Climate risk management postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

My degree gave me the physical science of climate change; my job has shown me how unevenly it lands on people. As a repairs and planning administrator for a housing association, I log the jobs that come in after heavy rain: blocked gullies, damp in ground-floor flats, a flat roof that fails every second winter. Individually they are maintenance tickets. Together they are a risk profile, and nobody in my office has the tools to read them that way. That gap is what I want to study.

My undergraduate dissertation was my first attempt at thinking in terms of exposure rather than hazard alone. I mapped surface water flood risk across residential streets in my home town, combining Environment Agency flood risk data with council information on property age and basement or ground-floor conversions. The physical modelling was not mine to do, but the work of matching datasets taught me a great deal: postcodes that did not align with property boundaries, records that described a building's use ten years out of date, and the temptation to treat a tidy map as more certain than the assumptions behind it. My supervisor pushed me to write a section on uncertainty rather than tucking caveats into footnotes, and that discipline has stayed with me. I also took modules in hydrology and environmental economics, and an option on GIS which is where I became comfortable with QGIS and, more hesitantly, with R.

Since graduating I have kept reading, though at a slower pace than I would like. The IPCC Working Group II report on impacts, adaptation and vulnerability has been the most useful thing I have worked through, particularly its framing of risk as the interaction of hazard, exposure and vulnerability rather than a property of the weather alone. That framing explains why two streets with the same rainfall have very different outcomes. I have also followed the UK Climate Change Committee's adaptation progress reports, which are blunt about how much adaptation planning stops at strategy documents. What I lack is the quantitative and regulatory grounding to move between a scenario and a decision: how climate projections are downscaled and used, how adaptation options are appraised when the benefits are decades out, and how physical and transition risk are handled in financial and public-sector reporting. A taught course with coursework in risk assessment methods, scenario analysis and adaptation appraisal is the right way for me to build that.

Outside work I share weekday care for my grandmother with my aunt, which has made me organised in a way that no module did: I plan around fixed commitments, break long tasks into evening-sized pieces, and I am realistic about what I can promise. I also manage the mailing list for a small community flood group, mostly sending out meeting notes and drainage consultation deadlines. It is unglamorous work, but I have watched residents make careful, specific arguments about water on their roads and then struggle to see how those arguments fed into anything. Communicating risk honestly, without either alarm or false reassurance, is harder than it looks.

I would like to work in adaptation and resilience planning, ideally for a local authority, housing provider or consultancy advising them. Studying part-time or with a clear timetable suits my responsibilities, and I intend to keep working alongside the course if the structure allows. The problems I see in a repairs inbox are small and specific, and I want the training to treat them as evidence rather than noise.

Review this personal statement

Latest reviews