Environmental policy postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

My interest in environmental policy grew out of a fairly unglamorous piece of fieldwork. For my undergraduate dissertation in Geography I looked at why recycling contamination rates varied between streets in one ward of my city. The council published bin lorry rejection figures at collection-round level, and I combined these with a short doorstep survey of 74 households about what they thought could go in the mixed recycling bin. The clearest pattern was not indifference but confusion: residents in the flats, where bins were shared and unlabelled, were markedly less confident about plastics than residents in terraced housing with individual bins. My conclusion was modest, and I was careful in the write-up not to overstate a small sample, but it changed how I think about environmental problems. The behaviour I had assumed was a matter of attitude was substantially a matter of how a service had been designed, procured and communicated.

That experience pushed me towards the parts of my degree I had previously treated as background: water framework legislation, the design of the landfill tax, how devolved and local government responsibilities overlap. I found I was more interested in the machinery than in the science alone. Since graduating I have kept reading in this direction, including Elinor Ostrom's Governing the Commons, which was a useful corrective to my instinct that every shared resource problem needs a regulator; her case material on locally devised rules and monitoring made me think harder about who is actually able to enforce anything at neighbourhood scale.

My current job has been an unexpectedly good education. I work part-time in the billing team of a water utility, handling calls about metering, leaks and payment difficulties. I speak to customers who are on social tariffs, and to others who have had a garden flooded by a sewer overflow. The gap between a policy as written and a policy as experienced on the phone is something I now notice constantly: an affordability scheme only works if the people eligible for it know it exists and can face the application form. I have also seen how much of a regulated company's attention is shaped by what it is measured on, which is itself a policy choice. It is ordinary work, but it has given me a sense of institutions as things staffed by people with targets rather than as abstractions.

Alongside this I volunteer roughly monthly with a group that clears litter from a stretch of river and records what we find. Last autumn three of us took on the task of tidying up the group's recording sheet so that categories matched the national survey format the organisers wanted to submit to; it was a small job, mostly spreadsheet work and a couple of evenings of discussion, but it made our returns usable rather than merely well-intentioned. I have since started making simple charts of our findings for the group's newsletter, partly to practise handling messy data and partly because people turn up more readily when they can see what the last six months produced.

I want to study environmental policy at master's level because I have reached the limit of what I can work out from the outside. I would like formal grounding in policy analysis and evaluation, in environmental economics beyond the introductory level, and in how regulation is designed and challenged, so that I can assess proposals rather than react to them. My longer-term aim is to work in analysis for a regulator, a local authority or an environmental NGO, on water quality or waste, where I would be reasonably close to the practical detail that first drew me in.

Review this personal statement

Latest reviews