Biodiversity, Wildlife and Ecosystem Health (Online Learning) PgCert, PgDip, MSc, PgCert (ICL), PgDip (ICL), PgProfDev postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

"Twice a year, when I remember." That was the most common answer to the question I cared about most in my undergraduate dissertation, which asked households in my home town how often they cleaned their bird feeders. I had chosen the topic because of trichomonosis, the parasitic disease that has been linked to the decline of greenfinches in Britain. Reading about it, I was struck that a disease affecting a wild population could be shaped so directly by ordinary domestic habits. I want to study biodiversity, wildlife and ecosystem health at postgraduate level because I keep finding myself at that same junction between people, animals and environments, and I would like the scientific grounding to work there properly.

My dissertation combined a questionnaire of just over a hundred households with a winter of feeder observations in a smaller group of gardens whose owners agreed to record visiting species and any birds that looked unwell. The observational data were limited, and I was careful in my write-up not to claim more than they could show. What the project did give me was practice in designing questions that people would answer honestly, cleaning messy data, and thinking about how disease transmission depends on behaviour as much as biology. Feeders that are rarely cleaned and attract birds at high density create conditions in which a pathogen spread through contaminated food and water can move easily. Several respondents told me they had no idea feeders needed cleaning at all, which made me think about how health advice for wildlife actually reaches the public.

Since graduating I have worked full-time on the counter of an agricultural merchant. Much of the job is ordinary: taking orders for feed, fencing and fertiliser, and keeping track of stock. But I also serve farmers buying wormers and other animal health products, and I have completed the training required to supply certain veterinary medicines. Listening to customers discuss worm burdens, rotating products and the worry of resistance has given me a practical sense of how livestock health decisions are made under real pressures of cost and time. It has also made me curious about the edges of those decisions: what drug residues mean for dung invertebrates, or how grazing livestock and wild deer share parasites. I do not have answers, but I have learned to ask better questions, and I have become good at explaining technical information clearly to people who are busy and sceptical.

An online course suits me because I want to keep working while I study, and because I think my job will remain a useful source of perspective throughout. I have already shown I can manage independent study alongside full-time hours: over the past year I completed a free online introduction to epidemiology in my evenings and kept notes on how its concepts, such as reservoirs and transmission routes, applied to examples from my dissertation and from the farm trade. I organise my week carefully, partly out of necessity, since I also play cornet in a local brass band that rehearses twice a week and competes in regional contests. Band has taught me the value of steady preparation and of listening closely to others, which I expect to matter in online group work with colleagues from different countries and professions.

I would particularly like to develop my understanding of how wildlife disease is monitored and how surveillance information is used in conservation and policy. In the longer term I hope to work in a role connecting land managers, the public and wildlife health, perhaps in advisory work or monitoring schemes, where the gap between scientific knowledge and everyday practice is exactly the problem to solve. My dissertation and my job have shown me that gap at small scale; I now want the training to address it more widely.