Engineering physics personal statement example

Personal statement example

The compass on my desk pointed nearly twenty degrees away from north, and for a week I assumed it was broken. It was only when I moved it across the room that the needle swung back, and I realised the steel radiator beside my desk was bending the field around it. That small annoyance became my Extended Project: building a low-cost magnetometer from a sensor module and an Arduino, and seeing how much useful information it could give about the magnetic field around my house.

The project taught me how far a working circuit is from a working instrument. My first readings drifted steadily over an hour, which I eventually traced to the sensor warming up inside a sealed plastic box. I drilled ventilation holes, let it settle before each run and recorded temperature alongside the field. Calibration was harder. Rotating the sensor through every orientation should trace out a sphere of readings, but mine formed a lopsided ellipsoid because of nearby metal and offsets in the chip itself. Working out how to correct for that took me into material beyond A level, and I used my Further Maths work on matrices to understand what a transformation that squashes and shifts a sphere actually does. By the end I could map how the field changed along our hallway and show the disturbance caused by the radiator, the fridge and my bike frame. My readings were rough, but I could explain where the errors came from, which mattered more to me than the numbers.

This is what draws me to engineering physics rather than physics or engineering alone. In Physics lessons I enjoy deriving results, such as the field from a current-carrying wire, but I find them most satisfying when I can test them with equipment I have had to understand and improve. I have been reading Richard Feynman's QED, which helped me see how much careful measurement underpins even very abstract theory, and I want to study a subject where theory and building instruments inform each other.

On Saturdays I work in a bike repair shop. Most of my jobs are routine: replacing inner tubes, adjusting brakes, indexing gears. It is not physics, but it has made me patient with mechanical problems and honest about what I do not know. When a customer's wheel kept going out of true, I learned from the owner to check spoke tension systematically rather than tightening whatever looked loose. I have also become comfortable explaining faults clearly to people who just want their bike back by Monday.

At home I walk my younger sister to primary school each morning and help my grandad with his weekly shopping and paperwork. These routines mean I plan my time carefully; much of my EPQ coding was done in the hour between dropping my sister off and my first lesson. Helping my grandad set up online banking also reminded me that technology is only useful if someone can actually use it, a point I tried to remember when writing the instructions for my magnetometer so a classmate could repeat my measurements.

Outside school I play five-a-side football with friends on Thursday evenings, which has nothing to do with physics and is mostly an excuse to switch off.

I am applying for engineering physics because I want a rigorous grounding in mathematics and physics alongside the practical skills to design and test real devices. I am particularly curious about sensors and measurement, though I expect my interests to change as I learn more. What I can offer is persistence with problems that do not resolve quickly, careful habits from both the lab bench and the workshop, and a genuine enjoyment of working out why something does not behave as expected.