Sample cover letter for Full Time position at King's College

Academic background

I studied a Mechanical and Electrical Engineering BSc in Mexico City, in the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education (ITESM) from August 2001 to May 2006. During that period I specialised in automotive engineering, and as part of this process I attended two summer courses: “Integrity of car structures” at the University of Applied Sciences, Department of Automotive Engineering, Esslingen, Germany; and “Internal Combustion Engines” at the University of Studies of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy. I also studied 6 months in the Politecnico di Torino as an interchange student in 2004.

In 2009, I started the MPhil in Engineering for Sustainable Development at the University of Cambridge, with a full scholarship awarded by the Shell Centenary Chevening Scholarship Fund. There, I decided to focus on topics related to sustainable water and sanitation management for the developing world. This course taught me a range of useful tools such as assessment frameworks, sustainability metrics and methodologies such as Life Cycle Analysis, Systems Dynamics, Multi-Criteria Decision making and Impact Assessment. My dissertation, entitled “Opportunities and constraints of sustainable water management in Oaxaca City”, gave me the opportunity to work with local and federal government entities, NGOs, academics and citizens in order to assess the current problems related to water in that area. To carry out the fieldwork for my dissertation, I received additional funding from two institutions: St. Edmund's College, and the Centre for Sustainable Development Alumni Fund, both of the University of Cambridge.

In March 2012 I started the LEAD (Leadership for the Environment and Development) Fellowship program, which is a world-class training program that gives emerging leaders the skills, knowledge and network of contacts to bring about transformational change and create a more sustainable future. I finished the programme in November 2013 during an international LEAD congress in the University of Lanus in Buenos Aires.

Professional experience

In 2006 I began my professional life in a technological consulting company as a business analyst, working with national and transnational companies in the manufacturing industry. During my third year in this company I undertook the responsibility for coordinating several projects with industries such as Caterpillar, John Deere, FEMSA Group (Coca Cola Company in Mexico among others) and BTcino, aimed at obtaining resources for innovation and for developing new technologies.

Upon my return to Mexico City after completing the MPhil, I started working as a water and sanitation consultant for the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), in a program aimed at building effective and democratic water and sanitation services for marginalized communities in three states of Mexico: Tabasco, Veracruz and Chiapas. For almost two years I coordinated the activities of all the consultants in CEPAL in the framework of the programme and in collaboration with seven other UN agencies. I also prepared financial and substantive plans, provided capacity building workshops for marginalised communities, and gave presentations and lectures to high level government officers (local, national and UN) and representatives from civil society. I also did research and fieldwork to develop a sustainable model for water governance in marginalised rural areas. The results of this work were published by ECLAC as an article entitled “Challenges of sustainable management of water and sanitation services in rural communities, the case of Tacotalpa, Tabasco”.

In January 2011, I was offered a senior consultancy position at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) to coordinate a team of specialists working in the design of a program aimed at improving water management in urban and rural areas of eight municipalities in three Mexican states. After seven months of research and fieldwork we developed a programme that is now being implemented by authorities of the three states in collaboration with the UNAM. In November 2012, the findings of this process were published in Tlaloc Magazine, a publication produced by the Mexican Association of Hydraulics.

Finally, in August 2012 the National Institute of Ecology and Climate Change (INECC) offered me a position as Director of Research on Air Quality. Here I have had to design, coordinate and supervise research studies on air pollutants to support the development of air quality policies in Mexico, in collaboration with a team of six experts in the subject. I am also the coordinator of the “Sustainable Cities Team” with the objective of assessing the sustainability of medium sized cities in Mexico across a wide range of factors. This is one of the first multidisciplinary projects to involve experts from all areas of the INECC. I am also the contact in Mexico for the solid waste initiative of the Climate and Clean Air Coalition (CCAC), which was launched in 2012 with the objective of reducing short lived climate pollutants around the world.

Reasons for taking the programme

The main motivation for applying to this program is based on the insight I have gained during my academic and professional experience, regarding the urgent need to have more experts in Mexico that know how to apply their knowledge in order to design better public policies to address climate change issues and to be able to apply more sustainable and environmentally friendly practices.

Having investigated the best places to perform the research I am interested in, I have found King’s College to be one of the best Universities in the UK for world leading research in Geography and Environmental public policy. Also, it is one of the largest Graduate Schools for Geography in the UK, which gives its professors and researchers the opportunity to gain knowledge about a wide range of topics. One of the things I liked most about the programme is that it offers the opportunity to collaborate with different research groups within the Department of Geography on a variety of topics that I wish to focus on during my PhD studies, such as the urban environment, sustainable development, climate change and the environment.

I have also made a thorough review of academic staff research interests and teaching areas, and have identified an important number of professors and teachers that are working in my area of interest. That was how I made contact with Mark Pelling and then with Federico Caprotti, who has agreed to be the supervisor of my research activities if I am accepted by the University. It would be a really good opportunity to work with Dr. Caprotti, since he has a lot of experience in eco-city mega projects and sustainable urbanism in emerging economies, which will be helpful for the case study I plan to do about Mexico.

Finally, reading about the experiences of other PhD students in the Department of Geography in King’s College I have learned that it is a lively, thriving and innovative research environment in which to pursue postgraduate research studies. They find it is a very supportive environment, forming part of a community of fellow research students, academics, and technical and administrative staff. Also, it seems that there are considerable opportunities for research training and skills development.

What I hope to gain from the experience

I think that undertaking a PhD in King’s College Department of Geography would be a challenging and rewarding experience. I would be able to learn a great deal about the topic I am interested in researching: the Impact of sustainable solid waste management scenarios for public markets in Mexico City as mitigation measures to reduce Short Lived Climate Pollutants (SLCPs).

This programme would give me invaluable tools that will allow me to go back to my country and apply them to design strategies that can make a real impact, by locally improving the health conditions in cities, and also globally, by reducing the adverse effects of solid waste emissions for climate change. Furthermore, studying in the UK would give the possibility of discussing solutions that have already been applied in developed countries. In this context, I could learn and translate these experiences and best practices and then apply them in the Latin American context, and more specifically, in Mexico. I am sure this knowledge would be extremely useful to develop strategies and effectively participate in decision-making processes and in public policy analyses, for a sound management of environmental resources in Mexico.

Relevant interests, strengths, ambitions or research interests

My main research interest, as I said in the previous section, is to learn about the best strategies to address short-lived climate pollutants, especially black carbon and methane, since this can help slow the melting occurring in the Arctic, Antarctica, Himalayas, Andes and East Africa as a result of climate change. Also, reducing SLCP emissions can locally benefit health and human development. For these reasons, there is growing recognition that efforts to address climate change should not only focus on reducing CO₂ emissions, but also in reducing SLCPs.

In this sense, while the contribution of the MSW sector to methane emissions is well characterized, black carbon emissions from this sector need to be studied in more depth. Particularly, it is important to develop methodologies to quantify black carbon emissions from open burning of waste. The proposed research for this PhD would consider environmental, social, economic and technical factors to evaluate possible scenarios to reduce short-lived climate pollutants (methane and black carbon) from solid waste in Mexico. Specifically, it would analyse the impacts and barriers of implementing different mitigation measures to reduce solid waste generation from markets in Mexico, which will help to reduce the presence of short-lived climate pollutants in the environment.

It is important to mention that in 2013 I was the main contact in Mexico for the solid waste initiative of the Climate and Clean Air Coalition (CCAC), which is a partnership of governments, intergovernmental organizations, the private sector, the environmental community, and other members of civil society. This gave me the opportunity to collaborate with - and learn from - solid waste management experts from all around the world. During 2013, I attended the Methane Expo organized by the Global Methane Initiative and the International Solid Waste Association Congress in Vienna. In this last congress I made a presentation for high level government officers and researchers from around the world about waste management operations in Mexico and the possibilities of implementing projects to reduce short lived climate pollutants in a city called Queretaro.