Pollution control postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

My interest in pollution control began with a stretch of river about twenty minutes' walk from my parents' house. The angling club my uncle belongs to complained every summer that the water ran cloudy after heavy rain, and nobody could tell them why. In my second undergraduate year I offered to take measurements. With a length of clear pipe, a printed Secchi disc and a set of inexpensive nitrate and phosphate strips, I sampled four points weekly for two summers, logging rainfall from a nearby weather station. The results were crude, but the pattern was consistent: turbidity and nitrate both rose sharply within a day of rainfall above a certain threshold, and the rise was much larger downstream of two field drains than upstream of them. I learned as much from the limitations as the readings. Colour strips are subjective, my sampling times drifted with my shift pattern, and I had no way of separating agricultural runoff from intermittent sewer discharge. Those gaps are precisely what a formal course in pollution control would help me close.

My degree gave me the engineering grounding I want to apply to this field. I enjoyed mass transfer and reaction engineering most, and chose a final-year project modelling ammonia removal from a synthetic wastewater stream in a small packed column. I built a steady-state model in Python, then compared it against bench runs using pH and conductivity measurements as proxies for concentration. The model over-predicted removal at higher gas flows, which pushed me into reading about channelling and effective wetted area in randomly packed beds. Presenting that discrepancy honestly, rather than tuning a coefficient until the curves matched, was the part of the project I am proudest of. Modules in process safety and environmental legislation also showed me how much of pollution control is about regulatory limits, monitoring regimes and proving compliance, not only about designing the abatement unit itself.

Since graduating I have worked as a laboratory assistant at a company that carries out routine water testing for industrial clients and local authorities. My responsibilities are unglamorous: preparing samples, maintaining chain-of-custody records, running standards and calibration blanks, and helping the analysts with COD and BOD determinations. It has taught me a great deal about where data actually comes from. I now understand why a result is rejected, how much depends on holding times and preservation, and how carefully a report has to be written when it may be read by a regulator. Working through the quality control procedures has made me want to understand the treatment and abatement processes that sit behind the numbers I handle.

I am particularly keen to study air and water pollution alongside each other, since my laboratory work has made me aware of how often a problem is shifted between media rather than solved. Wet scrubbing produces a liquid effluent; sludge from a treatment works has to go somewhere. I would like to develop stronger skills in dispersion and fate modelling, in monitoring design, and in the economics of abatement options, so that I can argue for a solution on more than technical grounds. Before the course I intend to revise my thermodynamics and improve my handling of statistical uncertainty, which I know my river project treated too loosely.

In the longer term I would like to work as a process engineer within a water utility or an environmental consultancy, ideally on catchment-scale discharge problems. I balance shift work, a long commute and evening study now, and I am prepared for the pace of a master's.

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