Applied physics postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Washing up at the café where I work, I sometimes watch a soap film stretched across a whisk before it bursts. The bands of colour drift downwards and thin out to a dark patch just before the film breaks. I first understood why in a second-year optics lecture: the colours come from interference between light reflected at the front and back of the film, and the dark region appears as the film becomes much thinner than a wavelength. What stayed with me was less the explanation than the idea that colour could be used as a measurement. That idea became my final-year project, and it is a large part of why I want to study applied physics at postgraduate level.

For the project I built a simple reflectance setup to estimate the thickness of transparent coatings on glass slides. I used a halogen lamp, a bifurcated fibre probe and a compact spectrometer from the teaching lab. I then wrote Python code to fit the measured reflectance spectra to a thin-film interference model. The physics was familiar, but making it work was not. My early spectra were dominated by drift in the lamp output, so I added a reference measurement before each sample and normalised against it. I also learned how sensitive the fit was to the refractive index I assumed. Where I had no reliable value, I treated the index as a fitted parameter and reported the correlation between it and the thickness, rather than presenting a single neat number. For spin-coated polymer films, my thickness estimates agreed reasonably well with step-height measurements a technician helped me take on a stylus profiler. I was pleased with that, but I was more interested in the samples where the two methods disagreed, which seemed to involve uneven film edges.

This project showed me that I enjoy the stage where a clean model meets an imperfect instrument. My strongest modules were optics, solid state physics and computational methods. I found that I worked best when I could connect them, for example by using band structure ideas to think about why the polymer's absorption changed my fits at shorter wavelengths. I would now like to develop this more rigorously, particularly in optical characterisation of materials and the physics of devices built from thin layers, where measurement and fabrication depend on each other.

Since graduating I have worked in a café kitchen during the day and tutored GCSE maths students in the evenings. The kitchen job has made me quick and organised under pressure. It has also made me surprisingly attentive to routine checks, because a missed temperature log matters to everyone on shift. Tutoring has been more directly useful. Explaining rearranging equations to a fifteen-year-old who is convinced she is bad at algebra forces me to find the step where understanding actually breaks. I have become better at explaining my own reasoning clearly, which I expect to need when writing up experimental work and discussing it with others.

Outside work I play tenor horn in a local brass band. I took on the job of keeping our music library catalogued, which is unglamorous but taught me to keep systems that other people can use. Rehearsals have also made me think about physics in passing. Tuning slides, temperature and why the whole band drifts sharp in a warm hall are now regular conversations at the bar afterwards.

I am applying for a master's in applied physics because I want the depth to design measurements properly rather than assemble them by trial and error. I bring solid foundations, practical patience with equipment and a habit of questioning a result before trusting it. I hope to develop these into the skills needed for research or technical work in optics and materials.