Geographical information systems postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

My route back to study began with a spreadsheet. Part of my job at a district council is keeping the waste collection round data tidy: which properties are on which round, which have assisted collections, which access routes have changed because of a new development. For years this lived in columns of text, and when a supervisor asked whether two rounds could be rebalanced, the honest answer was that nobody could see the problem properly. I started joining our property list to the council's address gazetteer in QGIS and producing round maps by hand-drawn convex hulls at first, then with proper spatial joins. Seeing the overlap between two rounds on a screen persuaded people in a meeting far faster than any table I had produced before. That experience convinced me that my geography degree had given me the concepts but not the tools, and that I want to work in spatial analysis properly rather than at the edges of an administrative role.

My BSc in Geography was seven years ago, and I recognise that gap. My dissertation mapped footpath erosion in a country park near where I grew up, using a GPS handset, a tape measure and a great deal of walking, then presenting the results as a series of static maps. I enjoyed the fieldwork, but the analysis was thin: I described patterns rather than testing them. Returning to that project recently, I can see the questions I should have asked about slope, soil type and distance from car parks, and that these are questions about layers and relationships rather than about drawing.

To prepare, I have worked steadily through QGIS on my own laptop, using open data from the Ordnance Survey OpenData products and the census. I built a small project comparing the distribution of household waste tonnage by ward with population density, mainly to teach myself normalisation and choropleth classification, and it taught me how easily a map can mislead depending on the breaks chosen. I have also learned enough Python to script repetitive tasks, and I have started reading around the theory rather than just the software. Longley and colleagues' Geographic Information Science and Systems has been useful for structuring what I had picked up piecemeal, particularly on the modifiable areal unit problem, which explained a discrepancy I had been puzzling over between two versions of one of my own maps. I would like to study spatial statistics, remote sensing and database design formally, because these are the areas where self-teaching has reached its limit.

My work has given me habits I think transfer well. Council data is imperfect, and I am used to checking whether a record is wrong or merely unusual, and to documenting what I have changed so that a colleague can follow it next year. Explaining data to people who do not want to look at data is a large part of the job; I have learned to lead with the question rather than the method. Outside work I volunteer with a canal restoration group, helping with survey days where we record the condition of structures along a section of towpath. I have been digitising those records into a simple map the group can use to plan work parties, which has been a good lesson in designing something for other people rather than for myself.

After the course I would like to work as a GIS analyst in local government or environmental consultancy, where I already understand the operational realities that spatial data is meant to serve. I am returning to study deliberately and with a clear sense of what I want from it.

Review this personal statement

Latest reviews