Yet Another SOP
So, I have started something for my SOP. This isn’t complete, but I just wanted to know if you guys thought I was on the right track or not. I’m afraid I’m focusing too much on my English background, but it has heavily influenced the student I was in criminal justice. I also feel like this is sort of amateur-ish, or childish. Some of it also feels really cheesy and forced, though I hope it's just because of how rough this is. Thoughts?
As I said, this is just where I’m starting. Please, feel free to destroy it. ☺
When I began my collegiate career at [MY UNDERGRAD] in August of 2004, I knew only one thing about my academic interests: I liked stories. What I didn’t know at the time was that already, I was using “stories” to define a broad interest I had in finding information, putting it together, digesting it, and being able to fully understand the information. Because I didn’t fully understand my own interests, I began taking English classes. It was my narrow understanding of stories that led me to a degree that taught me a unique way of understanding information. My English back ground taught me to read what was not always written, to ask critical questions of texts, to find gaps and holes in the “stories” I was reading, to defend my interpretations of works with thorough and precise reasoning grounded in the text, and to suck all of the information from a piece. This early experience with “stories” heavily impacted my approach to all of my academic undertakings. The greatest lesson I took from English, the greatest impact it had on me as a scholar, was that it taught me to question everything.
During my International Victimization class, I utilized my English-trained mind to the fullest. During the course of the semester, I found that rather than solidifying any tenuous answers I had come to concerning my own understanding of what it meant to be a “victim,” an “offender,” or what “crime” was, became progressively more nebulous. Until this point, I had only considered “crime” and it’s effects on US society and through the lens of a US citizen. International Victimization complicated the questions I asked of my field.
[I have a couple of other classes I want to discuss here, plus a fit paragraph/research interests]
The story I hope to write while at your program is one on the global relevance of understanding international criminal justice systems and the way that they will be forced to communicate with one another as the world continues to globalize and crime continues to become less and less rooted to and contained within specific countries. Already we see these areas of friction where systems are pushed up into one another and forced to create tension instead of cooperation: international and transnational crime, such as human trafficking and the drug trade; citizens of various countries caught in the crosshairs of international misunderstanding based on varying definitions and ideologies of crime; the use of these international tensions for political gain despite the often not fully understood social mores that complicate the base understanding of “what is crime?”
As I said, this is just where I’m starting. Please, feel free to destroy it. ☺
When I began my collegiate career at [MY UNDERGRAD] in August of 2004, I knew only one thing about my academic interests: I liked stories. What I didn’t know at the time was that already, I was using “stories” to define a broad interest I had in finding information, putting it together, digesting it, and being able to fully understand the information. Because I didn’t fully understand my own interests, I began taking English classes. It was my narrow understanding of stories that led me to a degree that taught me a unique way of understanding information. My English back ground taught me to read what was not always written, to ask critical questions of texts, to find gaps and holes in the “stories” I was reading, to defend my interpretations of works with thorough and precise reasoning grounded in the text, and to suck all of the information from a piece. This early experience with “stories” heavily impacted my approach to all of my academic undertakings. The greatest lesson I took from English, the greatest impact it had on me as a scholar, was that it taught me to question everything.
During my International Victimization class, I utilized my English-trained mind to the fullest. During the course of the semester, I found that rather than solidifying any tenuous answers I had come to concerning my own understanding of what it meant to be a “victim,” an “offender,” or what “crime” was, became progressively more nebulous. Until this point, I had only considered “crime” and it’s effects on US society and through the lens of a US citizen. International Victimization complicated the questions I asked of my field.
[I have a couple of other classes I want to discuss here, plus a fit paragraph/research interests]
The story I hope to write while at your program is one on the global relevance of understanding international criminal justice systems and the way that they will be forced to communicate with one another as the world continues to globalize and crime continues to become less and less rooted to and contained within specific countries. Already we see these areas of friction where systems are pushed up into one another and forced to create tension instead of cooperation: international and transnational crime, such as human trafficking and the drug trade; citizens of various countries caught in the crosshairs of international misunderstanding based on varying definitions and ideologies of crime; the use of these international tensions for political gain despite the often not fully understood social mores that complicate the base understanding of “what is crime?”