Master of Arts (by dissertation) — Environmental & Geographical Studies postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

At the plant nursery where I work on Saturdays, the most common request is for something that needs no water at all. I usually walk customers to the restios and the succulents and explain that even these need help to establish. Then I ask where in the garden the plant will go. That second question often reveals more than the first. People describe a corner that floods every winter, a bed under a leaking gutter, or soil they assume is dry because the surface cracks. Those conversations have made me curious about how people read water in their own surroundings, and that is the question I want to pursue through a dissertation-based master's in environmental and geographical studies.

My undergraduate degree combined geography and environmental science, and I was in my second year when Cape Town's 2018 drought brought talk of Day Zero, the date the city's taps might be switched off. The public response interested me as much as the hydrology. Restrictions were understood and obeyed very differently across neighbourhoods. A course in urban political ecology gave me a way to think about this. It treats who controls water, who carries its risks and whose knowledge counts as political matters, rather than purely technical ones.

For my honours project I studied a canalised stormwater channel running past a residential area on the Cape Flats. I carried out twelve walking interviews with residents along a two-kilometre stretch. I asked them to show me where water collected after rain, where children played and which parts they avoided. I mapped their routes and remarks in QGIS and compared them with the municipal drainage layout. Several residents described pooling well beyond the channel's official footprint, in places where older maps showed a seasonal vlei. I did not claim this proved anything about the wetland's extent. However, it showed that local accounts and formal plans described the same ground in different ways. Planners rarely asked people for the first kind of knowledge. I was pleased with how the method worked. People who were hesitant in a seated interview spoke easily while pointing at a drain or a patch of reeds. I also learned the practical work of gaining consent, transcribing in two languages with help from a friend, and keeping field notes organised enough to code later.

For a master's dissertation I would like to extend this approach to how households in low-lying areas understand winter flooding and wetland edges. I would also look at how this knowledge relates to official risk maps. I would combine walking interviews with participatory mapping and a closer reading of planning documents. I expect to refine the question substantially with supervision, particularly around sampling and the ethics of working with people in insecure housing.

Outside study, I coach an under-11 netball team at a community club on weekday afternoons. Planning sessions for children with very different confidence levels has made me patient and clear when I explain things. I also run on the mountain trails most weekends. That has nothing to do with research, except that I notice where paths have eroded after a wet season.

The nursery job has given me reliability and an easy manner with strangers, both of which matter in fieldwork. It also gave me the starting point I described. People hold detailed, practical knowledge of water that is seldom written down. I would like the time and training a research degree offers to study that knowledge carefully, and to present it in a form that planners and residents might both find useful.