Personal Achievements & Diversity Statement

The University of XXX is interested in a diverse and inclusive graduate student population. Please describe any aspects of your personal background, accomplishments, or achievements that you feel are important in evaluating your application for graduate study. Please describe if you have any unusual or varied life experiences that might contribute to the diversity of the graduate group, such as fluency in other languages, experience living in bicultural communities, academic research interests focusing on cultural, societal, or educational problems as they affect underserved segments of society, or evidence of an intention to use the graduate degree toward serving disadvantaged individuals or populations.

My interest in Communication Studies at the University of XXX is closely related to the achievements I made during my primary and middle schools. Like President Obama whom I mentioned in Personal Statement, I am pretty much of a public speaker. In primary school, my ability to read passages in my textbooks expressively and touchingly was readily recognized by my teachers, who gave me special coaching and helped me participate in various speech contests in my city. Winning numerous prizes, mostly first prizes and second prizes, I significantly improved my verbal expressiveness and oratorical skills and throughout my primary and second education I hosted various school-wide public occasions like Art Festival, Anniversary Celebrations, Graduation Ceremonies, Freshmen Welcoming Parties. As I entered high school, my school launched a TV station whose workers were largely students. I became a reporter and the chief anchoress of this school TV station. I did interviews, wrote news and made in-depth reports on major events on the campus and produced our own independent programs. In this way, we kept teachers and students of the latest developments on the campus, promoted closer interactivity between teachers and students, and also kept them abreast with the latest developments inside China and elsewhere in the world. Those valuable experiences convinced me of the huge important of media, journalism, and communication in our life and I came to recognize my strong interest and abilities in this field. They were crucial in my choice of media and communication studies as the focus of my undergraduate program.

During my undergraduate program, I have been majoring in English and Chinese anchoring. Now, most TV and radio stations across the provinces have English-Chinese bilingual programs and shows in order to keep a huge and growing population of foreigners in China informed of the latest developments in China and the world. Part of my anchoring training involved correct pronunciation in news reading. China is a country with hundreds of dialects and as a southerner, I had a heavy local dialect prevented me from producing standard pronunciation and intonation. My accent was a standing butt of my classmates. Instead of having a sense of inferiority, I was determined to turn the negative into positive and I kept practicing the standard way of pronunciation and intonation, imitated the anchoresses of the country’s best TV and broadcasting stations, and sought special coaching from my teachers. Through two semesters of committed efforts, I passed the Standard Mandarin Test as the top 3 student of the class, giving my teachers and classmates a very big surprise. This achievement indicates that I am a person who takes what I learn very seriously, ready to strive for the highest level of excellence and expertise, and prove myself fully qualified and competent for the responsibilities I am supposed to perform.

In my academic studies, I have not only achieved an exceedingly high GPA—3.63/4.0 for all the courses (my GPA in specialized and core courses is considerably higher) and I have been the winner of nearly 10 academic awards, honors, and scholarships. In addition, I am the sole student in my class to have published a research paper entitled “Argument and Its Cultural Interpretations” at a leading scholarly journal in the country. In addition, I have realized the importance, more than most of my classmates, of acquire real-world experiences in media and communication. Therefore, I have done professional internships at a number of TV, radio, new media and industrial organizations, as anchoress, reporter, program producer, and news writer. In writing my stories, I focused on the rights and interests of the undeserved segments of the society. At Nanning TV Station and Guangxi Province TV Station, both are located in the border province in southern China, I reported on the unfortunate conditions of divorced women, the children of one-parent families, the elderly in the remote mountain areas, deserted by their children who have gone to cities. I also reported on people who have been rendered homeless in the on-going urbanization process which took away their land. At a media student, all I could do at this point of my career is to present a true picture of our society, and raising public’s awareness about many social inequalities and injustices.

Professionals of media and journalism are the conscience of society and it is their sacred mission to be concerned with the welfare of the ordinary people and the unrepresented social groups, especially when government support schemes are absent or are late to come. On May 12, 2008, an unprecedented earthquake hit Sichuan Province in Southwestern China, claiming the lives of nearly 100,000 people. The earthquake, measuring 8.0 magnitude, was a big story in the international media, and people could see that not only the civilian buildings were devastated but also many primary and middle schools for what was allegedly poor construction qualities. In Early July, I received a phone call from a friend in Shanghai, telling me a group of universities students were launching a teaching support program in one of the most severely devastated counties at the epicenter—a county dominated by the Qiang ethnic minority. I joined their voluntary services and arrived at the county after traveling 2,000 miles by train and we set up small classes inside the tents. In the class that I was in charge of, the first day I gave the classes, I could not help crying again and again, as I heard how the school children were bereft of family members—grandparents, parents, brothers, sisters and relatives and how they were bereft of their classmates. Apart from teaching them lessons, I spent most of the time telling them stories, playing games, talking to them to relieve them of their fear, giving them counseling to address their traumas, visiting their homes to salvage whatever that was useful, and helping them put up shelters. I worked there throughout the summer, making friends with all the students and the villagers.

I returned to my university as a changed person. What media can do and what communication can do when we are faced with so many social problems? I keep asking myself those questions. I believe that there are at least two things I can do. The first is to help promote the Chinese society as an open society, more and more receptive to international influences and to universal values. The second is to present a comprehensive and realistic picture about the Chinese society, with both positive and negative sides, to the international community so that the entire world can gain a more balanced and objective understanding of my home country. This will be my mission and the best way how I can make my contributions to bring China and the rest of the world into closer interaction and mutual understanding.