UCL Personal Statement Example: Hydrogen economics researcher to industrial strategy (Score 92)

During the second year of my economics degree, I was asked to model the levelised cost of green hydrogen under different electrolyser learning rates. The numbers were straightforward to produce; explaining why a government should act on them was not. That gap — between a cost curve and a policy decision — became the question I have spent the past two years trying to answer. My undergraduate training gave me the quantitative foundation: regression analysis, scenario construction, and the discipline of checking assumptions before drawing conclusions. A research project I completed in early 2025 exposed the limits of working only with models. Tasked with producing a memo on hydrogen economics for an internal strategy discussion, I found the most contested questions were not technical — they were about which costs to socialise, which risks to assign to developers, and which timelines were politically credible. I rewrote the recommendation section three times before it was honest about uncertainty rather than merely confident-sounding. That experience shifted my thinking: rigorous energy analysis requires not only economic methods but a working understanding of how policy is designed, contested, and implemented. A subsequent placement with an energy advisory team reinforced this. Preparing briefing notes on hydrogen infrastructure investment, I noticed how the same levelised-cost figures supported opposite conclusions depending on the audience. The analytical problem was not the arithmetic; it was the absence of a shared framework for evaluating evidence under political constraint. I left that placement wanting to study that framework directly. UCL's MSc Energy Policy addresses exactly this. The programme's integration of economic analysis with governance, regulation, and geopolitical context matches the gap I identified in my own work. I am particularly drawn to the emphasis on evidence-based policy appraisal, which would let me test the analytical habits I have developed against more rigorous institutional and regulatory frameworks. UCL's position within a city that hosts major energy regulatory bodies and independent think tanks also matters: I want access to live policy debates, not only the literature about them. After this programme, I intend to work in industrial strategy — specifically on the economic design of hydrogen support schemes, where the translation between cost modelling and policy instrument remains poorly understood. A working paper I drafted this year, currently under departmental review, is a first attempt at that translation. Graduate study at UCL would give it — and me — the analytical and institutional grounding it currently lacks. I am applying because I have a specific problem I want to solve, and this programme has the structure to help me solve it rigorously.