Forestry postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Every spring at the nursery where I work, I count cell-grown oak, hazel and rowan seedlings into trays of forty before they are dispatched to planting schemes. After two seasons I can tell from the colour of a root plug whether a batch has been kept too wet, and I have started to wonder what happens to those trays after the lorry leaves. Many of the sites we supply are field margins and former pasture, and I would like to understand, with proper training, which of those young trees are likely to become woodland and why. That question is what draws me to postgraduate study in forestry.

My undergraduate degree in Environmental Science gave me a broad base in soils, ecology and statistics, but forestry became my focus in my final year. For my dissertation I surveyed ash trees along a four-kilometre stretch of hedgerow near my home in Shropshire, scoring crown condition for ash dieback using a standard five-class visual scale. I recorded 212 trees over two visits, in June and September, noting trunk diameter, hedge management and whether each tree stood alone or within a continuous hedge. My analysis was modest: I found that larger, isolated trees tended to score better than smaller ones in flailed hedges, but I was careful to say in my discussion that visual scoring by a single observer has limits, and that two visits cannot show a trend. Supervisors commented that my fieldwork was thorough, and I was pleased with how I organised a dataset that began as muddy notebook pages. The project left me with practical questions I could not answer alone, particularly about how hedgerow trees should be counted in landscape-scale assessments of tree cover.

Alongside my degree I took modules in GIS and environmental statistics. I enjoyed digitising field boundaries from aerial imagery, and I have since taught myself more of QGIS by mapping the coppice coupes at a local wood where I volunteer. That volunteering began socially, as a friend asked me to help one Saturday, but I have now attended most monthly work days for eighteen months. We cut hazel on a rotation, build dead hedges from the brash and stack the poles for a local hurdle maker. I have learnt that coppice management involves as much negotiation over access paths and dog walkers as it does cutting, and that the wood's history of neglect still shapes which stools regrow well.

My nursery job has also changed. After my first packing season I was kept on in the grounds team, which means irrigation checks, weeding beds of transplants and recording losses each week. It is ordinary work, but it has made me attentive to detail and comfortable with long outdoor days in poor weather. It has also shown me how much of a planting scheme's success is decided long before planting, in seed source, handling and storage.

I have read widely around these experiences. Oliver Rackham's Woodlands helped me see British woods as products of centuries of human use rather than untouched nature, which fitted what I see in our coppice. I have also followed public discussion of woodland expansion targets and the debate over whether natural colonisation can sometimes achieve more than planting.

At postgraduate level I want to develop rigorous skills in forest measurement, silviculture and spatial analysis, and to carry out a research project on establishment and early survival of new woodland, ideally connecting nursery practice with field outcomes. Longer term I hope to work in woodland creation or advisory forestry. Outside work I play five-a-side football weekly, which keeps me sociable after days spent mostly with seedlings. I am ready for the demands of advanced study, and I would bring to it field experience, patience with data and a genuine curiosity about how trees become forests.