Energy Engineering with Industrial Management postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

At the bakery distribution depot where I work night shifts, the air compressor behind the loading bays runs almost constantly, even between 2am and 4am when no vans are being loaded and nothing pneumatic is in use. I noticed it in my first month because the sound did not match the work. I now understand why that mismatch matters, and it is a large part of why I want to study energy engineering alongside industrial management.

I graduated last summer with a 2:1 in Mechanical Engineering. My final-year project looked at compressed-air losses in the department's teaching workshop. With my supervisor's agreement I used an ultrasonic leak detector borrowed from the technicians, tagged and logged the leaks on the distribution pipework, and estimated the flow lost through each one from orifice equations and the compressor's loading pattern, which I recorded with a clamp meter over two weeks. The figures were approximate, and a large part of my report discussed the uncertainty in leak sizing. Still, the conclusion was clear enough to act on: a handful of worn quick-release couplings accounted for most of the losses, and replacing them was cheap. The technicians replaced several before I submitted. Their interest in the cost of the parts, the downtime and who would check the fittings in future taught me as much as the thermodynamics did.

The modules I enjoyed most were thermofluids and a design project in which my group sized a heat recovery system for a small food factory. Our technical design was sound, but our weakest section was the business case. We had calculated a simple payback period without thinking properly about maintenance, financing or whether the factory's production pattern would stay the same. That gap is what draws me to a course that combines energy systems with management. I can work out where energy is wasted. I want to become better at judging which improvements an organisation will actually fund, carry out and keep up.

My job has given me a practical view of this. I assist the shift supervisor with rota planning and the handover log, so I see how decisions get made at 3am with limited staff. Lights in the empty racking aisles stay on because the motion sensors once failed and nobody trusted them again. Chiller doors are propped open during busy loading because it saves seconds per pallet. None of these habits are careless. They are reasonable responses to pressure, and any efficiency measure has to fit around them. I raised the compressor issue with the site manager, and it has gone into the maintenance contractor's next review. That is a small outcome, but it showed me how a suggestion moves through an organisation.

I have also helped my parents run their corner shop since I was fifteen, mostly with ordering and reconciling stock. When their electricity contract came up for renewal last year, I compared tariffs with them and looked at whether replacing an old open-fronted drinks fridge would pay off. Reading the half-hourly data from their smart meter, I could see that the fridge drew far more overnight than I had expected. We replaced it with a door-fronted unit. Explaining the decision to my father, who cares about cash flow far more than kilowatt-hours, was good practice in presenting energy figures to someone who has to pay for the change.

Outside work I play five-a-side every week and help organise the pitch booking and subs for our team, which is a modest lesson in chasing people for commitments.

At postgraduate level I want to strengthen my understanding of energy conversion and demand-side systems, and to learn the project appraisal, operations and organisational skills I currently pick up only by trial and error. In the longer term I would like to work as an energy engineer in manufacturing or logistics, where both the technical case and the human one decide what changes.