Anatomy and Development BSc (Hons) personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

Last spring a neighbour let me take a small clump of frogspawn from her garden pond, and I kept it in a washing-up bowl on our back step for eleven weeks. Every second evening I photographed the tadpoles through a clip-on phone lens that cost four pounds and matched each picture against the Gosner staging table. What held my attention was how ordered the changes were. Hind-limb buds appeared as tiny paddles, the paddles divided into toes, and the forelimbs emerged later from beneath the skin. Afterwards, reading Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish, I learned that related signalling genes help pattern limbs in frogs and in humans, and that fingers and toes separate partly because cells between them die in a controlled way. I want to study anatomy alongside development because I understand a structure best when I can see how it was built. The adult body shows what is there; the embryo helps explain why it is arranged that way. I am keen to learn both properly, including practical and microscopy skills I have not yet had the chance to use.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

In A level Biology our class dissected a lamb's heart, and I spent longer than anyone tracing the chordae tendineae back to the valve flaps, because the textbook diagram had never made clear how they held the valves shut. Studying the cell cycle and gene expression has given me the vocabulary to read about development, and I now understand why a mutation in a single regulatory gene can affect a whole body region rather than one feature. Chemistry has made me more careful with measurement and units, which helped when I estimated tadpole lengths from photographs using a ruler placed in the bowl. In Psychology I enjoy the research methods content most, especially thinking about sample size and bias, and I could see the limits of my own project: one clutch, one bowl, and no control over temperature. At home I simmered and cleaned the bones from a pack of chicken wings and laid them beside a diagram of the human arm. Identifying a humerus, radius and ulna, then working out how the bird's reduced digits had fused, showed me how much homology a kitchen table can reveal. I have also read parts of Lewis Wolpert's The Triumph of the Embryo, which explained gastrulation more clearly than anything else I had found. Those limits matter because a clear sequence of photographs can still leave the cause of a change unresolved.

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

I work two shifts a week in the stockroom of a discount shop, unpacking deliveries, checking quantities against the delivery note and rotating stock. It is not glamorous, but I have become quick and accurate, and my supervisor now asks me to train new Saturday staff on the scanning system. Most weekday mornings I walk my two younger cousins to primary school while my aunt starts an early shift. This keeps me organised, and their questions have tested my explanations; the younger one wanted to know why her baby teeth were falling out, so we looked at a library book together about adult teeth forming beneath them. I play five-a-side football with friends on Tuesday evenings, which is mostly for fun. When my tadpole project finished, I turned the photographs into a staged timeline and presented it at our school's lunchtime science club. Several younger students then asked how to stage their own, so I wrote a one-page guide on keeping spawn responsibly and returning froglets to the pond they came from. That small project taught me how much careful, patient observation can show, and I would like to build on it with proper training.