Civil Engineering focused on Geotechnics - AAS Supporting statement

Why did you choose your proposed course and institution?

My choice to pursue a Master's degree in Civil Engineering focused on Geotechnics has been driven by my experience working as a Highway Engineer. Being an archipelagic landscape often made road network in Indonesia the only alternative to logistic and population mobility, particularly in remote areas and that vulnerability is amplified by the risk of geohazards. Having an active tectonic and problematic soils made geotechnical failure as the common reason of infrastructure collapse especially when an earthquake or flooding happened.

To accelerate the community recovery, a speedy rehabilitation design was proposed with a budget constraint, oftentimes it leads to less evaluation on the design and it means shorter service time of the infrastructure. This could expose the people to another risk of infrastructure failure in the future and hurt the state budget. I want to contribute in disaster risk reduction with my job to design and evaluate the construction process of roads and bridges to be more resilient and maintain the engineering quality while still economically efficient.

Therefore, I would like to take Master of Engineering Science (Geotechnical Engineering) at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) as my first choice primarily because the program offered an Earthquake Engineering & Foundation Dynamics and Rock & Slope Engineering course. My second choice is Master of Engineering (Civil with geotechnics specialization) at the University of Sydney (UoS) because they provide Geotechnical Hazard at their curriculum. Both universities accommodate my future goals. These courses offers an opportunity to develop my engineering judgement skills when planning and designing roads and bridges to be more sustainable and became a disaster-resilient infrastructure. From my findings, UNSW and UoS also have a flexible course option so i can arrange my course to complement my management skill such as Sustainability & Risk Analysis and Engineering Economics & Finance.

The national program and your desired contribution are not well connected in the second paragraph. It would be better if you mention your intention first, then explain why you intend to do that, based on the government program. That should make the connection, intention, and importance of your chosen courses more evident / clearer to the reviewer.

Separate the course and university discussion. You have to individualize the discussion to show specific professional requirements on your part that will benefit from the chosen course and university. For example, you mention something about earthquake hazards in relation to your first course. However, there was no mention of that in your previous paragraphs. That is why you have to further expand that discussion with its own paragraph presentation. Each course must be highlighted as a potential career growth path for yourself due to its application to the current road development projects in Indonesia and your current career duties and responsibilities.