Epidemiology (Online Learning) MSc, PgCert, PgDip, PgProfDev postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Last autumn the community pharmacy where I work as a dispenser offered free flu vaccinations, and I volunteered to keep the tally. By November my spreadsheet showed something the pharmacists had suspected but never counted: almost all our vaccinations went to people over seventy, while eligible younger adults with asthma or diabetes, many of whom collect repeat prescriptions from us every month, rarely took up the offer. Adding a short reminder to their prescription bags raised the numbers a little, but I could not tell whether that was the reminder, the colder weather or chance. I want to study epidemiology because I would like to be able to answer questions like that properly, and online study would let me do so while continuing the work that keeps raising them.

My degree in Biomedical Science gave me a grounding in microbiology, immunology and basic statistics, but my dissertation was where I first worked with health data rather than laboratory samples. With my supervisor's help and the ward managers' permission, I analysed eighteen months of anonymised hand hygiene audit records from two hospital wards. The headline compliance figures looked reassuringly high, but when I separated audits by time of day and by who carried them out, the picture changed: scores recorded by ward staff were consistently higher than those recorded by the infection control team. I could not prove the reason, and I said so, but writing about observer bias and the limits of self-audit taught me more than any lecture about how data are produced. I learned to clean messy records in Excel and run simple comparisons in R, and I have kept practising R since graduating, mainly by working through publicly available NHS prescribing datasets.

My reading has followed the same thread. Ben Goldacre's Bad Science made me more alert to how studies can mislead, and I have since worked steadily through an introductory epidemiology textbook, finding the chapters on confounding and study design the most useful. Thinking about my vaccination tally in those terms, I can now see that comparing uptake before and after the reminder was a weak design, and that the patients who read their prescription bags may differ from those who do not. I would like the training to design something better.

Working in a pharmacy for four years has given me a practical sense of how health services meet the public. I handle medicine shortages, explain to patients why their usual tablets look different, and spot when someone has stopped collecting a prescription. I have also completed accredited training to support the pharmacists with blood pressure checks, which has made me careful about recording measurements consistently, because I now understand how easily small habits become systematic error.

Outside work, I help my mother run a fortnightly lunch club at our church for around thirty older people. I handle the shopping budget and the attendance list, and I have noticed that numbers drop sharply in icy weather, which has led to us arranging lifts with volunteer drivers. It is a small thing, but it reminds me that patterns in data usually belong to people with ordinary obstacles. I also keep an allotment, where I have spent three years losing a slow battle with clubroot in my brassicas, and reading about how the disease persists in soil was, oddly, my first informal encounter with thinking about reservoirs of infection.

I am organised, used to fitting study around shifts, and comfortable learning independently, which I believe suits distance study. I would bring an understanding of frontline primary care and a habit of questioning where figures come from. In the longer term I hope to work in health protection or service evaluation, helping teams like mine understand whether what they are doing actually works, and for whom.