Biomedical science personal statement example

Personal statement example

The most useful piece of equipment I own is a two-litre drink bottle with strips of masking tape down one side, each marked in fifty-millilitre steps against a kitchen jug. Turned upside down in a washing-up tub of water, with aquarium tubing running from a smaller bottle of warm yeast mixture, it lets me read off how much carbon dioxide yeast produces in a given time. I built it last winter because I wanted to answer a question our school lab could not easily accommodate.

In Biology we had studied respiration, and I became curious about artificial sweeteners. If a sweetener tastes like sugar, does a living cell treat it like sugar? Our school has a small science department, and practical time goes mainly to assessed work, so I set up a version at home. I compared glucose, sucrose, a sorbitol-based sweetener, stevia and a no-sugar control, keeping the water temperature as steady as I could with a cooking thermometer and topping up from the kettle. Each run lasted thirty minutes and I repeated each condition four times across several weekends.

The glucose and sucrose bottles produced plenty of gas, the stevia bottle barely more than the control, and the sorbitol result sat in between and varied far more than the others. That inconsistency was the most interesting part. I read that sorbitol is a sugar alcohol which many organisms metabolise slowly or poorly, and I wondered whether trace sugars in the commercial product or the age of my yeast explained the spread. I could not separate those explanations with my equipment, but I could describe the limits honestly, and my Biology teacher let me present the method and results to our Year 12 class. Writing it up taught me more about controls and sources of error than any worksheet had, especially how a small change in temperature shifted the rate more than I expected.

The project led me to read more widely. Bill Bryson's The Body gave me a broad, readable picture of human physiology, and I followed it with sections of an introductory physiology textbook from the public library, particularly on how insulin regulates blood glucose. It struck me that the question I had asked about yeast has a human parallel: how cells respond to the molecules we put into our bodies, and why some substances that look similar behave so differently. That is the kind of question I want to study properly, with the techniques and equipment to investigate it.

Outside school, I have spent the last two summers working at a kiwifruit packhouse, first on the grading line and then checking fruit weights and recording batch data for quality control. Long shifts taught me to stay accurate when tasks become repetitive, and to speak up when a scale was drifting rather than assume someone else would notice. During term I walk my two younger cousins to school each morning because my aunt starts work early, which means my own study has to be organised around fixed times. I also repair bikes for neighbours from our garage; diagnosing why a gear slips is satisfyingly similar to working through an experiment, because you change one thing at a time and watch what happens.

I am studying Biology, Chemistry and Calculus, and I enjoy the point where they meet, such as using rates of reaction to make sense of enzyme behaviour. I know a university laboratory will be very different from a tub of water on the kitchen bench, but I have shown myself that I can design an investigation, persist through repeat trials and think critically about what my results do and do not show. I would like to build on that through a degree in biomedical science, and I am ready for the work it requires.