Entomology postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

For the past two summers I have run a 15-watt actinic moth trap in my parents' back garden in Leicester, borrowed from the county moth group and powered from an extension lead through the kitchen window. The garden is unremarkable: a lawn, a buddleia, a fence line of ivy. Over roughly seventy trapping nights I have recorded a little over 130 macro-moth species, learned to separate the commoner pugs with a hand lens and a key, and discovered how much of identification depends on patience and on being willing to write "not confirmed" in the notebook. Sending records to the county recorder, and occasionally having a determination politely corrected, taught me more about rigour than any single module did. It is this combination of fieldwork, taxonomy and data that I want to study formally through a master's in entomology.

My BSc in Biological Sciences gave me the grounding. I took options in invertebrate zoology, ecology and applied entomology, and my strongest results came in modules with a quantitative element. For my final-year project I surveyed pollinators on a set of allotments close to campus, using timed pan-trap and transect counts across plots that differed in how much bare soil and uncut margin they retained. Hoverflies turned out to be the group I could identify most reliably, so I focused the analysis on Syrphidae abundance and morphospecies richness. The results were modest and the variation between plots was large, but working the data up in R, and having to justify why my sample size could not support the model I originally wanted to fit, was genuinely formative. I also learned how much of applied entomology is negotiation: persuading plot holders that a yellow bowl of soapy water was not a threat to their runner beans.

Alongside study I have worked, first on supermarket checkouts and now as a shift supervisor at weekends, and during the growing season as a plant advisor at a garden centre. The second job has been unexpectedly useful. Customers arrive with leaves in sandwich bags and photographs on their phones, and I have become reasonably confident at recognising vine weevil damage, viburnum beetle, woolly aphid and the difference between a pest and a beneficial larva that someone is about to squash. Explaining that hoverfly larvae eat aphids, or that most caterpillars on a nasturtium are not a crisis, has made me think carefully about how entomological knowledge is communicated to people who simply want their plants to survive. Once a month I join a work party at a wildlife trust reserve, mostly scrub clearance and ditch management, which has shown me how habitat decisions are made with limited volunteer time and money.

My reading has followed my recording. Chinery's field guides and the Waring, Townsend and Lewington moth guide are the books I use most, and Dave Goulson's work on bumblebees first made me interested in how agricultural landscape structure shapes insect populations. I would like to build on this with formal training in insect systematics, morphology and identification beyond the groups I have taught myself, and in the survey design and statistics needed to produce evidence that stands up.

In the longer term I hope to work in invertebrate survey and monitoring, either for a consultancy or a conservation organisation, and eventually to contribute to recording schemes as more than an enthusiastic amateur. A taught master's with a substantial research project is the step that would take my garden notebook and my degree and make something professional of them.

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