Coastal and Marine Energy Engineering – CoMEM+ postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Before every Sunday row, someone in our pilot gig crew checks the tide times and the inshore forecast, and over the past three years that someone has usually been me. Launching from a shingle beach means paying attention to more than wind speed. A long-period swell arriving at low water can make the shore break far steeper than the headline wave height suggests. Learning to read those conditions, and getting them wrong occasionally, is part of why my undergraduate interest in hydraulics turned into a wish to study the coast and the sea as an engineering environment in its own right.

I graduated with a 2:1 in Civil Engineering. The modules I enjoyed most were fluid mechanics and hydrology, where I first worked through linear wave theory and saw how dispersion links wave period to wavelength and speed. For my final-year project I tested wave overtopping on a 1:25 scale model of a stepped concrete seawall in the university's teaching flume. I built the model from marine plywood and sealed it with resin. I then ran regular wave trains at several heights and periods, collecting overtopped water in a calibrated tray behind the crest. I used Froude similarity to relate my results to prototype conditions and compared measured mean discharges with the empirical overtopping relationships I had read about. The agreement was reasonable at moderate wave heights, but my results scattered widely in the steepest conditions. I traced part of this to reflections from the flume end, which had only basic passive absorption. My discussion of those limits was the section my supervisor commented on most positively. What stayed with me was how much of the engineering lay in deciding what the model could and could not represent.

Since graduating I have worked as a design technician at a small consultancy that handles surface water drainage for housing developments. My work involves producing drainage layouts, running pipe network calculations in standard software and preparing attenuation storage checks for an engineer to review. It is not coastal work. However, it has taught me to keep calculations traceable, to state my assumptions clearly, and to recognise that a design storm is a deliberate simplification of something more variable. I have also seen how often the downstream boundary condition in a scheme is a tidal outfall, and how sensitive that makes a system near the coast.

My interest in marine energy grew alongside this. I have read about tidal stream turbines and the practical difficulties of operating them, such as biofouling, access windows for maintenance and fatigue loading from turbulent flow. I have also worked through introductory material on wave spectra, including the JONSWAP form, to understand how irregular seas are described for design. I am drawn to the overlap between protecting coastlines and generating energy from the same waves and currents, because both depend on understanding loads that are irregular and uncertain over long periods.

I want postgraduate study that combines coastal processes, offshore structures and renewable energy. I would value working with better physical modelling facilities and more advanced numerical tools than my undergraduate project allowed. I would like to focus on how scaled tests and numerical models can be combined to give designers more confidence in extreme conditions. Studying across more than one country also appeals to me, since coastlines and engineering practice differ and I would like to understand those differences firsthand.

Outside work I still row with the gig club, where I help maintain the boat and coach newer crew members on launching technique. I also swim in the sea through most of the year. Both keep me close to the conditions I want to spend my career understanding. I am ready for a demanding course, and I would bring careful experimental habits, practical design experience and a steady curiosity about how water behaves at the shore.