Environmental engineering personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

The thing that pulled me towards environmental engineering was noticing how often water decides what a place can do. My college's playing field floods every autumn and matches get cancelled; the road near my house has a drain that backs up whenever there is heavy rain, and the council marks it, clears it, and it happens again the next season. I started wanting to know why the same spots fail repeatedly, and I found that the answers were not really about the drain itself but about what the ground upstream had been covered with, how much water arrives at once, and how the system was sized for rainfall patterns that have shifted. That combination of physical science, design decisions and public consequence is what I want to work on. Geography gave me the catchment thinking and Physics and Maths gave me the tools to put numbers to it, but neither on its own lets you design a solution, and the design is the part I am most drawn to. I like problems where the answer has to be built, maintained and paid for, not just described. Reading around the subject has shown me how broad the field is: water treatment, contaminated land, air quality and waste all use similar habits of thinking about mass balance and residence time. I am particularly interested in sustainable drainage and how retrofitting features into existing streets and school grounds compares with building larger pipes, because that seems to be where a lot of practical decisions are being made now. I want a degree that pushes me through the fluid mechanics, hydrology and chemistry properly, so that I can eventually justify a design rather than repeat an opinion about it.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

I am studying Maths, Physics and Geography at A level, and the three fit together usefully for this course. In Maths I have found calculus and the mechanics work on rates of change the most directly relevant, since so much of environmental engineering is about flows changing over time. Physics has given me fluid pressure, energy transfer and a habit of checking units, which has saved me more than once in my own calculations. Geography has been where I met catchment hydrology, river management and the arguments about hard versus soft engineering, and I wrote coursework on a stretch of the River Tame comparing channel measurements at two points and discussing why discharge changed between them. Doing the fieldwork in February, with a flow meter and a very cold pair of hands, taught me how much variation there is in real measurements and why you take repeats.

Outside the syllabus I have read Charles Fishman's The Big Thirst, which widened my sense of water as an industrial and municipal system rather than just a natural one, and I follow the Institution of Civil Engineers' articles online, which is where I first came across the practical trade-offs in retrofitting sustainable drainage. I have also taught myself enough spreadsheet modelling to build a simple rainfall-runoff calculation, which is crude but helped me understand what the standard methods are actually doing. I chose to keep Geography alongside two quantitative subjects deliberately, because I did not want to lose the part of the subject that deals with land use and people.

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

For my college's extended project I surveyed the drainage on our playing field, which floods each autumn. I used a dumpy level borrowed from the estates team to take spot heights along two transects, carried out infiltration tests with a simple ring and a stopwatch at six points, and mapped where the standing water actually sat. The soil turned out to be far more compacted near the gate where everyone walks, and my recommendations were modest: aeration, a shallow swale along the low edge, and moving one path. The estates manager read the report and agreed to trial aeration on the worst corner, which was more than I expected and taught me to write recommendations that someone could afford to act on.

I have volunteered with a local river conservation group for two years, mostly on Sunday morning work parties clearing balsam, planting along banks and helping with the annual litter surveys. We record what we pull out by category, and seeing three years of those records made me appreciate how slowly a catchment responds to intervention. I have also learned to work with people who know far more than me about the ecology and to ask questions rather than assume.

I work Saturdays and holidays on the till at a garden centre, which has been better preparation than it sounds. Customers arrive wanting to solve a waterlogged lawn or a dry border, and I have to ask the right questions, explain why a solution may not work, and stay patient when someone disagrees. It has made me much more comfortable explaining technical points in plain language. I am also on the committee for our college's five-a-side league, where I do the fixtures and pitch bookings, which mostly involves negotiating around, unsurprisingly, waterlogged ground.

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