Master in Transportation Electrification postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Last month I clipped a current transformer around the meter tails of a 1930s semi-detached house so that a new 7 kW car charger could see what the rest of the house was drawing. The supply had a 60 A main fuse, an electric shower and an induction hob. Without load management, the owner's first winter evening of cooking, showering and charging could have blown that fuse. With it, the charger simply throttled back. That small clamp sums up what draws me to transportation electrification: a vehicle is only as useful as the electrical system around it, and the interesting engineering often sits where the two meet.

I graduated with a BEng in Electrical and Electronic Engineering, and for the past eighteen months I have worked as an installation assistant for an electrical contractor fitting domestic and small workplace chargers. My role is practical rather than senior. I survey consumer units, run cable, help the qualified electricians with testing and complete the paperwork for the distribution network operator. The work has given me a feel for real constraints that rarely appeared in lectures: undersized supplies, earthing arrangements that need rethinking, and customers who want to know why their charger runs slower at six in the evening than at midnight. Explaining load management to someone at their kitchen table has made me much clearer about the principles myself.

My final-year dissertation looked at the vehicle side of the problem. I compared coulomb counting with an extended Kalman filter for estimating the state of charge of lithium-ion cells, using a first-order equivalent circuit model. I fitted the model parameters from pulse discharge tests I ran on cylindrical cells in the department's teaching laboratory, then implemented both estimators in MATLAB. In my tests, coulomb counting drifted when I deliberately gave it a wrong starting value, while the Kalman filter converged towards the measured value within a few minutes of cycling. The model's weakness was temperature: my parameters were fitted at room temperature, and the estimate degraded when the cells warmed under heavier current. I would like to understand thermal and ageing effects properly rather than treating them as a footnote.

Modules in power electronics and electrical machines gave me the foundations of converter topologies and motor control, and I enjoyed building a small buck converter in a lab assignment. I am aware, though, that my knowledge of traction inverters, onboard chargers and fast-charging infrastructure is still largely from reading. I have been working through Hughes and Drury's Electric Motors and Drives to strengthen my understanding of machine control, and I follow the technical discussion around smart charging and vehicle-to-grid because I see its consequences directly in my job.

Outside work I volunteer at a monthly repair café in my town, mostly mending lamps, kettles and the occasional cordless drill whose battery pack has failed. Opening those packs has shown me how differently manufacturers approach cell balancing and protection, and how often a cheap design choice shortens a product's life. I also row with a recreational club on weekend mornings, which has nothing to do with engineering but has taught me to turn up reliably and pull my weight in a crew.

I want postgraduate study because my job has shown me the practical edges of electrification while my degree gave me only an introduction to the theory beneath it. I hope to deepen my understanding of battery systems, power conversion and the integration of charging with the grid, so that I can move towards design and analysis roles rather than installation alone. I bring careful laboratory habits, practical familiarity with real electrical installations and a steady curiosity about how the pieces fit together, from cell chemistry to the fuse under the stairs.