Energy economics postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

My interest in energy economics grew out of a spreadsheet I was never asked to make. In my second year I downloaded a year of publicly available half-hourly electricity demand data for Great Britain, mostly out of curiosity about how winter evenings looked, and ended up spending several weekends plotting demand against temperature and daylight. The shape of the curve was familiar, but what held my attention was the price data alongside it: the fact that a commodity nobody can store cheaply, and which everyone consumes at roughly the same moments, produces prices that swing so far in a single day. That observation turned into my dissertation and into the direction I want my studies to take.

For the dissertation I looked at whether households on time-of-use tariffs shift consumption away from peak hours, using published survey and trial data rather than any access of my own to metering records. I built the panel in Python, which I had taught myself over a summer, and estimated fixed-effects models with temperature and day-of-week controls. The result was a modest average shift, concentrated in a minority of households, and I learned as much from what I could not claim as from what I could. Self-selection into trials, small samples and the difficulty of separating a genuine behavioural response from weather made me careful about attributing causality. My supervisor's main comment was that the write-up was honest about its limits, and I would rather be told that than be told the estimates were large.

My degree gave me the foundations I will need: intermediate micro and macro, econometrics, and an industrial organisation module where I first met natural monopoly, marginal cost pricing and the regulatory problem of setting allowed revenues for a network business. A group assignment in that module asked us to assess a proposed merger; I took the demand-elasticity section while others handled market definition and remedies, and coordinating three parts into one coherent argument under deadline taught me more about writing economics than any individual essay. I have since read around the subject, including Bhattacharyya's Energy Economics, which helped me see how demand modelling, project appraisal and policy analysis fit together, and I follow Ofgem consultation documents and National Energy System Operator publications to keep the institutional detail in view.

Since graduating I have worked as a data assistant at a housing association, maintaining records of communal heating charges, arrears and repairs. It is ordinary administrative work, but it has been an education in how energy costs actually reach people: tenants on district heating systems who cannot switch supplier, standing charges that dominate small bills, and the difference between a property's modelled efficiency rating and what the heating actually costs to run. When I read about tariff design or fuel poverty metrics now, I picture specific blocks of flats. I have also improved practically, moving our monthly reporting from manual copying into a reproducible script, which cut the work to an afternoon and made errors easier to spot.

On the master's I particularly want rigorous training in energy modelling and in applied econometrics for panel and time-series data, along with the economics of electricity markets, carbon pricing and investment under uncertainty. Afterwards I would like to work as an analyst for a regulator, a network company or a consultancy advising on tariff and network charging questions. Outside study I play in a badminton league and help at a Saturday homework club, which keeps me in the habit of explaining quantitative ideas to people who have no reason to already understand them.

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