Climate Change Finance and Investment MSc postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Last spring my manager asked me to set up a new nominal ledger code. The regional bus company where I work as an accounts assistant had taken two electric buses on trial, and the battery packs came under a separate lease from the vehicles. Until then I had mostly processed diesel invoices, fuel card statements and depot maintenance bills. The new code was a small administrative task, but it showed me how differently an electric fleet sits in the accounts: a larger fixed commitment up front, electricity bills that depend on when buses charge, and questions about what the batteries will be worth when the lease ends. I want to study climate change finance and investment because I have started to see that the energy transition is, in practice, a long series of decisions like this one, each made by people trying to fit uncertain future costs into today's budgets.

My degree in Accounting and Finance gave me a solid technical base. I enjoyed financial reporting and corporate finance most, particularly discounted cash flow valuation, because it forces you to state your assumptions about the future openly. In my final year I took an elective on sustainability reporting, which introduced me to the recommendations of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures and its distinction between physical risks and transition risks. That framework shaped my dissertation, in which I read the annual reports of five UK listed housebuilders and coded their climate disclosures against the four TCFD pillars: governance, strategy, risk management, and metrics and targets. The coding was slow, and I had to revise my scheme twice when I realised I was treating a general statement of intent as equivalent to a measurable target. My main observation was that governance sections were generally detailed, while scenario analysis was often described in qualitative terms that would be hard for an investor to compare across companies. The project left me with a practical respect for how much judgement sits behind a single disclosure, and with a question I could not answer at undergraduate level: how do investors actually price information that is this uneven?

Outside my degree, I read Mark Carney's 2015 speech on the 'tragedy of the horizon', which argues that the most serious costs of climate change will fall beyond the time frames that most financial decision-makers work within. It helped me understand why disclosure alone may not be enough, and why the design of incentives and capital allocation matters. I have also worked through introductory material on green bonds, and I would like to understand more rigorously how investors can judge whether the proceeds genuinely fund additional emissions reductions.

My job has developed skills I expect to use on the course. I prepare month-end accruals, reconcile supplier accounts and answer queries from depot managers who are not accountants, which has taught me to explain numbers plainly and to check my work carefully before it reaches anyone else. I also helped compile cost comparisons for the electric bus trial. I did not draw the conclusions, but gathering accurate figures from several sources showed me how much depends on the quality of the underlying data.

Away from work, I sing tenor in a community choir and have looked after ticket sales for our winter concert for the past two years, which mostly involves spreadsheets, patience and chasing late payments with good humour. I commute by bike most days, partly from habit and partly because our town's cycle routes are a useful reminder that infrastructure decisions shape everyday behaviour for decades.

I hope to develop the analytical and quantitative depth to work in climate risk assessment or sustainable investment, where I can combine careful accounting with a clearer understanding of the longer-term choices that finance enables or delays. A master's degree would let me move from recording these decisions to analysing them properly.