Global Food Security and Nutrition (Online Learning) MSc, PgDip (ICL), PgCert (ICL), PgProfDev postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Most mornings at the fruit and vegetable wholesaler where I work as a stock controller, I log the pallets that customers have rejected. A load of peppers turned away by a restaurant for being slightly soft will often still suit a café making soup, and part of my job is finding that second buyer before the produce becomes waste. After three years of this, I have come to see food supply as a long series of decisions about quality, timing and price, each made by someone with limited information. I want to understand how those decisions add up at a much larger scale, and why plentiful food in one place can sit alongside poor diets nearby. That is why I am applying for postgraduate study in global food security and nutrition. Online study would let me keep working while I learn.

My interest began during my geography degree. For my dissertation I mapped food retail in a valley town in south Wales, recording the price and availability of a fixed basket of fresh items in fourteen shops and comparing them with bus timetables. The two large supermarkets were cheapest but sat on the edge of town. Residents of the upper estates without cars had a forty-minute round trip by bus, or relied on convenience stores where my basket cost noticeably more and fresh vegetables were sometimes missing entirely. The work was small and local, but it showed me that access can fail even when food is physically present. Reading Amartya Sen's Poverty and Famines later gave me a framework for this: his argument that famine can result from a collapse in people's entitlements, such as wages or purchasing power, rather than simply from a shortage of food, made sense of patterns I had seen on a street map.

Since graduating I have tried to build on that foundation. I have read FAO material on the four dimensions of food security, availability, access, utilisation and stability, and I have found the last two the least familiar to me. My degree said little about nutrition itself, so I have been working through an introductory nutrition textbook in the evenings, focusing on micronutrient deficiencies and the idea that a diet can provide enough energy while still lacking iron or vitamin A. I would welcome the chance to study this properly, alongside the policy and agricultural side of the subject.

My job has also taught me practical things that reading cannot. I track stock against forecasts, and I have seen how a single wet week in Spain or a delayed ferry changes prices and availability within days. I helped redesign our waste log so that rejected stock is recorded by reason rather than just by weight, which has made it easier for the buyers to spot recurring problems with particular suppliers. It is ordinary work, but it has made me comfortable with messy data and with explaining figures to colleagues who are busy.

Outside work, I help on Thursday mornings at a primary school breakfast club, serving toast, cereal and fruit to around thirty children. I keep an allotment where my onions are reliable and my brassicas mostly feed the pigeons, and I cycle to work most days.

I am a careful, steady learner rather than a quick one, and I am used to fitting study around shifts. I would like the course to give me a broader, evidence-based understanding of food systems and nutrition, so that I can eventually move into analytical work with a food policy organisation or a supply chain role with a clearer focus on access and nutrition.