Computer Science (CSCN-​MEng) postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Every September the school where I work as an IT support technician exports its timetable from the management system into a spreadsheet so that teachers can see their rooms. In my first year the export took most of an afternoon and froze the office computer twice. I wrote a short Python script that read the raw file, built the room and teacher lookups as dictionaries, and produced the same sheets in under a minute. Nobody asked me to do it, and it was hardly sophisticated, but it made me realise how much of my working day depends on software that nobody involved fully understands. I want to move from patching around such systems to designing them well, and a taught master's degree in computer science is the most direct route.

My first degree was in mathematics, which gave me a strong grounding in linear algebra, probability and proof, but only two computing modules. The more substantial preparation came from my final-year project, in which I implemented the conjugate gradient method in C for sparse symmetric matrices and compared storage formats. I stored test matrices in coordinate form and in compressed sparse row form, then timed matrix-vector multiplication on problems of increasing size. Compressed sparse row was consistently faster on my laptop, and working out why taught me more than the result itself: I had to learn about memory layout, cache behaviour and how to profile code rather than guess. I also learned to write tests against small matrices whose solutions I could check by hand, a habit I now use at work.

Since graduating I have tried to fill the gaps a mathematics degree leaves. I worked through the exercises in the first half of Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective by Bryant and O'Hallaron, which explained the caching effects I had measured in my project. I have also completed an online course in databases, and I applied it by helping the school's data manager replace a tangle of linked spreadsheets for laptop loans with a small SQLite database and a simple web form. I designed the tables, wrote the queries for overdue devices and documented everything so that colleagues could maintain it after I leave. The system has handled a full year of loans without needing my intervention, which I count as its main success.

My job has shaped my interests in less technical ways too. Supporting a hundred staff with very different levels of confidence has made me patient at explaining problems and careful about what I change on a live network. It has also shown me that reliability and clear interfaces matter as much as clever algorithms. In a master's degree I hope to study systems and distributed computing in depth, alongside algorithms, because I want to understand how large programs stay correct and fast when they run across many machines.

Outside work I run a lunchtime chess club for pupils in the lower years. Several now play in a local junior league, and preparing puzzles for them has kept my own thinking sharp. I recently wrote a basic move generator for chess in C as a personal project, which was a useful exercise in representing state compactly with bitboards, although its playing strength remains modest.

I am applying now because I have reached the limit of what I can learn alone in the evenings. I can write working code, read technical books and finish projects, but I want the structured teaching, demanding assignments and contact with peers that a postgraduate course offers. I would bring mathematical rigour, practical experience of keeping real systems running for real users, and the steady work habits of someone who has already chosen this path deliberately.