Environmental humanities personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

For four years my job was to answer telephone calls about water: bills, leaks, hosepipe restrictions, a flooded alleyway in a terraced street. I noticed that almost nobody rang to talk only about pipes. They talked about the brook their children used to paddle in, about whether the company could be trusted, about fairness between neighbours on meters and neighbours without. The engineering existed, and so did the regulations, but what actually shaped how people behaved was a mixture of memory, suspicion, habit and local pride. That mixture is what environmental humanities seems to me to study, and I want to study it properly rather than guess at it. On my Access course I wrote an essay on how the drainage of the Fens was described at the time, and was struck by how much the language of improvement did work that no engineering could do on its own: wet land became waste land simply by being named that way. Reading Robert Macfarlane's Landmarks afterwards pushed me in the opposite direction, towards the words communities keep for places that outsiders find blank. I am drawn to a degree that takes history, literature, philosophy and geography as tools for the same problem, because the climate questions I hear people argue about in my own town are rarely arguments about data. They are arguments about who belongs somewhere, what is owed to the future, and which version of the past counts. I would like to spend three years learning to read those arguments carefully, and to write about them in a way an ordinary reader could follow.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

I left school with GCSEs and went straight into work, so returning to study at 33 was a deliberate decision rather than a drift. I am now completing an Access to Higher Education Diploma in Humanities, taking modules in English literature, history, sociology and academic research skills. Coming back to formal learning was harder than I expected in one specific way: I could argue a case confidently, but I had no practice in showing where an idea had come from. Learning to reference, to quote sparingly and to separate my own reasoning from a source's has changed how I read anything, including the reports my old employer used to publish. My history modules have been the most useful preparation. One assignment asked us to compare two nineteenth-century accounts of urban sanitation, and I spent a long time on the assumptions each writer made about poverty before either of them mentioned drains. In English I studied Hardy and wrote about landscape as something inherited and contested rather than as scenery, which is close to the questions I want to pursue. Sociology introduced me to thinking about risk and how unevenly it is distributed, and I have since read around the edges of that, including Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, which I found more interesting for its rhetoric than for its chemistry. Alongside the diploma I have been teaching myself to use library databases and to keep proper notes, because I know an essay-based degree will ask for reading at a pace I need to plan for.

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

My eleven years of work were unglamorous and genuinely useful. At the garden centre I learned plant names, seasons and the patience of customers who wanted advice rather than a sale; I still recognise most native hedgerow species, which has made fieldwork with my volunteer group much easier. At the water company I dealt with complaints, which taught me to listen to what someone is actually worried about before answering the question they asked. I also had to explain technical decisions I had not made to people who were rightly annoyed, and I became careful about language: saying investment when someone's kitchen is wet does not help. For the past two years I have volunteered with a river catchment group. I take monthly water clarity and temperature readings at two points on a small tributary, record them on a shared spreadsheet, and help with litter clearances and balsam pulling. I am not a scientist and my role is a modest one, but collecting the same measurements in the same place has taught me how much local knowledge sits outside official data, and how often long-standing residents can date a change in the river more precisely than any record we hold. I have started writing short pieces for the group's newsletter about the mills and washing steps that once stood along that stretch, using the local archive's photographs. I care for my grandmother two evenings a week, which has made me organised about deadlines and given me hours of her accounts of a valley before the bypass. Those conversations are part of why this subject interests me.

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