Master Of Science In Veterinary Epidemiology & Economics postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Every evening at the agrovet shop where I work, I copy the day's sales from the receipt book into a ledger. After a year of doing this I noticed that acaricide sales rose sharply in the fortnight after the first heavy rains, then fell away well before the tick season was over. Farmers were buying when they saw ticks, not when the risk was highest. That pattern in a shop ledger is a small thing, but it captures the question I want to study: how disease risk, farmers' decisions and money interact, and how evidence can make those decisions better.

My degree in Animal Health and Production gave me a foundation in parasitology, animal nutrition and herd health, alongside introductory statistics. For my final-year project I surveyed 58 smallholder dairy households in one sub-county about their tick control practices. I recorded how often they sprayed, which products they used, how they diluted them and what they spent each month, and asked about calf losses they attributed to tick-borne disease. Analysing the data in R, I found wide variation in spending that bore little relation to spraying frequency, and several farmers were diluting acaricide more weakly than the label recommended, apparently to stretch a bottle further. I could describe these patterns, but I could not say much about cause. Households that spent more also tended to have larger herds and better road access, and I realised I lacked the tools to separate those influences. My supervisor pointed out that my sample was a convenience sample drawn through one farmers' group, which limited how far I could generalise. Recognising those limits is a large part of why I want formal training in study design and analysis.

Since graduating I have read parts of Thrusfield's Veterinary Epidemiology, particularly the chapters on sampling and on diagnostic tests. Working through sensitivity and specificity made me think differently about the rapid tests some customers ask us about, since a test's usefulness depends on how common the condition is in the herds where it is used. I have also tried simple partial budgets for customers' decisions, such as whether switching to a longer-acting acaricide would cost less per month once labour for spraying was counted. These are rough calculations, but they showed me how much an economic framing changes the advice a farmer actually finds useful.

The shop itself has been a practical education. I advise on dosage under the pharmacist's supervision, manage stock rotation so vaccines and dewormers stay in date, and handle questions from farmers who often know their animals far better than I do. I have learnt to listen carefully, to explain withdrawal periods plainly, and to recognise when a problem needs referral to a veterinarian rather than a product off the shelf.

Outside work, I help my cousin keep accounts for her flock of about 300 layers. We track feed costs, egg output and mortality in a shared spreadsheet, and last year that record helped her see that a feed brand she had changed to was cheaper per bag but no cheaper per tray of eggs. I also play in a weekend chess club, which has little to do with livestock but has made me more patient with problems that need several steps of thought.

I hope postgraduate study will give me rigorous skills in epidemiological methods, disease surveillance and the economic evaluation of control measures. In the longer term I would like to work on livestock disease programmes for smallholder farmers, where the gap between technical recommendations and what households can afford is often wide. I would bring careful record-keeping, first-hand knowledge of how farmers buy and use animal health products, and a habit of asking what the numbers can and cannot tell us.