Unfortunately, there will be no mulling today. I have to postpone blogging in a patriotic effort to rescue our economy.
However, I think I'll be able to resume my "campaign" tomorrow.
UPDATE: Ha, ha, ha. This is what I get for making fun of unreliable, irresponsible people at a time like this in my life. I have had to abandon the crafting of my Statement of Purpose to throw myself completely into the fray of job hunting and filing for unemployment benefits-- two things I refuse to blog extensively about, as I want this to be a blog focused on my journey as an aspiring scientist, and as I am too embarrassed and frustrated anyway.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
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.
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.
Monday, September 22, 2008
Fair Introduction
Inch by inch, year by year, I succumbed to the power and wonder of science. Really, science eventually teaches you that you know very little. You can’t know the world outside of your observations of it. Moreover, all your observations are simply descriptions of the world that you make from perspectives arisen from an unholy mishmash of biases—known and unknown. How then to understand the world around us with certainty? We’ll never be certain. We’ll try anyway. Romance and ambition at once!
The key is that some of our descriptions of the world are more accurate than others. The difficult business of describing the world with growing accuracy attracts me. I can’t help it. I want to belong to the tribe of science. I want to be a scientist.
Now, I do not hail from a family of scientists—or academics, for that matter. I have no illustrious connections. I do belong to a racial group—swarthy, not fair—still stereotyped by an uncomfortable amount of Americans, including scientists, as intellectually deficient. My real gift is writing. I don’t want to write for an income, but I love to write. I suck at math—read: I have made it through single-variable calculus by studying harder than a true scientist should—and most of my instructors and friends think of me as a writer, not a scientist. They press me to be a writer. Like a bred-in-the-bone writer, I’m high-strung, manic-depressive, uptight, snobby, stubborn, overly sensitive, girly, gratuitously imaginative, naïve, vain, pensive, arrogant, introverted and self-critical. I’m also skinny and attractive, and most women are catty toward me—especially when they learn I’m not a bimbo. I majored in English as an undergrad years ago, and I devoted my time outside of class to student theater for the sake of a boy I worshipped. Both my college years and my grad school years were fraught with sordid drama. (I don’t want to admit it. I’m admitting it in the interest of full disclosure.) Most tellingly, I’ve spent more years thinking superstitiously than rationally. So I know I have no business being a scientist. With my background and my temperament, how dare I think of being a scientist? Science is for special people!
Nevertheless, last year, as an old maid of twenty-seven, I quit a master’s degree program in archaeology to pursue a career in medical genetics. I have spent the last year recovering from a nasty experience, sporadically working embarrassingly odd jobs and worrying my quaint parents, with whom I get along imperfectly, but with whom I get along better since my mother’s recent recovery from breast cancer, and whom I know I have let down . . . especially since I did go to Berkeley and all. But I have also spent the last year plotting. At this juncture, I have figured out that the first thing I need to do is to convince a pre-medical post-baccalaureate program to train me for a PhD program in medical genetics.
Yes. I dare.
Moreover, I even dare to tell the story of my progress.
The key is that some of our descriptions of the world are more accurate than others. The difficult business of describing the world with growing accuracy attracts me. I can’t help it. I want to belong to the tribe of science. I want to be a scientist.
Now, I do not hail from a family of scientists—or academics, for that matter. I have no illustrious connections. I do belong to a racial group—swarthy, not fair—still stereotyped by an uncomfortable amount of Americans, including scientists, as intellectually deficient. My real gift is writing. I don’t want to write for an income, but I love to write. I suck at math—read: I have made it through single-variable calculus by studying harder than a true scientist should—and most of my instructors and friends think of me as a writer, not a scientist. They press me to be a writer. Like a bred-in-the-bone writer, I’m high-strung, manic-depressive, uptight, snobby, stubborn, overly sensitive, girly, gratuitously imaginative, naïve, vain, pensive, arrogant, introverted and self-critical. I’m also skinny and attractive, and most women are catty toward me—especially when they learn I’m not a bimbo. I majored in English as an undergrad years ago, and I devoted my time outside of class to student theater for the sake of a boy I worshipped. Both my college years and my grad school years were fraught with sordid drama. (I don’t want to admit it. I’m admitting it in the interest of full disclosure.) Most tellingly, I’ve spent more years thinking superstitiously than rationally. So I know I have no business being a scientist. With my background and my temperament, how dare I think of being a scientist? Science is for special people!
Nevertheless, last year, as an old maid of twenty-seven, I quit a master’s degree program in archaeology to pursue a career in medical genetics. I have spent the last year recovering from a nasty experience, sporadically working embarrassingly odd jobs and worrying my quaint parents, with whom I get along imperfectly, but with whom I get along better since my mother’s recent recovery from breast cancer, and whom I know I have let down . . . especially since I did go to Berkeley and all. But I have also spent the last year plotting. At this juncture, I have figured out that the first thing I need to do is to convince a pre-medical post-baccalaureate program to train me for a PhD program in medical genetics.
Yes. I dare.
Moreover, I even dare to tell the story of my progress.
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