Interdisciplinary Brain Sciences postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Every morning on the stroke rehabilitation ward where I work as a healthcare assistant, one patient insisted on making his own coffee. He could name the kettle, the mug and the spoon, yet he would often stir an empty cup before pouring the water. The occupational therapists called this a sequencing difficulty, and I watched them break the task into steps he could rehearse. I am not a clinician and my role is practical: washing, feeding, transfers, observations. But two years of evening and weekend shifts have given me a steady curiosity about how knowing what to do and being able to do it in the right order can come apart. I want to study the brain at the level where questions like that can be asked properly, which means combining biology, computation and behaviour rather than choosing one.

My undergraduate degree in Psychology gave me a grounding in cognitive and biological psychology, research methods and statistics. I chose two optional modules from the computing department, introductory programming in Python and a data analysis course, because I found that I enjoyed the precision of writing code more than I expected. These shaped my final-year dissertation, which examined task switching in bilingual and monolingual adults. I programmed the experiment myself in PsychoPy: participants alternated between classifying digits by parity or magnitude, and I measured switch costs in reaction time and accuracy. Recruiting forty-two participants, cleaning the data and fitting mixed-effects models in R took far longer than designing the task. My results did not show the bilingual advantage that some earlier studies reported, which taught me to read that literature more critically and to report a null finding plainly. My supervisor encouraged me to discuss power and the limits of reaction time as a measure, and that section became the part of the dissertation I am proudest of.

The obvious limit of my project was that I could only infer what was happening in the brain from button presses. I have tried to close some of that gap on my own. I worked through an online course on computational neuroscience covering integrate-and-fire neurons and simple network models, and wrote a small Python simulation of a leaky integrate-and-fire neuron so that I could see how changing the membrane time constant altered firing rates. I have also read Lisa Genova's novel Still Alice alongside more technical reading on executive function, because the ward has made me interested in how cognitive change is experienced as well as measured. I am aware that my physics and mathematics are less developed than those of applicants from engineering backgrounds, so I have been revising linear algebra and differential equations in my own time and would welcome structured teaching in these areas.

Outside work and study I play bass in a covers band that performs in local pubs roughly once a month. It has nothing to do with neuroscience, though rehearsing a set has made me appreciate how much timing depends on listening to others. Shift work has also taught me habits that I think transfer to research: keeping careful records, handing over clearly to colleagues, and staying calm when a plan changes at short notice.

At postgraduate level I hope to work on motor control and action sequencing, ideally using methods that link behavioural data to neural recordings or models. I am particularly drawn to an interdisciplinary programme because the questions I care about sit between psychology, biology and computation, and I would like to learn the vocabulary of each well enough to collaborate across them. I bring solid experimental design skills, working programming ability and a sustained, practical familiarity with what brain injury means for people's daily lives. I would like to build on these with the rigour of a demanding scientific training.