Energy and environmental management postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

My interest in energy management began with a spreadsheet that would not balance. For my final-year dissertation I was given half-hourly electricity data for two teaching buildings and asked to explain why one used noticeably more energy per square metre than the other. The obvious answer was the age of the plant, but when I plotted consumption against timetabled occupancy it became clear that a large part of the difference sat in the overnight and weekend baseload. Neither building was fully empty at night, and in one of them the ventilation ran on a schedule that had apparently not been revised since a refurbishment. I could not verify that from the records available to me, so I wrote it up as a plausible explanation rather than a finding, which my supervisor said was the right call. That project taught me that energy performance is rarely only a technical question: it involves who holds the settings, who reads the reports and whether anyone acts on them.

Since graduating I have worked as an administrator in the estates team of a further education college. Much of my work is routine, but it has given me a practical view of how organisations actually handle energy. I collate gas and electricity invoices across six sites, check them against meter readings and prepare a quarterly summary for the head of estates. Earlier this year I noticed that one site's gas figures had been estimated for several consecutive months because the meter was difficult to access. Getting that corrected involved emails to the supplier, a site visit with a caretaker and some patience, and the revised figures changed our year-on-year comparison enough to matter. I also helped a colleague put together the data for a lighting replacement bid: my part was assembling the existing consumption baseline and checking the floor areas, while he handled the costings. It was a small task, but it was the first time I saw my figures used to justify spending, and it made me want to understand appraisal and payback properly rather than simply supplying numbers to someone else.

Alongside this I have kept up my own experiments. I built a small logger using a microcontroller and a temperature and humidity sensor, and left it running in my flat through a winter to see how quickly the living room lost heat after the boiler cut out. The results were messier than I expected, largely because I had put the sensor near a window, and I have since moved it and started again. Working with that data pushed me to learn enough R to clean timestamps and produce readable plots, which I now use for work reporting too.

I want to study energy and environmental management because my current knowledge is uneven. I am reasonably confident with data and with the practicalities of metering, but I have only a general understanding of environmental management systems, carbon accounting boundaries and the regulatory framework organisations work within. Reading around the ISO 14001 approach has shown me how much rests on auditing and documented review rather than on one-off projects, and I would like formal grounding in that as well as in building services and energy economics.

In the longer term I hope to work as an energy manager within a public sector estate, ideally in education, where decisions are made over long horizons and where buildings are used in awkward, uneven patterns. Volunteering at a community allotment has also reminded me how much depends on persuading people to change habits gradually. I expect that to be as much a part of the job as the metering.

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