Interdisciplinary Sciences postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Every autumn I make up several litres of copper sulfate solution for a Year 9 crystal-growing practical, and every autumn a few groups bring back crystals that are cloudy and lopsided instead of clear and blue. The textbook answer is that they cooled too quickly. When I started noting which benches produced the poor crystals, though, they were usually the ones nearest the radiator, where students had left beakers uncovered and dust and evaporation had done as much as temperature. It is a small puzzle, but it captures what I enjoy most: a question that looks like it belongs to one discipline turns out to need several. I am applying for postgraduate study in interdisciplinary sciences because I want the training to work on such questions properly rather than by instinct.

My undergraduate degree in Natural Sciences combined chemistry and biology, and I chose that pairing deliberately. Physical chemistry gave me a respect for rate laws and spectroscopy; ecology and cell biology taught me that living systems rarely behave like an idealised flask. My final-year project sat between the two. I studied the breakdown of diclofenac, a common anti-inflammatory drug found in wastewater, under ultraviolet light, following its concentration by UV-visible spectroscopy. I then exposed cultures of duckweed to irradiated and unirradiated solutions and counted fronds over two weeks. The chemistry was tidier than the biology: a pseudo-first-order model described the early decay reasonably well, but my duckweed results were noisy, and I could not confidently say whether the breakdown products were more or less harmful than the parent compound. Writing that honestly in my discussion, and proposing how better analytical separation would help, taught me more about experimental design than a clean result might have.

Since graduating I have worked as a science technician at a secondary school. The job is practical and unglamorous: preparing reagents, maintaining microscopes, risk-assessing demonstrations and repairing the equipment that teenagers inevitably drop. It has made me quick, organised and careful, and it has given me a broad view of the sciences, because in a single morning I might set up a pendulum experiment for physics, a titration for A-level chemistry and an osmosis practical with potato cylinders for Year 8. Explaining to a teacher why a resistance experiment gave strange values, or adjusting a method so that it works in fifty minutes, is a modest kind of problem-solving, but I have come to value it.

Outside work I ring church bells with a local band. I took it up to keep a neighbour company, and stayed because method ringing is unexpectedly mathematical: each method is a sequence of permutations of the bells, and learning to ring one means holding a pattern in your head while responding to everyone else's timing. I also walk my elderly neighbour's two spaniels most evenings, which is less intellectual but keeps me in a routine.

I am drawn to a flexible, interdisciplinary programme because the problems that interest me, particularly how pharmaceuticals and other contaminants transform in the environment and affect organisms, cannot be understood with chemistry or biology alone. I want to strengthen my physical chemistry and analytical methods, learn more quantitative modelling than my degree offered, and gain experience in a research group where chemists and biologists work on the same question. I would bring a solid foundation across two sciences, practical laboratory competence developed through daily work, and a habit of noticing when an accepted explanation does not quite fit the evidence. I hope to use postgraduate study to turn that habit into rigorous research.