Master of Science In Geographic Information Systems postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Last year, while working as a field enumerator for a market research company, I noticed that the household points from one of our survey areas formed a neat line along the main road. The households themselves were spread across a hillside, but several enumerators had been recording coordinates on their tablets after walking back to the matatu stop, where the signal was better. Nobody had done anything dishonest. The location field had simply been treated as a formality. When I raised it with my supervisor, she asked me to check the other areas, and I spent two evenings comparing recorded points against the sampling map we had been given. That small exercise showed me how easily spatial data looks authoritative while being wrong, and it is a large part of why I now want to study geographic information systems properly rather than continue picking up techniques as I need them.

My first degree was in urban and regional planning, where GIS was one tool among many. I learned to digitise features, build buffers and produce thematic maps in QGIS, but much of the coursework stopped at presenting results. My final-year project went further. I examined walking access to matatu stages in two estates in Nakuru, asking whether a simple distance buffer gave a fair picture of who was within reach of public transport. I digitised footpaths from satellite imagery, then walked sections of them to confirm which were usable, because several apparent shortcuts ended at fenced plots or a drainage channel. Comparing straight-line buffers with distances along the path network showed that some households counted as close by the buffer method faced a considerably longer walk. The analysis was modest and the network incomplete, but it taught me to treat the method itself as a question. I also spent an uncomfortable afternoon discovering that two of my layers used different coordinate systems, one in geographic coordinates and one in UTM zone 37S, which is why my footpaths initially sat some distance from the roads. I now check projections before anything else.

My enumerator job is not a technical role, but it has given me a practical view of where data comes from. I have conducted interviews in markets and homes, learned to explain why we need a location reading without alarming respondents, and seen how fatigue, poor signal and unclear instructions shape what ends up in a spreadsheet. I have since suggested to my team leader that we record a photo of the gate alongside each point in areas with weak reception, and this has been adopted for some of our projects. I would like to understand how professional systems handle these problems at scale, including accuracy assessment, metadata and the design of collection workflows.

Outside work, I tutor my younger brother in maths three evenings a week as he prepares for his secondary examinations. Explaining gradients and simultaneous equations to someone who would rather be playing football has made me more patient and clearer in how I set out steps, which I expect to help when documenting analyses for others. On Saturdays I run with a local club, and I have become the person who plans our routes, mostly by trial and error and a phone app rather than any sophisticated analysis.

At postgraduate level I hope to strengthen my grounding in geodesy, remote sensing and spatial statistics, areas my planning degree touched only lightly. I am particularly interested in how imagery and field-collected data can be combined to keep information about informal settlements and transport access current, since official maps in growing towns quickly fall behind what is on the ground. I would also like to become comfortable with scripting, as I currently repeat too many tasks by hand. I bring careful habits, field experience and a real familiarity with the gap between a map and the place it describes, and I am ready for the more rigorous training needed to close that gap.