Chemical and process engineering personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

I grew up within sight of the chemical works on Teesside, and for most of my childhood the plants were just shapes on the skyline. What changed my view was a chemistry lesson on Le Chatelier's principle and the Haber process, where we compared the conditions that give the best yield with the conditions a plant can actually afford to run. The idea that a reaction has to be judged not only by whether it works but by pressure, heat recovery, catalyst life and cost was the first time chemistry felt like a design problem rather than a set of results. Chemical and process engineering appeals to me because it sits at that join. I want to understand mass and energy balances properly, learn how separation processes are chosen and sized, and see how continuous plants are controlled rather than simply described. My EPQ on carbon capture pushed this further: reading about amine scrubbing, I was struck by how much of the debate is about the energy penalty of regenerating the solvent, not the chemistry of absorption itself. That is an engineering argument, and it is the sort of argument I would like to be able to follow and eventually contribute to. Locally, the questions about hydrogen, waste heat and decarbonising existing plants are not abstract, and I would rather be part of solving them than watching from a distance. I am also drawn to the breadth of the discipline, from food and pharmaceuticals to water and energy, because the underlying unit operations travel between industries. A degree that teaches thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, reaction engineering and design together is exactly the training I want.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

I am studying Chemistry, Mathematics and Physics at A level. Chemistry gives me the reaction knowledge, and I have most enjoyed kinetics, equilibria and energetics, particularly practical work where I measured rates and had to account for why my results deviated from the expected trend rather than dismissing them. Maths has been the most useful preparation for engineering: differentiation and integration, and the work on differential equations, have shown me how a changing quantity can be described and solved, which I understand underlies the balance equations used to model reactors and tanks. Physics has taught me to handle units and estimates carefully, and the mechanics and thermal physics topics overlap directly with the fluid flow and heat transfer I expect to meet at degree level. My EPQ has been valuable in a different way. Writing about post-combustion carbon capture forced me to read technical sources well above my usual level, and I learned to extract the parts I could follow and be honest about what I could not yet assess, such as detailed cost modelling. I built a simple spreadsheet to compare flue gas volumes and solvent circulation rates and quickly saw how easy it is to produce confident numbers from shaky assumptions. That taught me to state assumptions clearly. Outside the syllabus I have worked through problems on P and ID symbols and read about process safety, including the findings of the Flixborough inquiry, which showed me how a modification made under time pressure can undermine a whole plant. I also completed an online short course in basic Python and used it to plot a batch reactor concentration curve from data I generated by hand.

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

Through my college I spent three days work-shadowing at a water treatment works. I was there as an observer with a mentor at all times, wearing supplied PPE, and my tasks were limited to recording readings on a clipboard, carrying sample bottles and helping tidy the laboratory bench. Even in that small role I learned a great deal. I watched a technician run jar tests to choose a coagulant dose and saw how much of the decision rested on how the flocs looked and settled, not only on a calculated value. I also sat in on a shift handover and noticed how carefully operators described anything unusual about a pump or a filter run, because the next shift would inherit it. The site tour explained the sequence of screening, coagulation, filtration and disinfection, and afterwards I drew the process as a block diagram to check I had understood the order and the reasons for it. My Saturday job in a bakery has given me a different kind of process awareness. Everything runs to timings and temperatures, the proving and baking stages cannot be rushed, and when the queue builds up the constraint is almost always the oven rather than the counter. Spotting where the bottleneck sits, and covering tills when two of us were off with flu, taught me to stay calm and keep to a sequence under pressure. I also manage the composting rota at our community allotment. Turning the bays and keeping the balance of green and dry material right is a slow lesson in aeration and heat, and I now log temperatures so we can see which bay is working. I play in a local netball team, which keeps me organised. These experiences have not made me an engineer, but they have made me confident that I want to spend my degree learning how processes are designed and run.

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