Climate Change Management MSc postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

After a heavy storm last August, I took forty-one calls in one shift about flooded gardens, overflowing gullies and sewage smells. As a customer adviser for a regional water company, my job is to log each report, check whether it relates to our assets or the council's highway drains, and raise a job for the right team. That evening I noticed that most calls came from three streets I already knew well, because they had appeared in my undergraduate dissertation. The pattern was familiar, but on the phone I could only offer a reference number. I want to move from recording the consequences of a changing climate to understanding how organisations decide what to do about them.

My BSc in Geography gave me a grounding in hydrology, GIS and environmental policy, and I graduated with a 2:1. For my dissertation I compared surface water flooding complaints submitted to a borough council over ten years with the age and capacity of drainage infrastructure, using publicly available records and my own street surveys. The analysis was modest: I mapped clusters in QGIS and interviewed two residents' group members. What interested me most was not the hydrology but the responsibility. Residents did not know whether to contact the council, the water company or the Environment Agency, and each body's records described the same street differently. I concluded that some persistent flooding was less a technical gap than a coordination problem, and I want to study that problem with proper tools.

My current job has sharpened this. I have learned how a large utility prioritises work, how regulatory performance measures shape what gets recorded, and how much depends on an accurate first conversation with a worried customer. I was recently asked to help update the call scripts for flooding enquiries, adding clearer guidance on who owns which drain. It was a small change, but it reduced repeat calls on my team, and it showed me that practical adaptation often happens in unglamorous places such as forms and handover processes.

I have also tried to widen my reading beyond flooding. Mike Berners-Lee's There Is No Planet B helped me think about emissions across food, energy and travel at the scale of everyday choices, while the Climate Change Committee's progress reports to Parliament showed me how national targets are translated into sector-by-sector expectations. I find the gap between those reports and what I see on the ground particularly interesting, and I would like to develop the economic and governance understanding to analyse it rather than simply notice it.

Outside work I keep a half plot at a local allotment, which I share with a retired neighbour. Over two seasons we have moved towards drought-tolerant crops and installed water butts after the dry summer of 2022 left the communal tap restricted. This is not climate research, but it has made me attentive to how individuals adapt informally and how much they rely on shared resources. I also play five-a-side weekly, which is mostly an excuse to switch off, though the pitch closing twice for waterlogging last winter did not go unremarked.

At postgraduate level I hope to strengthen my understanding of climate policy, finance and organisational change, alongside the quantitative skills I began building in my dissertation. I am particularly drawn to adaptation planning for local services, and I would welcome the chance to work on a research project examining how responsibility is shared between public bodies and utilities. Longer term, I would like to work in a climate resilience role within a water company, local authority or similar organisation, where knowing how customers experience a problem is as useful as knowing the data.

I bring a relevant degree, practical experience of how an essential service handles climate-related pressure, and the patience to work through messy records and anxious phone calls alike. I am ready to build on these with focused study.