Palaeontology personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

The first fossil I collected myself was a broken belemnite guard from the shingle below Whitby, and I only understood what I was holding after an afternoon with a library book. What struck me was not the object but the chain of reasoning behind it: that a cone of calcite could be tied to a squid-like animal, a warm Jurassic sea, and a specific band of shale a few metres above my head. Palaeontology appeals to me because it asks biological questions using evidence that has been through a geological filter, so you can rarely answer anything without thinking about both. Reading Richard Fortey's Trilobite! sharpened this for me, particularly his account of how much can be inferred from eyes preserved in stone. I have since become interested in taphonomy, and in how selective the fossil record is: soft-bodied animals are mostly absent, shallow marine shelly faunas are over-represented, and any claim about diversity through time has to account for how much rock of the right kind survives. I want to study a degree where I learn the stratigraphy, sedimentology and mineralogy that make those judgements possible, rather than only the anatomy. I am also drawn to fieldwork as a method, not just as a day out. Mapping, logging sections and recording exactly where a specimen came from turn a curiosity into data, and losing that context is what makes an unlabelled fossil almost useless. Longer term I am interested in museum collections work or invertebrate palaeobiology, but I would like the first two years of a degree to test that.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

My A-levels give me the mix I will need. Biology has been the most directly useful: evolution, classification and the practical work on skeletal and shell structure all feed into how I read fossil material, and the statistics element has made me more careful about small sample sizes. Chemistry explains why fossils exist at all, since much of preservation is dissolution, replacement and the behaviour of carbonate, and the practical titration and precipitation work made me comfortable with careful measurement. Geography has taught me sedimentary environments, coastal processes and how to construct an argument from maps and profiles; the fieldwork unit, where we measured beach sediment size along a transect, was the first time I collected my own data and had to defend how I sampled it. For my EPQ I investigated how ammonite preservation differs between shale and limestone beds at a single Yorkshire locality. I compared my own loose-block finds with published descriptions of the succession, sorted specimens by whether they were crushed, pyritised or preserved in three dimensions, and wrote about the limits of what a collector working on a beach can conclude without seeing the fossils in place. The honest answer in my conclusion was that my sample was biased towards whatever the sea had already cleaned and delivered to me, and explaining that clearly was the part I was most pleased with. I have also taught myself to use basic spreadsheets for tabulating measurements and drawing simple scatter plots, and I have started reading the geological memoir for my local area to get used to formal stratigraphic language.

What else have you done to prepare outside of education, and why are these experiences useful?

Once a month I volunteer at a small museum near home, mostly running the handling table at weekends. I talk to families about a coral, a shark tooth and a cast of a dinosaur bone, and I have learnt to explain deep time without either patronising people or losing them: comparing rock layers to the pages of a book works better for children than millions of years does. I was also asked to help a staff member repack part of the local geology store, writing out replacement labels where the old ones had faded. It was slow and unglamorous, and it convinced me that documentation matters as much as the specimens. My own collection is now kept the same way, in trays with numbers, a notebook of localities and dates, and no guessed identifications written as facts. At college I worked with one other student to design and run a lunchtime session for Year 12s on our fieldwork skills. We split the work, I prepared a short exercise on logging a sediment sequence from photographs, and about a dozen people came. It was not a large project, but agreeing what to cut so it fitted into forty minutes was genuinely useful practice in deciding what mattered. I work Saturdays in a garden centre, which has taught me to be patient with customers, to keep going through a long shift outdoors in poor weather, and to handle stock records accurately. I play in a local netball team, which is where most of my teamwork actually comes from, and I walk a good deal in the Dales, increasingly with an eye on what the walls are built from. I am comfortable with early starts, wet boots and repetitive recording, which I understand is a fair description of a field season.

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