Cartography postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

My interest in cartography began with a practical problem rather than an abstract one. For my undergraduate dissertation I surveyed footpath widening across a upland country park, walking transects with a handheld GPS and comparing my results with three editions of Ordnance Survey mapping from the 1950s onwards. The fieldwork was straightforward; representing it was not. My first maps showed every measurement I had taken and communicated almost nothing. Redrawing them taught me that design decisions – classification breaks, line weights, which paths to label and which to leave silent – were doing as much analytical work as my statistics. I finished the project more interested in the map than in the erosion, and that is why I am applying for postgraduate study in cartography.

My BSc gave me a reasonable technical base. Alongside physical and human geography I took GIS and remote sensing options, learning vector and raster analysis, coordinate systems and basic image classification. I have since built on this independently: I work confidently in QGIS, have used Inkscape to finish maps for print, and can write simple Python to batch-process shapefiles and clean attribute tables, which saved me several evenings of manual editing during my dissertation. My reading outside the syllabus has shaped how I think about the subject. Mark Monmonier's How to Lie with Maps made me more careful about projection choice and about the persuasive effect of shading, and Denis Wood's writing on maps as arguments rather than neutral records has stayed with me. I would like the chance to study generalisation, typography and thematic design far more systematically than a general geography degree allows.

A week of supervised work-shadowing with a county council spatial data team showed me what careful cartographic work looks like day to day. I sat with officers checking address points against building footprints, flagged mismatches for someone more senior to resolve, and was given a small task tidying the symbology and layer order of a draft planning constraints map. Watching an experienced colleague explain why a proposed colour scheme would fail for a councillor with colour vision deficiency, and then rebuild it, was more instructive than any lecture on cartographic conventions. I was an observer and a helper rather than a practitioner, but the week left me with a clear sense of the standards expected, and of how much of the job involves data quality and communication with non-specialists.

My volunteering with a local rivers trust has reinforced this. I help with river fly sampling and litter clearance most months, and last winter I produced a simple map for the group showing sampling points and access gates. Discovering that volunteers found my first version confusing – too many base map details, labels competing with symbols – was a useful corrective, and the second version is now printed and used at site briefings. Working part-time as an administrator for a housing association has taught me related habits: managing repair records and tenant correspondence has made me methodical about version control, metadata and keeping a clear audit trail, all of which matter when several people depend on the same dataset.

My longer-term aim is to work as a cartographer in the public sector or with a mapping agency, producing maps for planning, environmental management or public information, where clarity has real consequences for how decisions are understood. Postgraduate study is the sensible route: I need formal training in map design and production, deeper competence in web and interactive mapping, and the discipline of working to a brief and a deadline under critical review. I would particularly value a taught project that allowed me to develop a small map series from data collection through to a finished, tested output. I am prepared for the workload and keen to be taught by people who will tell me plainly when a map is not yet working.

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