Master of Architecture and Master of Landscape Architecture (MARCLA) postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

After heavy rain, the lower paths of the cemetery where I work hold water for two days. The puddles always form in the same places: where the gravel has been compacted by the mowing tractor, and beside the Victorian section, where the ground was raised for burials and now sheds water onto the path below. I noticed this in my first autumn there, when part of my job was raking leaves out of the gullies. Over two years I have learned how a site behaves through the seasons, and this has changed how I think about design. I want to train in both architecture and landscape architecture because I no longer see a building and its ground as separate problems.

My undergraduate degree in architecture gave me a solid grounding in studio method, technical drawing and building construction. I graduated with a 2:1. My strongest work came in the final year, when I designed an extension for an existing primary school on a site next to a culverted stream that floods most winters. The brief asked for two classrooms. I spent the first weeks on the ground rather than the building. I walked the site after rain, photographed where water collected and read the local authority's published flood maps. I then placed the classrooms on the higher northern edge and turned the low playground into a sequence of planted rain gardens and a shallow swale that children could cross on timber boardwalks. My tutors pushed me hard on the planting, and they were right to. I had treated it as a green hatch on a plan rather than as living material with root depths, maintenance needs and seasonal change. Fixing that sent me to Ian McHarg's Design with Nature. His method of overlaying maps of soils, drainage and vegetation to read a site's suitability gave me a structure for analysis I had been doing by instinct. I also read about sustainable drainage systems so that the swale could be explained in technical terms, not just drawn.

The cemetery job began as a way to pay rent while I decided what to do next. It has become a practical education. I mow, strim, clear drains, prune hedges and help the senior groundsman decide which trees need inspection after storms. I now know how long a yew hedge takes to recover from hard cutting, and why the gravel paths clog while the older flagstone ones drain. I have also seen how people use the space. Visitors bring folding chairs to certain graves, older people avoid the slope near the chapel, and dog walkers cut corners until the grass gives up. Watching these desire lines has made me more modest about plans that assume people will follow the intended route.

Outside work I collect my younger brother from school three afternoons a week. I spend a lot of time waiting at a gate with poor shelter and a narrow pavement, and I have sketched alternatives in my notebook more often than I would like to admit. I also play five-a-side on Thursday evenings on a council pitch whose floodlights and fencing have taught me something about how cheaply public space is often maintained.

In postgraduate study I want to build the ecological and horticultural knowledge my architectural training lacks: soils, hydrology, planting design and how landscapes are managed over decades. I also want to keep developing as an architect, particularly in how buildings meet the ground at thresholds, edges and drainage routes. Studying both disciplines together would let me test the instinct that grew from my school project and from two winters of clearing gullies. I want to understand landscape structure well enough that it shapes a building from the first sketch, rather than being fitted around it at the end. I bring a reliable studio method, comfort with physical work outdoors and a habit of watching how places actually get used.