Food Security [MSc] postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

On my first week as a picker at a wholesale grocer in Aberdeen, I was sent to the back of the warehouse to load a pallet of red lentils for a restaurant order. The bay held about forty sacks. By the following spring, the same bay had shrunk to a dozen, and the supervisor told me the supplier had moved them to another distributor offering a better price. Nobody in the warehouse was worried; restaurants simply switched to yellow split peas. Watching how quickly one product disappeared and another replaced it made me curious about who absorbs those adjustments when the buyer is not a restaurant but a household with little room to switch. That question shaped the second half of my Geography degree and is why I am applying for postgraduate study in Food Security.

My undergraduate dissertation compared the contents of emergency food parcels in two city wards with the shelf prices of equivalent items at nearby supermarkets over six months. I worked with volunteers at a food bank who let me record anonymised parcel lists, and I photographed price labels every fortnight. The method was modest, and I could not claim the price changes caused anything, but the pattern was useful: parcels leaned heavily on pasta, tinned beans and long-life milk, while fresh vegetables appeared mainly when a local allotment group donated surplus. Writing it up taught me to be careful with small samples and to separate what my data showed from what I suspected. My supervisor's comment that the strongest chapter was the one describing limitations has stayed with me.

Reading for the project pushed me beyond local detail. Amartya Sen's argument in Poverty and Famines, that hunger often follows a collapse in people's entitlements rather than a fall in total food supply, gave me a way to think about my two wards: food was physically present on supermarket shelves, yet access depended on income, transport and time. I also found the four commonly used dimensions of food security, namely availability, access, utilisation and stability, helpful for organising evidence, though I noticed that my project said a great deal about access and almost nothing about utilisation. I would like to study nutrition and dietary outcomes properly, rather than assuming that a full parcel means a healthy one.

The warehouse job continues to teach me things no module covered. I handle the delivery schedules for chilled goods, so I know how much stock is lost when a lorry arrives late or a cold room fails overnight. I have started noting waste categories on a spreadsheet for my team leader, which has made me interested in supply chain resilience and post-harvest loss, areas where my geography background feels thin. I expect to work hard on the quantitative and agricultural science content, and I have begun brushing up statistics through an online course in R.

Outside work I keep an allotment plot with a friend. Our potatoes failed last summer after a wet July brought blight, while the neighbouring plot with a resistant variety did well. It was a small, personal reminder that weather and seed choice matter long before food reaches a warehouse. I also help set up the course at our local parkrun most Saturdays, which mostly involves cones, punctuality and talking to strangers, skills that proved surprisingly useful when interviewing food bank volunteers.

I hope postgraduate study will give me the scientific and policy grounding to connect these strands: production, distribution and the household. Longer term I would like to work in research or analysis for a local authority or a food charity network, helping design support that responds to how people actually obtain food. I bring field experience of a practical kind, a careful approach to evidence and a willingness to learn the areas where I am still a beginner.