Brainstorming My "Personal Statement"

As every one of you would already know, I must write a Statement of Purpose for every pre-medical postbaccalaureate program I apply to. The time draws nigh!

Yikes. Even though I discovered the existence of pre-medical postbaccalaureate programs way back in February, I have not yet steeled myself for this. First, writing personal statements for academic endeavors feels to me like stripping bare in a stuffy chamber amid a primly-seated circle of well-meaning nobles. (Okay. A bit of an exaggeration. But let me masochistically savor this everyday trial for all it’s worth.) Second, I would like to write this personal statement with more, um, accuracy than my past statements contained.

I do not mean that I’ve lied in my other applications to school. Oh, hell, no. I mean that my former statements, especially the one I wrote for my master’s degree program in archaeology, were a great deal more thoughtless than focused and well-reasoned. (Note: Please do not think that reflects ill on anyone but myself.) For my master’s degree program, I did not carefully describe “the formation of my academic interests and present concerns”, nor did I set forth a real plan of study. Neither did I explain what I wanted to do with my archaeological research. Exactly.

Part of this was because of what might be called a lack of maturity. My relationship with education has changed from a desire to advance myself for the sake of winning respect to a passion for learning how to discover and contribute in a way that truly engaged me. It has also changed as I’ve gotten a way better idea of who the hell I really am.

Part of this was also because, as I noted before, I lacked an archaeological background. Granted, this Department expressed an interest in training students who had not majored in anthropology as college kids, and it’s not like I was expected to produce a five-page proposal for a study of, say, wear patterns on microdrills from a site by the LA Harbor and associated with the Gabrielino-Tongva tribe. This program emphasized “evolutionary archaeology”, a (controversial) paradigm to which a minority of archaeologists subscribe, and in which its practitioners’ valiant efforts to turn archaeology into real science compelled anthropology majors to discard most of what they had learned as undergrads anyway. So, yes, the statement I wrote was kind of general.

Which means that I’ve actually never produced a Statement of Purpose of the quality that I will need by this winter. Suffice it to say that the prospect of coherently explaining the development of my interest in immunology and virology, from my participation in an AIDS awareness project in Ghana to my studies in evolutionary archaeology, is both coldly frightening and wonderfully thrilling at once. For real.

I’ve never blogged before and this brainstorm isn’t unfolding exactly as I planned it. It's a little disorganized. Please bear with me. Now that I’ve gotten the emotional blogging out of the way, I can mull over the actual content of my Statement. I hope to continue tomorrow.