also work Saturdays on the till at a hardware shop, where I have learned how often people buy a whole new tool because one small part is unavailable.

I bring a technical foundation, comfort with hands-on testing and a habit of recording what I observe. What I lack, and want to gain, is the economic, policy and systems thinking needed to understand why a well-designed drill is still rarer than a badly designed one, and what might change that. After my studies I hope to work on product stewardship or repair policy, where an engineer who has actually counted the screws could be useful.