Civil Engineering (dual degree programme with Universitas Indonesia) [BEng/Sarjana Teknik] personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

The multi-storey car park in my town closed when I was in Year 10, and for months a sign on the fence said only "structural concerns". For my Extended Project I set out to understand what that meant. Using the council's published committee papers and introductory texts on concrete durability, I learned how carbon dioxide gradually reduces the alkalinity of concrete, how this can leave steel reinforcement open to corrosion, and why rust, occupying more volume than the steel, cracks the cover from inside. Seeing photographs of spalled soffits in a report about a building I had walked through every week made the science feel immediate. What interested me most was that the choice to demolish rather than repair was not purely technical: cost, how long the town could cope without parking and the carbon involved in rebuilding all shaped it. I want to study civil engineering because it joins careful analysis with decisions about places people will use for decades. Studying partly in Indonesia appeals to me because the same questions about durability, drainage and ground look different in a hot, humid climate with intense rainfall and soft soils, and I would value learning alongside students and engineers who work in those conditions.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

Mechanics in A level Maths has been the most direct preparation. Resolving forces on a ladder against a wall felt abstract until I sketched the car park's ramps and asked where the loads would go. In Physics I enjoyed the Young modulus practical: stretching copper wire, plotting stress against strain and seeing the graph bend as the wire began to yield showed me why engineers care about elastic limits. Geography has added a different perspective. For my independent investigation I measured channel width, depth and surface velocity at six sites along a local stream, timing floats over ten metres, and found how much a single culvert under a road changed the flow pattern. Handling messy field data and explaining its limits was good practice for the uncertainty I expect in engineering. Outside lessons, J. E. Gordon's Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down helped me think about tension and compression more intuitively, particularly his explanation of why cracks concentrate stress. Roma Agrawal's Built showed how foundations and materials are chosen for specific places, which connected well with my interest in building in different climates.

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

Through my school's careers adviser I spent four days with a contractor's site team building a classroom extension at a primary school. I was always supervised and mainly observed, but I attended the morning safety briefings, watched a slump test before a slab pour and helped label concrete cubes for testing under the site engineer's direction. She showed me how she set out gridlines with a total station, and I held the prism pole while she checked levels. I was struck by how much of the job involved coordinating people and paperwork as well as calculations. Since Year 12 I have worked Saturdays on reception at a leisure centre, taking bookings, handling queries from busy parents and staying polite when classes are full. It has made me more confident speaking to strangers and more organised under pressure. At home I repair bikes for my family, from replacing brake cables to truing a wheel, which I enjoy because a small adjustment produces a visible result. I also walk my younger brother to school each morning and sometimes help him with his maths homework; explaining an idea simply to a ten-year-old is harder than it sounds and has improved how I explain things to others. I am ready for a demanding course and for the adjustment of studying in two countries.