Maritime archaeology postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

My route to maritime archaeology has been gradual rather than sudden. I graduated in geography twelve years ago, wrote a dissertation on coastal erosion in north Norfolk using successive Ordnance Survey editions, and then took an office job because I needed one. That job turned out to matter. For the past five years I have coordinated schedules for a marine engineering firm that services survey and dredging vessels, which means I spend my working days thinking about tides, weather windows, port access, crew availability and what it costs when a survey day is lost. Fieldwork at sea is expensive and short, and I have a practical feel for how rarely conditions cooperate.

The archaeological interest grew alongside the work. I learned to dive with a local club and now hold a Rescue Diver qualification, mainly diving wrecks in the Sound and along the south coast. What drew me in was noticing how much I could not interpret: whether a scatter of iron concretion was structure or cargo, why one hull survived on one side and not the other. I began reading properly, starting with Muckelroy's ideas about wreck sites as processes of disintegration rather than fixed deposits, and then more recent work on protected wreck management and on ships as evidence of construction traditions rather than just losses. Reading about the Mary Rose and Newport ship excavations made me appreciate how much of the discipline is post-excavation: timber recording, conservation logistics, decades of analysis.

For the past two years I have volunteered with a foreshore recording group on our local estuary. We work low spring tides, photographing and measuring exposed timbers, fish traps and hulk remains, and submitting records to the county historic environment record. I have learned to draw a plan in drizzle with numb hands, to use a total station under supervision, and to write descriptions that someone else can use in five years' time. One winter I helped re-record a set of oak posts first noted in the 1990s; comparing our measurements with the earlier sketch showed how much had been lost to scour, which felt like a direct continuation of the erosion work in my undergraduate dissertation.

Because my degree is a decade behind me, I wanted evidence that I could still study rather than simply assert it. I completed a distance-learning introductory archaeology module last year, achieving a distinction, and used the assignments to practise academic writing again and to work through basic artefact and stratigraphic reasoning. I have also been teaching myself QGIS in the evenings, building a simple layered map of recorded intertidal features on our estuary against historic charts, which has made me aware of how uncertain older positional data can be.

What I want from postgraduate study is the training I cannot get from volunteering: systematic survey methods, geophysics and remote sensing, ship construction and recording, conservation science, and the legal and heritage management framework governing underwater sites. My longer-term hope is to work in commercial marine archaeological consultancy, where offshore development requires assessment of the seabed's historic environment, though I would equally welcome a coastal heritage or curatorial route. I am aware that neither is a comfortable field to enter at thirty-eight, and I have saved accordingly and discussed the finances with my partner.

I would arrive as a student who is out of practice at essays but entirely used to early starts, wet gear and equipment that fails on the day it matters. I am ready to do the academic work to match that.

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