Sanitary engineering postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

My interest in sanitary engineering began with a hydraulics module in my second year of civil engineering, where we spent several weeks on open channel flow and I realised that the same equations governing a concrete flume also decide whether a sewer self-cleanses or silts up. That connection between fairly plain mathematics and everyday public health kept pulling me towards water and wastewater options, and I chose them whenever the timetable allowed: water resources, geotechnics for buried services, and a design module in which my group sized a foul and surface water drainage layout for a fifty-house development. I took the foul drainage half, and learned more from getting the gradients wrong first time than from any lecture, because the correction required me to actually understand minimum velocity rather than just look up a table.

My final-year project was an investigation into small-scale wastewater treatment in an area without mains sewerage. I surveyed twenty-two households in a rural parish with septic tanks and package treatment plants, using a questionnaire about desludging intervals, maintenance costs and any nuisance problems, and compared their reported practice with the drainage field conditions I could observe on site. The results were modest but useful: most owners could not say when their tank had last been emptied, and several soakaways were sited in ground my soil descriptions suggested was too heavy for the infiltration rates assumed in design. I did not have laboratory access to test effluent quality, so I was careful in writing up to present the work as what it was, a study of maintenance behaviour and site suitability rather than of treatment performance. My supervisor's main criticism was that my sample was self-selecting, which I accepted and discussed in the limitations section. Working on it taught me that sanitation engineering fails as often through neglected operation as through poor design, and that is the part of the field I most want to study properly.

Since graduating I have worked part-time as a technical assistant for a drainage surveying firm. Much of it is unglamorous: producing CAD plans from CCTV survey logs, coding defects, and occasionally standing in a yard with a manhole key while a colleague runs the camera. It has given me a practical vocabulary for the condition of real assets, including root intrusion, displaced joints and the surprising frequency of misconnections between foul and surface water systems. I have also become the person who checks our drawings against the survey notes before they go out, a small responsibility I asked for after finding two mislabelled outfalls.

Outside work I sample water monthly for a local river monitoring group, recording phosphate, nitrate and turbidity with test kits at three points along one tributary. The readings are not research grade, but the discipline of consistent sampling and the arguments we have about what a single high result means have taught me caution about data. I also read around the subject in my own time; Duncan Mara's writing on waste stabilisation ponds first showed me how much treatment can be achieved with land, sunlight and patience rather than mechanical plant, which is something I would like to explore further.

Postgraduate study would let me build the treatment process knowledge, microbiology and design skills that my undergraduate degree only introduced. In the longer term I want to work on wastewater infrastructure for smaller communities, where budgets are tight and the maintenance question is unavoidable.