(no subject)
Hello Folks:
This is my 500 word SOP to cultural communication programs. My areas of concern: 1) Not enough personal input and experience, 2) Not engaging enough and 3) An ass kissing fit paragraph that makes me sound desperate.
You be the judge! :)
Statement of Purpose
“What makes a story newsworthy?” This was a question I frequently visited as a student reporter. As someone who had a strong interest in writing about Arab and Middle Eastern issues, I found myself at odds with the editorial culture of UMass Boston’s student-run paper. The toil and sweat I put into what I thought were pertinent and relevant topics often came down to their lack of newsworthiness: most students were far more interested in the issues that mattered to them (from rising tuition costs to UMass Beacons matches) than they were about stories of seemingly distant cultures. Ironically enough, this conflict of interest sparked my desire to explore the philosophical underpinnings of newsworthiness and its implications beyond the confines of a campus. What drives our attraction to certain messages over others? And how do standards of newsworthiness affect the culture of the news? These are questions I seek to explore in my graduate study at X School
Over the course of my study at Y, my interest in how politics, newsworthiness and journalism intersected grew. For my Intercultural Communications class, I wrote a paper examining newsworthiness from Al Jazeera’s perspective. Here, I drew upon Tal Azran’s Positional Hypothesis Theory to show how newsworthiness in this instance evolved from an intraregional specific system to a model designed to deliberately reproach or counter-flow Western-centric messages. What fascinated me most about this trend was how these counter-flow messages occurred even under circumstances when Eastern and Western tangents did not intersect. Beyond the clashing narratives on Iraq between American and Arab news sources, coverage of the financial crisis by both Al Jazeera and Al Arabiyah touched upon issues (like race and class) that American broadcasters deemed too controversial and therefore un-newsworthy. To that end, I feel that the study of newsworthiness in this context can provide valuable insight into the nature of the chasm between these competing media cultures, as well as the political proclivity of the audiences informed by them.
At X, I look forward to expanding my research interests to further explore counter-flow systems used by the Arab satellite news networks in their understanding of newsworthiness and the implications this may have on Arab and American media channels. The continued wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the disparity in coverage over these hotspots highlight how crucial this scholarship is to informing areas of collaboration between Arab and American media spheres.
In my pursuit of higher learning, I have strived for a program that exemplifies intellectual rigor while encouraging out-of-the box approaches to research and scholarship. Through my visit to the campus and conversations with professors and staff, I have come to believe that X engenders these qualities and much more. Leafing through the X website’s thesis database, I was amazed by the breadth and diversity of the topics covered. Closer reading of some of the work revealed a strong theoretical aptitude in a myriad of disciplines; from economics, to mathematics, to philosophy. This cross-pollination of ideas affirms X as the ideal environment to transform my interests into an enriching research experience, one that I hope to carry forward on the doctorate level.
This is my 500 word SOP to cultural communication programs. My areas of concern: 1) Not enough personal input and experience, 2) Not engaging enough and 3) An ass kissing fit paragraph that makes me sound desperate.
You be the judge! :)
Statement of Purpose
“What makes a story newsworthy?” This was a question I frequently visited as a student reporter. As someone who had a strong interest in writing about Arab and Middle Eastern issues, I found myself at odds with the editorial culture of UMass Boston’s student-run paper. The toil and sweat I put into what I thought were pertinent and relevant topics often came down to their lack of newsworthiness: most students were far more interested in the issues that mattered to them (from rising tuition costs to UMass Beacons matches) than they were about stories of seemingly distant cultures. Ironically enough, this conflict of interest sparked my desire to explore the philosophical underpinnings of newsworthiness and its implications beyond the confines of a campus. What drives our attraction to certain messages over others? And how do standards of newsworthiness affect the culture of the news? These are questions I seek to explore in my graduate study at X School
Over the course of my study at Y, my interest in how politics, newsworthiness and journalism intersected grew. For my Intercultural Communications class, I wrote a paper examining newsworthiness from Al Jazeera’s perspective. Here, I drew upon Tal Azran’s Positional Hypothesis Theory to show how newsworthiness in this instance evolved from an intraregional specific system to a model designed to deliberately reproach or counter-flow Western-centric messages. What fascinated me most about this trend was how these counter-flow messages occurred even under circumstances when Eastern and Western tangents did not intersect. Beyond the clashing narratives on Iraq between American and Arab news sources, coverage of the financial crisis by both Al Jazeera and Al Arabiyah touched upon issues (like race and class) that American broadcasters deemed too controversial and therefore un-newsworthy. To that end, I feel that the study of newsworthiness in this context can provide valuable insight into the nature of the chasm between these competing media cultures, as well as the political proclivity of the audiences informed by them.
At X, I look forward to expanding my research interests to further explore counter-flow systems used by the Arab satellite news networks in their understanding of newsworthiness and the implications this may have on Arab and American media channels. The continued wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the disparity in coverage over these hotspots highlight how crucial this scholarship is to informing areas of collaboration between Arab and American media spheres.
In my pursuit of higher learning, I have strived for a program that exemplifies intellectual rigor while encouraging out-of-the box approaches to research and scholarship. Through my visit to the campus and conversations with professors and staff, I have come to believe that X engenders these qualities and much more. Leafing through the X website’s thesis database, I was amazed by the breadth and diversity of the topics covered. Closer reading of some of the work revealed a strong theoretical aptitude in a myriad of disciplines; from economics, to mathematics, to philosophy. This cross-pollination of ideas affirms X as the ideal environment to transform my interests into an enriching research experience, one that I hope to carry forward on the doctorate level.