Remote sensing postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

My interest in remote sensing began less with a single moment than with a stubborn practical problem. In my second year of Geography I wanted to know how much the surface area of a reservoir near my home had shrunk during a dry summer, and I could not find a dataset that answered it. A demonstrator pointed me towards Sentinel-2 imagery, and after several evenings of confusion I produced my first water index map. It was crude, but I could see the shoreline retreating between images taken weeks apart. That combination of open data, physical reasoning and careful checking is what I want to build a career around, and an MSc in remote sensing is the route I have been working towards since.

My degree gave me the groundwork: hydrology and catchment processes, a strong GIS strand, and a statistics module that I found difficult at first and eventually enjoyed. For my dissertation I extended the reservoir work into a three-year time series, calculating the Normalised Difference Water Index across cloud-free Sentinel-2 scenes and comparing the results with published Environment Agency water level records. The honest outcome was mixed. The general pattern matched well, but my estimates were unreliable at the shallow, vegetated northern end, where the spectral signal of wet sediment and reeds sat awkwardly between water and land. Writing that up taught me more than a clean result would have. I had to read properly about mixed pixels and threshold selection, and to state clearly what my method could and could not support. I was pleased with the mark, but I am more pleased that I understand the limitation.

Alongside my studies I have taught myself the tools I will need. I moved my dissertation processing out of point-and-click software into Python, using rasterio and numpy, mostly by working through documentation and fixing my own errors. I keep the scripts tidy enough that I could rerun the analysis a year later, which I did, and they still worked. More recently I have been experimenting with Landsat thermal bands to look at surface temperature differences between the industrial estate and the park at either end of my street, partly out of curiosity about urban heat and partly to practise atmospheric correction on data I have not used before.

Collaboration has come mainly through my volunteering with a river conservation group. I took on one task rather than several: producing an accurate, printable map of access points and survey sites from GPS traces collected by other volunteers. That meant tidying messy coordinate data, agreeing symbols and labels with people who would actually be standing in a field holding the map, and revising it twice after they told me the first version was unreadable in rain. The finished maps are now used for monthly invertebrate surveys, which feels like a fair measure of success.

My paid work is ordinary but relevant. In a council land and property records team I check address and boundary data, resolve discrepancies between sources and answer queries from surveyors and the public. It has made me patient with metadata and sceptical of any dataset I have not inspected myself, habits I expect to need when working with satellite products.

What I want from postgraduate study is depth I cannot reach alone: the physics of sensors, radiative transfer, radar and lidar, and formal training in validation and uncertainty. In the longer term I would like to work in environmental monitoring, ideally on water resources, producing analysis that agencies and community groups can actually use. I am ready to be taught properly, and I am comfortable with work that requires precision and repetition.

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