Information management postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

In my first month as an administrative assistant at a housing association, I was asked to find the gas safety certificate for a single flat. It took me forty minutes. The certificate existed, but it sat in a folder called 'Scans 2019 misc', named with a date and nothing else. Nobody had been careless. Over several years, a dozen people had each made reasonable choices that did not fit together. That search, and the many like it since, is why I want to study information management at postgraduate level.

My degree is in Geography. For my dissertation I studied how three allotment societies in my home town recorded the histories of their plots: who held them, what disputes arose and how boundaries changed. One society kept a bound ledger going back decades. Another relied on a secretary's spreadsheet and her memory. The third had almost nothing written down. I interviewed committee members and compared their records with old Ordnance Survey maps. My main finding was modest but useful. The completeness of a record mattered less than whether the next person could understand how it had been kept. The ledger was patchy, yet its consistent format made it more usable than the spreadsheet, whose columns had changed meaning over the years. At the time I thought of this as a geography question about land and community. I now see it was also a question about metadata and continuity.

At work I handle tenancy files, repair records and correspondence for around four hundred properties. Last year my manager let me draft a naming convention for our compliance documents, combining property reference, document type and date. I tested it on one estate for two months before it was adopted more widely. Colleagues now find certificates in seconds, although I am aware it solved one narrow problem rather than the larger question of how our records should be structured and how long they should be kept. I have started reading about retention schedules and data protection obligations, partly because tenants increasingly submit subject access requests, and I have seen how hard those are to answer when records are scattered.

Outside work I volunteer with my local family history society, transcribing parish burial registers into a searchable index. The work is slow and often absorbing. Spellings drift, clerks abbreviate, and I have learned to record exactly what is written rather than what I think was meant, flagging uncertainty instead of resolving it silently. I have also been treasurer of a five-a-side football league for three seasons. This is less related, though keeping clear accounts that someone else could audit has taught me something similar about writing records for a stranger.

I have read Ross Harvey's Digital Curation, which helped me understand the idea of a lifecycle for digital material. It made me realise how many of the problems I meet at work begin at the point of creation, long before anyone tries to find something. I would like to understand the theory behind classification, information governance and user behaviour more rigorously. I also want to develop practical skills in database design and information systems that I have so far picked up only informally.

I am applying because I have reached the limit of what I can work out alone. I am a careful, patient worker who enjoys making things findable for other people, and I can bring experience of how records are actually used in a busy organisation. After the course, I hope to work in records or information governance, perhaps in the public or social housing sector, where good information directly affects whether people's homes are safe and their questions are answered.