International Student Personal Statement Sample

Personal Statement

I was born and grew up in a rural village in Jiangsu province, China. I am a female, a Chinese and at present also an international student. What do all those identity markers mean for me and how have they shaped my interest in the sociology of culture?

Being born as a country dweller means education is probably the only upward ladder. Both of my parents are common peasants with neither much economic capital nor political capital. Yet, they worked extremely hard to support the education of me and my sister. Although we could not afford after-school tuition, we made the best of the formal education and managed to get into college. At the same time, a lot of my peers from my village, including my cousins, dropped out of schools early.

Now, education gives me an eye to look back my life and the

Meeting people from different countries and backgrounds can be very exciting. Yet the boundaries between different cultures can be easily formulated or evoked, which would be further strengthened or complicated by the division between locals and migrants. For example, in Singapore, the sentence I often hear is that “Singaporean Chinese and mainland Chinese are different.” What happens usually in a multi-cultural context is grouping around the same culture unless a stronger bondage is formulated, such as a common goal. My own experience as an international student teaches me that multiculturalism needs constant effort. Thus, another motif that drives me to do a PhD is to explore how different cultures/ideologies can really understand each other, how boundaries are drawn and how cosmopolitanism can be realized.

Despite being a little bit discursive, the identity markers I give above can roughly summarize my experiences and how those experiences have shaped my interest.

Explanation for a low GRE writing