Media Arts and Sciences (Extended Reality Technologies), MS postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

The set model for my final-year production was 1:25 scale, built from mountboard and balsa, with a cardboard figure 7cm tall standing in for each actor. Everyone admired it, but in our first technical rehearsal the director discovered that a staircase I had drawn looked generous in miniature and felt cramped on stage. That gap between how a space reads at arm's length and how it feels when you stand inside it is what I want to study at postgraduate level, through extended reality.

My BA in Theatre Design gave me a grounding in spatial storytelling, technical drawing and lighting, but my final project took me towards computing. I photographed a second model from roughly two hundred angles, built a mesh with free photogrammetry software, cleaned it in Blender and imported it into Unity. Using a borrowed Meta Quest 2 from the department, I set it up so that a director could walk through the set at full scale before anything was built. The first version had warped textures and floating geometry where the photographs had failed on white surfaces. I learned to dust the model with grey powder and photograph it under even light, which fixed most of it. Four directing students tested the walkthrough, and two asked for a sightline check from the back row of the auditorium. I added this as a fixed viewpoint. My project was assessed as a design portfolio rather than a technical submission, but writing up the process showed me how much I wanted to understand the systems underneath, not just assemble them.

Since graduating I have worked as a visual merchandiser for a homeware chain, setting up displays across three branches from head-office planograms. The job is more relevant than I expected. Planograms are flat diagrams, and staff regularly misjudge how a bay will look from the entrance. I now make quick phone-based mock-ups to compare layouts before moving stock. I have also learned to explain a spatial idea clearly to colleagues who have little time and no interest in jargon, which matters if immersive tools are to be used by people other than their designers.

I have been preparing for a technical course by working through an online C# course in my evenings and rebuilding my walkthrough with proper scene management rather than the copied scripts I first relied on. Reading Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things helped me put words to problems I had seen in testing. One user kept reaching for a virtual handrail because it signified support it could not give. I have also read about simulator sickness and the conflict between visual and vestibular cues. That explained why my early smooth-locomotion version made one tester queasy, and why I switched to teleport movement.

Outside work I climb at an indoor bouldering wall twice a week. Route setters think carefully about how a body reads a sequence of holds, and I often find myself noticing how they guide movement without instructions. I also collect my niece from nursery three afternoons a week, which has taught me to plan my study time realistically.

At postgraduate level I want to develop rigorous skills in real-time graphics, interaction design and user evaluation, moving beyond trial and error towards testing with clear methods. I am particularly interested in how XR can help non-specialists judge scale, whether in performance spaces, shops or public buildings. I bring a designer's eye, experience of making a working prototype from scratch, and the habit of watching closely how real people move through a space. I would like the chance to turn these into a more technical and research-informed practice.