Geographical information science postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

My undergraduate dissertation began as a question about allotments and ended as a question about data. I wanted to know how far residents of different wards in my home city had to travel to reach a community growing plot, and I assumed the hard part would be the fieldwork. In fact the hard part was reconciling three incompatible datasets: a council list of sites held as a PDF, OpenStreetMap polygons of variable quality, and a national land use layer that classified two of my sites as "amenity greenspace". I ended up digitising boundaries by hand against aerial imagery, keeping a log of every judgement I made, and running network-distance analysis in QGIS rather than straight-line buffers, because a canal and a dual carriageway made Euclidean distance meaningless. The results were modest, but the process convinced me that the interesting problems in geography are increasingly problems of representation, uncertainty and method. That is why I want to study geographical information science formally rather than continue picking it up in fragments.

Since graduating I have worked as an administrator for a housing association, which has been an unglamorous but genuinely useful education in data. I maintain records for around 900 properties and produce monthly reports on repairs and void periods. Addresses are entered inconsistently, postcodes are mistyped, and the same block appears under three different names depending on who created the record. I have taught myself enough Python to write scripts that standardise address fields and flag duplicates, and I persuaded my manager to let me geocode our stock and produce a simple map of repair response times by neighbourhood. It is not a research project, but it showed my team something a table had not: that our slowest responses clustered in properties furthest from the contractor's depot. It also taught me to be careful about causal claims drawn from a map of about 900 points.

My reading has been steady rather than systematic, and I am aware of its gaps. Longley and colleagues' Geographic Information Science and Systems gave me the vocabulary for things I had been fumbling towards, particularly the modifiable areal unit problem, which explained why my dissertation results shifted noticeably when I moved from wards to lower-layer output areas. I have also worked through parts of Brunsdon and Comber's introduction to spatial analysis in R, and I found the chapters on spatial autocorrelation harder than I expected, which is a reasonable argument for structured teaching. Stronger training in spatial statistics, coordinate systems and database design would let me work with more confidence and less trial and error.

Outside work, I help run a monthly walk for a local rambling group and produce the route maps. My grandfather kept handwritten notes on paths around the valley where he grew up, including several that are no longer obvious on the ground, and I have been slowly turning them into a GPS-tracked layer, checking each route against historical Ordnance Survey editions. Some of his descriptions have proved unreliable, which has been an oddly good lesson in metadata and provenance.

I am particularly keen to develop skills in remote sensing and in scripted, reproducible workflows, and I would like eventually to work in environmental or housing data analysis for a public body. A master's course is the most direct way for me to move from competent amateur to someone who can defend their methods.

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