Personal History Statement... help!

[lissiehoya]

I am really struggling with this personal history statement, which I think is common to all the UC's based on discussions I've had with others in this community. The prompt is:

In an essay, discuss how your personal background informs your decision to pursue a graduate degree. Please include any educational, familial, cultural, economic, or

Comments

[saralinds]

Agreed. You'll also find out that it's nothing new in the academia. There are a number of professors and grad students who came from that kind of background- everyone's got only a BA or a MA/JD/MD/MBA but not a PhD. And they're the only ones (or at least very few of 'em in their families) who actually hold a doctorate.

As you keep working at this essay and think about your life, you'll be so surprised how seemingly little things actually set you off to this path. For example, it's too easy for people to say "I fell in love with history because I visited Colonial Williamsburg/read a book about the slavery issue/etc" that's just obvious to anyone needing motivation to study history. Those things were purposely designed to motivate people to learn more about history. So in my case, while my visit to the Holocaust Museum in DC encouraged me to deepen my understanding of Holocaust and history, that visit inspired a self-proclaimed 16 year old atheist who insisted that Judaism was good as dead to rediscover her Jewish roots through means of historical research and travel to Israel in college to find other ways to keep Judaism alive. Crazy but I had to explain my own upbringing in a Christian community where my family was the only Jewish family for at least 20 miles around.

What's your internal driving force that can control you, but not anyone else to be part of all this?

[slowbro]

"What's your internal driving force that can control you... to be part of all this?"

Could you explain what this sentence is supposed to mean? I still can't parse it, even after several readings.

[roseofjuly]

I think what she/he's trying to say is what was that "spark of life" that led you to lead your life the way that you do? To be interested in the things in which you're interested? To tackle the research questions/have the interests that you do? And in addition to adding that spark, it needs to be at least slightly different from what or how everyone else was led to a 'part of all this' ("all this," I understand to mean as being research or whatever it is in your life you're writing about).

[saralinds]

That's right, the spark! Everyone has their own spark moment and these adcoms want to know it and why that's going to be pushing you along the way in your research. Thanks amaterasu for clearing up :)