Statement of Purpose hellllp
Anybody who's interested in helping a poor wannabe MFA candidate (creative writing) with her SOP? I just feel as if I've got no clue what I'm doing, which is pathetic because I'm a writer.
Ok. here it my working draft. It's a bit long for a few schools. I have a few specific questions about it, and then you all can rip it to shreds as well...
1. I haven't yet included a sentence or two about each school and why I like them. Should I, or is it better to be general?
2. I'm also applying to get teaching assistantships: some schools require a separate teaching statement, others say to mention it in my SOP. Have I done that enough, or should I be more explicit?
3. Actually, on the whole, should I be more direct? I feel it may be too abstract.
4. Please tell me admissions committees aren't looking for this to be a second writing sample. It's not at all creative or poetic, and I'm not sure I could make it that way and still say what my educational and professional goals are.
5. Anything else. Really. I feel pretty lost.
Ok, here it is:
My whole life, I’ve been a planner, but over the last few years, I have found the joy in drifting. In an effort to decide what I could to, and what I wanted to do with a Bachelor’s degree in Writing, and a love for creative nonfiction, I tried a little of everything. I moved to the big city for two months of inside politics, working media strategy for an environmental non-profit organization. I moved across the country to rural Montana, far from my family and roots. I worked retail. I tried writing grants. I fell in love. I helped a family raise their baby boys. I spent all of my time outdoors. I packed up the car and drove to California for a summer.
After two years of floating, a lot of beating myself up for “not doing enough”, not trying, not writing, not getting a real job, wasting my education and getting lazy, I stumbled into direction. I started tutoring high school students and then, like a smack to the forehead, came the inspiration: the love of learning and of nurturing the process of discovery in someone else. Growing up the daughter of a public school teacher, I’d always thought I would teach someday, but I never expected it to be the path that fueled my creative inspiration and provided me with a sense of serious direction.
Unexpectedly, in the midst of all that, my writing began to grow and expand upon itself. I joined a writing group, and started freelancing for an alternative weekly newspaper. I found my footing and finally was able to craft a writing sample I could be proud of for graduate applications. And now, I’m moving again, back to a place where I can measure the steps of my life with the changing of the seasons, with a bigger portfolio and a staunch readiness for the responsibility of full-time writing and teaching.
It was this process of exploration that solidified my ideas for a manuscript. Each step along this stumbling journey has been significant; the places I have lived have come to define me, and I’ve realized that the importance extends far beyond my own life, into the global community. These places and their stories belong to all of us, but we are losing them, and I want to help stop that. I want to write a memoir of place: of these places living within me and my living within them, of how they live and how people experience them. I want to explore how the shared identity of a place and the people that live there converge.
I want to delve into, for example, how global warming affects the culture of the New England people and how those people and their need to identify with New England may cause global warming. I want to write about mining and logging and drilling for oil and voracious recreational use in the forests of the Rocky Mountains. I want to talk about hidden wilderness, its value to us, and how to discover it living within ourselves. These places, spatial, physical, geographical and internal have created the map of my life, and I owe them everything. Yet I see a world around me so willing to destroy the backdrops of our lives.
I am curious. I ache with nostalgia. I am concerned about many things. Writing is the way I figure all that out, find connections and tease out solutions. In a country, in a world, where people seem to be struck with a deep, penetrating fear of the unknown, and therefore, of change, I believe that it is only when we feel emotionally connected to the suffering that we take action. In tying our own battered memories to the ultimate survival of the land and to each other, hopefully we will begin to change. Here, my writing goals once again converge with my desire to teach; all minds, at all stages of life, are driven primarily by passion, and I want to expose college students to the wonder of the written word, and help them discover their own joys.
Mostly, I feel ready to stop being so selfish, and to take charge of my writing with the force of this newfound understanding. I am ready to pluck the ideas buzzing in the air around me and make something of them. I want to become the person who starts another lifelong student on their path of exploration; I want to take the meaning I have found, then mold and refine it, and send it out into the world to spread like ivy.
Ok. here it my working draft. It's a bit long for a few schools. I have a few specific questions about it, and then you all can rip it to shreds as well...
1. I haven't yet included a sentence or two about each school and why I like them. Should I, or is it better to be general?
2. I'm also applying to get teaching assistantships: some schools require a separate teaching statement, others say to mention it in my SOP. Have I done that enough, or should I be more explicit?
3. Actually, on the whole, should I be more direct? I feel it may be too abstract.
4. Please tell me admissions committees aren't looking for this to be a second writing sample. It's not at all creative or poetic, and I'm not sure I could make it that way and still say what my educational and professional goals are.
5. Anything else. Really. I feel pretty lost.
Ok, here it is:
My whole life, I’ve been a planner, but over the last few years, I have found the joy in drifting. In an effort to decide what I could to, and what I wanted to do with a Bachelor’s degree in Writing, and a love for creative nonfiction, I tried a little of everything. I moved to the big city for two months of inside politics, working media strategy for an environmental non-profit organization. I moved across the country to rural Montana, far from my family and roots. I worked retail. I tried writing grants. I fell in love. I helped a family raise their baby boys. I spent all of my time outdoors. I packed up the car and drove to California for a summer.
After two years of floating, a lot of beating myself up for “not doing enough”, not trying, not writing, not getting a real job, wasting my education and getting lazy, I stumbled into direction. I started tutoring high school students and then, like a smack to the forehead, came the inspiration: the love of learning and of nurturing the process of discovery in someone else. Growing up the daughter of a public school teacher, I’d always thought I would teach someday, but I never expected it to be the path that fueled my creative inspiration and provided me with a sense of serious direction.
Unexpectedly, in the midst of all that, my writing began to grow and expand upon itself. I joined a writing group, and started freelancing for an alternative weekly newspaper. I found my footing and finally was able to craft a writing sample I could be proud of for graduate applications. And now, I’m moving again, back to a place where I can measure the steps of my life with the changing of the seasons, with a bigger portfolio and a staunch readiness for the responsibility of full-time writing and teaching.
It was this process of exploration that solidified my ideas for a manuscript. Each step along this stumbling journey has been significant; the places I have lived have come to define me, and I’ve realized that the importance extends far beyond my own life, into the global community. These places and their stories belong to all of us, but we are losing them, and I want to help stop that. I want to write a memoir of place: of these places living within me and my living within them, of how they live and how people experience them. I want to explore how the shared identity of a place and the people that live there converge.
I want to delve into, for example, how global warming affects the culture of the New England people and how those people and their need to identify with New England may cause global warming. I want to write about mining and logging and drilling for oil and voracious recreational use in the forests of the Rocky Mountains. I want to talk about hidden wilderness, its value to us, and how to discover it living within ourselves. These places, spatial, physical, geographical and internal have created the map of my life, and I owe them everything. Yet I see a world around me so willing to destroy the backdrops of our lives.
I am curious. I ache with nostalgia. I am concerned about many things. Writing is the way I figure all that out, find connections and tease out solutions. In a country, in a world, where people seem to be struck with a deep, penetrating fear of the unknown, and therefore, of change, I believe that it is only when we feel emotionally connected to the suffering that we take action. In tying our own battered memories to the ultimate survival of the land and to each other, hopefully we will begin to change. Here, my writing goals once again converge with my desire to teach; all minds, at all stages of life, are driven primarily by passion, and I want to expose college students to the wonder of the written word, and help them discover their own joys.
Mostly, I feel ready to stop being so selfish, and to take charge of my writing with the force of this newfound understanding. I am ready to pluck the ideas buzzing in the air around me and make something of them. I want to become the person who starts another lifelong student on their path of exploration; I want to take the meaning I have found, then mold and refine it, and send it out into the world to spread like ivy.