Energy engineering personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

Our brass band rehearses on Tuesday evenings in a church hall with two night storage heaters and a fan heater that someone always switches on at half seven. When the hall committee asked whether the band could share the cost of a rising electricity bill, our band secretary and I spent three weeks noting the meter reading before and after each rehearsal. The fan heater, which nobody had thought much about, accounted for a large part of our evening use, while the storage heaters were releasing most of their heat during the day when the hall was empty. Changing the storage heater settings and buying a timer was a small fix, but it made me see energy as something that can be measured, explained and redesigned rather than simply paid for. I want to study energy engineering because it joins the physics I enjoy most, thermodynamics and electricity, with the practical question of how heat and power reach people at a cost they can manage. Reading David MacKay's Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air showed me how useful rough numbers are. His habit of converting everything into kilowatt-hours per person per day made it clear why insulation and heat pumps matter as much as new generation. I would like to learn how engineers design whole systems, from turbines and heat exchangers to the storage needed when supply and demand do not line up.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

I am studying A levels in Maths, Further Maths, Physics and Design and Technology. In Physics I have particularly enjoyed thermal physics, where specific heat capacity and the ideal gas equation gave me tools to check my estimates for the hall. The required practical on internal resistance taught me to look carefully at where energy goes missing in a circuit. Further Maths has introduced differential equations, and I was pleased to recognise Newton's law of cooling as one when modelling how quickly a room loses heat. For my Extended Project I investigated heat loss from three rooms in our 1930s semi-detached house. I built temperature loggers from an Arduino Nano and DS18B20 sensors, recorded readings every five minutes for a fortnight, and compared indoor and outdoor temperatures to estimate a cooling rate for each room. The back bedroom, with an uninsulated section of loft above it, cooled noticeably faster than the others. My results had clear limits, as I could not control how often doors were opened, and my supervisor commented that my evaluation of these was the strongest part of the write-up. In D&T I am designing a passive solar food dehydrator and testing absorber plate finishes with a thermocouple, which has given me experience of improving a design from measured results.

What else have you done to prepare outside of education, and why are these experiences useful?

Since Year 11 I have worked Saturdays and some summer weekdays at a local garden centre, mostly in the plant area. I water, restock and answer customers' questions, and I now open the greenhouse section on my own, checking vents and the irrigation timer before the doors open. Seeing the heated propagation house run through winter made me curious about how growers balance temperature against fuel costs, and I asked the manager about it, though the job itself is mainly about reliability, lifting compost and staying polite on busy bank holidays. I have played cornet in our community brass band for six years and now sit on second cornet. Learning difficult passages has taught me patience, and helping new junior players find their place in the music during rehearsals has made me better at explaining things simply. At contests I help load the van with stands and percussion, which is less glamorous but needs organisation. On Sundays I cook dinner for my family, which started as a way to give my mum a break and has become something I enjoy. Planning a meal so that everything finishes at the same time is a small timing problem I like solving, and it suits the steady, organised way I prefer to work.