Biodiversity and Taxonomy of Plants MSc postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

The first thing I learned to check on a bluebell was the colour of its anthers. In the native species they are cream; in the Spanish bluebell and many of its hybrids they are blue. For my final-year project I spent much of one April crouched beside graves in an old town cemetery, tilting flowers towards the light and recording anther colour, whether the flowers hung from one side of the stem, how far the tips of the stem drooped and how strongly the petals curled back. The cemetery was a useful place to work because garden bluebells had clearly been planted on some graves while woodland plants survived along the boundary hedge, so the two met over a few hundred metres.

I scored just over three hundred flowering stems along four transects and assigned each to native, Spanish or intermediate using a simple character index. The pattern was not as tidy as I had expected. Plants near the hedge were mostly native, but intermediates appeared well away from any planted graves, and several stems combined native-looking flowers with blue anthers. With my supervisor's help I analysed the data in R and discussed why a handful of morphological characters can suggest hybrid ancestry without proving it. That limitation is the main reason I want to study taxonomy at postgraduate level. I would like to understand how morphological evidence is weighed against molecular data, and how decisions about species boundaries are actually made and recorded.

My degree gave me a reasonable foundation. I took modules in plant physiology, evolution and ecology, and a second-year field course where we keyed out grasses and sedges, which I found slow at first and then oddly satisfying once I could recognise ligules and leaf sheaths without hunting through the text. Since graduating I have kept practising with Stace's New Flora of the British Isles, working through one family at a time on local walks and photographing anything I cannot confidently name. I have also been reading introductory material on DNA barcoding, including why plant barcoding commonly uses the chloroplast regions rbcL and matK and why these can struggle to separate closely related species. I understand the principle but have no laboratory experience of sequencing, and gaining it is one of the things I am most looking forward to.

At the moment I work evening shifts in a print-and-copy shop. Much of the job is checking files before they go to print: whether margins are correct, whether an image will reproduce at the requested size, whether a forty-page booklet has been paginated in the right order. It is unglamorous, but it has made me careful about small details and comfortable asking customers precise questions when instructions are vague. I have come to think that good herbarium labels and good print orders have something in common, because both fail when one piece of information is missing.

Outside work I play badminton for a club team, which keeps me sociable during a week otherwise spent with keys and screens, and I walk a neighbour's dog on weekday mornings since she had a hip operation. The walks have become my most regular botanising time; I now know which verges are cut first and where the cuckooflower comes up.

I am applying for a masters because I want structured training in plant identification, systematics and the use of collections, rather than continuing to teach myself in fragments. I am particularly interested in groups where hybridisation makes identification difficult, and I would welcome the chance to work with herbarium material and to develop a research project that combines careful morphology with molecular methods. My bluebell project showed me that I enjoy patient, repetitive observation and that I am willing to accept results that complicate my first assumptions. I would like to build on that with the skills to answer such questions properly.