Yes, I have received the Birmingham Masters Scholarship. It has helped to ease my mind about funding somewhat, I will still need to work to help fund my expenses but it eases the burden.

I hope to gain a skillset that I can take forward into my career and I hope to make memories I can take forward into my life.

I am most looking forward to the optional module Human Spaceflight Critique.

I was motivated to undertake a Masters degree for two reasons. The first was the pure practicality of the wider job options available to a person with a Masters degree and the graduate programmes offered at the European Space Agency, only offer places to people with Masters degrees. The second reason was how much I loved being at university and of learning.

I undertook my undergraduate degree, in Aerospace Engineering, at Swansea University. During my third year I began to consider my future options and I quickly realised that I wanted to continue my study and do a postgraduate degree, though before I did so I wanted to take a gap year not only to work for a while and save money for my studies but also to give myself a bit of a break from full-time education. What subject I wanted to do my degree on was something I considered for a while, I knew I wanted to specialise, and therefore a Aerospace Engineering degree was ruled out but there were many other options still left in. The one I considered for a while was an Engineering Management or even a Management degree, to widen my career prospects and skillset. But my love of space and the Satellite Systems module I had taken as a part of my undergraduate won out and I settled on Space Engineering as my course.