Advanced Electrical Power Systems Engineering MSc postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

The shed on my allotment runs from a small solar panel and a leisure battery, and last winter its LED strip began flickering whenever I used a cheap inverter to charge a drill. Tracing the problem with a borrowed oscilloscope showed a badly distorted output waveform, and the fix was a better-quality inverter. It was a minor domestic puzzle, but it was the first time I had watched a power quality problem happen on equipment I owned. It also echoed the subject of my final-year project, and it is the kind of everyday interaction between loads and supply that I want to understand at system scale through a masters in electrical power systems.

My BEng in Electrical and Electronic Engineering gave me a solid grounding in circuit theory, electrical machines, power electronics and control. The modules I enjoyed most were those where theory had to meet messy reality. In power systems analysis I worked through per-unit calculations, load flow using the Newton-Raphson method and symmetrical components for fault analysis. I found that writing my own small load flow script in Python, rather than relying only on the coursework software, made the convergence behaviour and the role of the Jacobian much clearer to me.

My individual project measured harmonic distortion on a single distribution board in a university teaching building that had recently been refitted with LED lighting and two electric vehicle chargers. With the estates team's permission and under supervision, I used a clamp-on power quality analyser over three weeks. I then compared the measured current harmonics with a simple simulation model I built of the board. The total harmonic distortion stayed within the limits I was comparing against, but the third harmonic in the neutral was noticeably higher in the evenings, when lighting and charging overlapped. My model underestimated this at first because I had treated the chargers as constant loads. Refining it with time-varying profiles brought the results much closer. The project taught me how much depends on realistic assumptions about load behaviour, and it left me curious about how network operators plan for large numbers of converter-connected devices, from heat pumps to rooftop solar.

Since graduating I have worked night shifts as a forklift driver at a distribution warehouse. The work is not electrical, but it has been useful in other ways. I hold responsibility for battery changeovers on our electric trucks, following strict charging and handling procedures, and I have become reliable at working safely and steadily through long shifts. I have also used the quieter daytime hours to keep studying. I have read David Elliott's introductory material on grid integration of renewables and worked through parts of Kundur's Power System Stability and Control, especially the chapters on frequency control. These made me aware of how falling system inertia changes the problems that engineers face. I would like to study this properly, alongside protection and the modelling of HVDC links.

Away from work I hold an amateur radio Foundation licence and build simple antennas, which has kept my practical electronics skills in use and made me patient with fault-finding. The allotment is mostly vegetables, though the solar setup on the shed has become a running experiment in battery sizing through the seasons.

I am applying for postgraduate study because I want the depth that my undergraduate degree only began to provide. That means rigorous treatment of stability, protection and network planning, and the chance to use industry-standard simulation tools on problems larger than one distribution board. In the longer term I hope to work in network planning or connections engineering for a distribution network operator, where the questions raised by my project are practical, daily concerns. I would bring careful measurement habits, a willingness to question my own models, and a steady work ethic built over many night shifts.