Optics postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

My physics degree gave me a broad foundation, but the parts I returned to again and again were those where light behaved in ways that were easy to demonstrate and surprisingly hard to calculate. I want to study optics at postgraduate level in order to move from understanding standard results to being able to design, model and measure optical systems properly.

My final-year project was a modest but instructive one: characterising a Michelson interferometer assembled from components already held in the department. The aim was to measure the coherence length of two sources, a helium-neon laser and a filtered white-light source, and to compare the observed fringe visibility with predictions from the source spectra. Much of the work turned out to be practical rather than theoretical. Mechanical drift in the translation stage, air currents from the ventilation and the alignment of the beamsplitter all affected the results more than I had expected, and I spent several weeks improving the mounting and shielding before the data became repeatable. I learned to record alignment procedures carefully, to estimate uncertainties honestly rather than optimistically, and to model the instrument in Python so that I could see which parameters my measurements were actually sensitive to. The final report included a straightforward Fourier treatment linking visibility to source bandwidth, which matched the white-light results reasonably well and the laser results very closely.

Alongside my degree I have read fairly widely outside the syllabus. Hecht's Optics was my main reference during the project, and I worked through the chapters on partial coherence and on aberrations more thoroughly than my course required. More recently I have been reading about Fourier optics and spatial filtering, and have tried to reproduce simple diffraction calculations numerically, comparing single- and double-slit patterns from my own code against measurements taken on an optical bench at the college where I work. The agreement is good enough to be satisfying and imperfect enough to be interesting.

My interest is also rooted in something more hands-on. For several years I have done amateur astrophotography with a second-hand refractor, which has taught me a great deal about focal ratios, chromatic aberration, seeing conditions and the trade-offs between aperture and practicality. Stacking short exposures to reduce noise was my first real encounter with signal-to-noise reasoning, well before I met it formally. I have also spent many Saturdays helping my uncle in his workshop, where he still measures and sorts lens blanks for interest. Using a lensometer, checking curvatures and discussing why particular prescriptions are made up in a particular way gave me an early feel for lens design as a craft with real constraints, not only a set of thin-lens equations.

Since graduating I have worked part-time as an assistant to a laboratory technician in a further education science department, preparing practicals, maintaining equipment and occasionally rebuilding demonstration setups that have drifted out of alignment. It is ordinary work, but it has made me methodical, and explaining why an experiment is not working to a class of sixteen-year-olds is good practice in clear reasoning.

I am particularly keen to develop stronger skills in optical design software, in coherence and polarisation theory, and in laboratory metrology, and I would welcome a project involving interferometric measurement or imaging system characterisation. In the longer term I would like to work in instrumentation, either in industry or supporting research, where careful optical measurement is the substance of the job rather than a preliminary to it.

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