MSc in Business and Information Systems Engineering postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Every weekday at two o'clock, the courier van arrives at the warehouse where I work, and whatever has not been scanned and labelled stays behind. For eighteen months I have packed orders against that deadline for a homeware company with about forty staff. The handheld scanners we use talk to a stock system that was clearly configured for a smaller business, and much of my curiosity about information systems comes from watching where the software and the work on the floor quietly disagree. Returned items, for example, often sit in a cage for days because the system cannot record a product as 'received but not yet inspected'. I want to understand, rigorously, how organisations design processes and systems together, and postgraduate study in business and information systems engineering is the natural next step.

My undergraduate degree in Business Management with Information Systems gave me a broad base: accounting, operations management, relational databases and systems analysis. I particularly enjoyed a second-year course on databases, where I normalised a messy dataset of student society memberships into third normal form and wrote SQL queries to answer questions the society committee actually had. It was satisfying to see that a sound data model made new questions easy to answer rather than requiring another spreadsheet.

For my dissertation, which received a first, I studied returns handling at my employer, with permission from the operations manager. I mapped the existing process in BPMN after interviewing four colleagues and timing a sample of returns over three weeks. The model showed that inspection itself was quick; delays came from items waiting for someone to decide whether they could be resold. I proposed an additional status in the stock system and a simple daily triage rule, and discussed the trade-offs, including the extra scanning step it would add for packers. The manager trialled the triage rule informally, and while I cannot claim a measured result, staff told me the cage now empties more often. The project taught me how much process modelling depends on careful conversation, and how easily an analyst's neat diagram can miss an informal workaround.

I have also read beyond my course. Michael Hammer and James Champy's Reengineering the Corporation made me think about radical redesign, although my own small project suggested that incremental change is often more realistic where staff and software are already stretched. I have been working through an online course in Python and have written a short script that reads our weekly dispatch export and flags orders that missed the courier, which I share with my team leader.

Outside work I am treasurer of a local five-a-side league with twelve teams. I keep the accounts, chase subscriptions and, last season, replaced a paper ledger with a shared spreadsheet that every captain can view. It is modest, but it showed me that a system succeeds only when the people using it trust and understand it. I also do orienteering most weekends, which has nothing to do with computing but has made me comfortable planning a route quickly and changing it when the ground turns out differently from the map.

At masters level I want to deepen my technical knowledge, particularly in enterprise architecture, data management and the formal modelling of business processes, where my skills are still those of a confident beginner. I would like to learn methods for verifying that a process model is correct, not just plausible, and to strengthen my programming so that I can build prototypes rather than only specify them. Longer term, I hope to work as a business analyst or process consultant for small and medium-sized firms, which often run on systems that almost fit. I bring practical experience of operational work, a well-received piece of independent research and a habit of asking why the screen and the shop floor tell different stories. I am keen to develop those foundations into genuine expertise.