Climate Change Management (Online Learning) MSc postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Most of my working week is spent measuring roofs I will never stand on. As an estimator for a roofing contractor in Leeds, I take drone photographs and survey sketches and turn them into quotes: square metres of membrane, lengths of flashing, insulation thickness, labour days. Last spring a school asked us to price replacing a flat roof that had leaked through three winters. The cheapest option met building regulations; a second option added thicker insulation and a pale reflective finish. I set out both with running costs over twenty years, and the governors chose the second. It was a small decision, but it showed me how often climate outcomes are settled by people comparing spreadsheets rather than by policy announcements. I want to study climate change management because I would like to understand those decisions properly, and to be useful to the organisations making them.

My undergraduate degree in Environmental Science gave me a grounding in atmospheric processes, ecology and environmental law, but the module I returned to most was on corporate environmental reporting. For my dissertation I worked with a small brewery near Harrogate that wanted to understand its emissions. I calculated its footprint twice: once using spend-based emission factors, and once using activity data I collected myself, including delivery mileage, malt tonnages and energy bills. The two figures differed noticeably, mainly because spend-based factors treated the brewery's locally sourced malt like an average agricultural purchase. Writing up why the gap existed taught me more than either number did. Scope 3 emissions are where most of a small firm's impact sits, yet they are the hardest to measure honestly, and I concluded that a modest business is better served by a rough but transparent estimate it understands than by a precise-looking figure it cannot explain. The brewery's owner later told me she had used my delivery analysis to combine two weekly routes.

Since graduating, my job has given me a different kind of preparation. Estimating is about uncertainty: hidden rot, material price swings, weather delays. I have learned to state assumptions clearly, to build contingency into figures without inflating them, and to explain to clients why two quotes for the same roof can differ. I also deal daily with suppliers, site managers and customers who want different things, which I suspect is closer to the reality of climate management than any textbook case study.

Outside work I volunteer with a towpath clean-up group on the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, where I now help plan monthly sessions and liaise with the canal trust about where we can safely work. It is unglamorous, mostly litter picking and clearing overgrowth, but organising thirty volunteers with different levels of fitness has made me a more practical planner. I also play cornet in a brass band, which has nothing to do with climate but a great deal to do with turning up prepared and listening to others.

I have been reading to fill gaps in my knowledge. Mike Berners-Lee's How Bad Are Bananas? was useful when I started my dissertation because it treats carbon footprints as approximate and comparative rather than exact, which matched what I found. More recently I have been working through summaries of the IPCC's Working Group III report on mitigation, particularly the sections on buildings, where I recognise many of the measures I price at work.

An online programme suits me because I want to keep developing at work while I study, applying ideas on finance, policy and adaptation to real projects as I learn them. In the longer term I would like to move into a sustainability role within construction or for a local authority estates team, helping organisations make better decisions about buildings they will use for decades. I am organised, comfortable with numbers and used to explaining technical choices to non-specialists, and I am ready for the demands of postgraduate study.