Petrology postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

My undergraduate mapping project took me to a stretch of hillside in the north-west Highlands where a band of amphibolite cut across psammite, and the contact was nothing like the clean line I had drawn in my notebook the first week. Working out what had happened there, over a summer of wet boots and a rather battered hand lens, taught me that rocks record arguments rather than conclusions. I graduated with a 2:1 in Geology and expected to go straight into research, but a job came up that I needed, and I took it. Eight years later I am applying for postgraduate study in petrology because that interest never went anywhere; it simply found other outlets.

Since graduating I have worked as a materials testing technician for a construction consultancy, mostly on aggregates, concrete and occasionally dimension stone. Day to day this means sieve analyses, density and water absorption tests, alkali-silica reactivity screening and writing up results for engineers who need a clear answer rather than a discussion. It is not research, but it has sharpened things that research needs. I have become careful about sampling: a result is only as good as the lump of rock it came from, and I have learned to ask where material has been stockpiled, blended or weathered before it reached me. I also spend a lot of time looking at thin sections of aggregate, and it was this that pulled me back towards petrology properly. Identifying strained quartz and microcrystalline silica in a potentially reactive gravel is a practical problem, but the underlying question, what the deformation history of these grains was before they ended up in a river terrace, is a petrological one.

To prepare for returning to study I have taken two evening courses in optical mineralogy and igneous petrology through a university continuing education programme, which gave me supervised microscope time and reminded me how rusty my extinction angles had become. I have also been an active member of my local geological society, helping to lead two Saturday field excursions to a disused granite quarry and a coastal exposure of pillow lavas. Explaining zoned plagioclase to a group that includes retired engineers and teenagers is good discipline; you cannot hide behind terminology. Alongside this I have worked through Winter's Principles of Igneous and Metamorphic Petrology, and have been reading around phase equilibria and pseudosection modelling, which was barely touched on in my degree and is the area where I most need formal teaching. I can see how much the quantitative side has moved on since I was a student, and I would rather be taught it properly than assemble it from papers.

My particular interest is in metamorphic petrology, especially using mineral assemblages and textures to reconstruct pressure-temperature paths in polydeformed terranes. I am realistic that this means considerable work on thermodynamics and on the computational tools I have not used. I am equally aware that I am returning to study later than most, having also taken on a share of weekly childcare for my sister's two children, which has made me efficient rather than distracted.

After the course I would like to move into geological consultancy work with a stronger analytical basis, or into a research role if one is open to me. Either way, I want to spend my working life closer to the microscope than I have managed so far, and to go back to the kind of question that kept me on that Highland hillside.

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