Biomedical engineering postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

The first recording from my final-year project board was mostly the building's wiring. I had designed a small circuit to pick up surface electromyography signals from the forearm, and when I squeezed a grip trainer the trace barely changed. Underneath it all sat a steady 50 Hz hum from the mains. Getting rid of that hum, and understanding why it was there, taught me more about measuring the human body than any lecture had.

My degree was in electronic engineering, and the project grew from a signals module in which we filtered prerecorded ECG data. I wanted to work with a live signal from a real person, and a low-cost EMG front end seemed achievable on a student budget. Over two terms I built a board around an instrumentation amplifier, then a band-pass filter covering roughly 20 to 450 Hz, where most of the useful surface EMG content lies. I fed its output into a microcontroller. The hum taught me that a digital notch filter alone was not enough. The real gains came from improving common-mode rejection, shortening and twisting the electrode leads, and adding a proper reference electrode on the bony part of the elbow. By the end, I could show a clear difference between relaxed muscle, light grip and maximum grip on myself and three willing housemates. I could also estimate a simple RMS amplitude in real time. The project earned a good mark, but I was honest in my report about its limits. It used four subjects, there was no comparison against a commercial system, and skin preparation varied enough between sessions that I could not claim the results were repeatable.

That last point is why I want to study biomedical engineering rather than general electronics. Wherever the body was involved, it was the least predictable component in my circuit. Sweat, hair, fat thickness and how tightly someone wore an electrode strap all changed the signal. I would like to understand the physiology and tissue properties behind those effects. I also want to learn how devices that measure them are designed, tested and regulated so they can be trusted outside a student lab.

Since graduating I have worked as a calibration technician for a company that services industrial and retail weighing scales. Most days I drive to warehouses, butchers and pharmacies, run test weights across each scale, and record whether it falls within tolerance. It is not glamorous, but it has made me careful about traceability: knowing exactly which reference weight was used, when it was last checked, and how to document a result so someone else can audit it. I have started to see medical measurement the same way. A reading from a sensor is only as useful as the chain of checks behind it.

Outside work I play fiddle in a ceilidh band that does weddings and village halls around the region. I organise our set lists and keep a small kit of spare strings and leads, because something always fails at a gig. I also help keep my family's allotment going, which mostly means turning compost and losing arguments with slugs. Neither connects neatly to engineering. Still, the band has made me comfortable coordinating with people under time pressure, and a weekly allotment shift is good practice at patient, unexciting persistence.

At postgraduate level I hope to strengthen my grounding in biomechanics, biomaterials and medical signal processing. I would particularly like to explore wearable sensing, where the gap between a tidy bench result and a reading taken on a moving, sweating person is still large. I bring solid analogue and embedded design skills, a working technician's habits around calibration and records, and a clear sense of how much I still need to learn about the body itself.