嘉文博译留学文书写作范例 个人陈述/推荐信

Personal Statement

 Applied Program: Special Education

The efforts undertaken by my mother and I testify to the vicissitude of China’s special education over the past two decades. My mother is an average elementary school teacher. There was a mentally retarded boy in our rural community who was rejected admission into school. Against misunderstandings, objections and even scorns on the part of her colleagues, my mother insisted on admitting the boy into her class. She made her utmost efforts to teach the boy to read and write, but unfortunately, without professional knowledge and trainings in special education, all my mother’s charitable efforts proved abortive. Nevertheless, my mother’s readiness to offer her love to those who need care and attention has profoundly touched me. It was perhaps this inherent altruistic inclination that prompted me to make a crucial choice after my successful university entrance examination—to relinquish the more pragmatic specialties like business and law in favor of the specialty of Special Education at China’s one of the best normal universities—North-eastern China Normal University. With this decision, I resolved to commit myself to the noble cause of Special Education as my lifelong pursuit.

On entering the university, I was filled with passion. However, the harsh realities virtually shattered this initial passion of mine, only to be replaced by frustrations. The content of the textbooks were outdated and shallow, seriously detached from social actualities. On the other hand, there were grave incomprehension and misunderstandings on the part of the general public regarding special education as a serious academic discipline. My constant observations and reflections made me realize that the dilemma surrounding this subject had much to do with their deeply entrenched conventional prejudices against the handicapped and the mentally retarded. I believed that to enhance the general public’s awareness of the importance of Special Education, to heighten their concern for the cause, and to cultivate their willingness to help this unprivileged group, it was imperative to drive home to people the notion of Special Education and to cultivate their humanitarian awareness.

I incorporated this idea into my practice. By formulating the principle “Extending Your Helping Hand to Those in Need” as the guideline of the organization, I organized students in my department to form a non-profit-making White-Dove Volunteers Association. Under my leadership, members visited local schools of special education and welfare centers to provide special assistance to handicapped and mentally retarded children. On the National Helping-the-Handicapped Day which falls on May 20, we organized charity activities at some busiest business areas in downtown Beijing to raise funds and to advocate our cause. By publicizing to the public many cases how the handicapped youths endeavored to overcome their difficulties to be independent and self-reliant, we wished to maximize the public’s commitment to the cause. Eventually, we succeeded in raising funds and obtaining donations. What made me feel particularly proud was that, by the coverage of mainstream media, our activities produced very positive social impact.

What made me ultimately decide to pursue advanced studies on the other side of the Pacific Ocean is my encounter with Miss Sang Lan during my internship at Beijing Rehabilitation Center. Miss Sang was a gymnast who became paralyzed due to an accident during her performance at the 1998 Goodwill Sports Meet held in the United States. With smiling calm she faced the calamity that befell her. In my discussions with her, she described to me in significant detail how she received medical treatment in the United States. She especially mentioned the advanced rehabilitative facilities and technologies there. Her descriptions made me believe that the United States is the precisely the country whose knowledge and expertise in this special field will facilitate my efforts to develop myself into an accomplished professional in the education of the handicapped and the mentally retarded.

Having formulated the objective of my academic pursuit, I devoted myself to both coursework and to research. I actively involved myself in classroom discussions during which I would not hesitate to come up with in-depth analyses and unique, though somewhat tentative, perspectives. As a recognition of my classroom performance, my insights and scholastic talents, my teachers awarded me with straight A’s in virtually every specialty-related course. In my extracurricular activities, I offered voluntary services in the classrooms at a local school for the deaf and a rehabilitation center. I was responsible for providing language trainings to the children there. It was not long before I found that the same teaching methodologies and strategies I adopted produced very different effects at those two different places. At the School for the Deaf, the students that received compulsory education ranged from 6 to 14 years in age. As they were not given any preschool special education, they had missed the optimum period of language acquisition, therefore, my efforts failed to produce desired effects. In contrast, the children I trained at the Rehabilitation Center were exclusively 3 to 4 years in age and my efforts led to very encouraging results. Those empirical studies helped me focus my attention of the importance of early-stage intervention in the cognitive and linguistic development of the handicapped and mentally retarded children.

In order to investigate the condition of the development of Special Education in the more economically depressed regions of China, I became a member of a research team organized by my university (a concomitant purpose of the team was to provide professional trainings to local teachers working in the field). We visited Guizhou Province, the poorest province in China’s great West. What I discovered was a bleak picture. For lack of sufficient funding and professional expertise, the local schools offering Special Education could by no means satisfy the real needs, with in quantity or in quality. In Guizhou Province, as in elsewhere in China, the education for the handicapped and mentally retarded children is conducted in a self-enclosed manner, which more often than not resulted in disorientation and displacement in their adult lives. This experience reminded me of the “Back-to-the-Mainstream” concept proposed educators in the United States in the late 1970’s. By studying in the same classroom as normal children and in a normal environment, the handicapped and the mentally retarded children could have the opportunity to potentially integrate themselves into the mainstream society, an step they have to undertake in their future. I believe that for China as a whole and for the economically underdeveloped regions in particular, to apply advanced concepts of Special Education from international academic communities would generate very positive and realistic significance for making compulsory education accessible to every handicapped and mentally retarded child, protecting their equal rights to education, and ensuring that they can participate in social life in their adulthood as equal members of society.

My outstanding performance in coursework and rich practical experiences qualified me to be a member in the Individual Education Program, a key project in the 10th Five-Year Educational Plan under the auspices of China Education Commission. Our detailed observations over a long period of time revealed that the existing curricula in Special Education have failed to reflect the individual differences in the obstacles that individual children suffer from and to propose solutions as to how to generate specific programs directed at the specific needs of different individuals. Drawing inspirations from early-stage invention, we took mathematics teaching in elementary school as the “point of entry” into the inner workings of the mentally retarded children. Our purpose is to develop the computerized generations of IEP that can be geared toward the individual needs of mentally retarded children. Relying on Visual Basics and Microsoft ACCESS database system, we developed single-chip computer-aided IEP System and the software for the system of case management of students suffering from learning barriers. The research findings based on this project have been published in Studies of Special Education, the authoritative journal in China. My participated in this unique research project has significantly enhanced my research abilities.

Recently, an American delegation consisting of specialists in auditory obstacles headed by Joseph Bass, chairman of the Planning Committee for the Deaf and the Mute, the Educational Commission of South Carolina, paid a visit to my university during which Sino-American scholars held seminars and workshops. As the sole student representative to participate in this exchange program, I derived very useful information concerning the latest development and achievements in the field special education in the United States. The presentations by those American educators highlighted some of the major gaps between China and the United States in the area of Special Education. Apart from insufficient concern for the cause of Special Education on the part of the Chinese government, the general public and the academic community, there is another more serious technical problem in Chinese special education, that is, the correctional education of handicapped children tends to miss the most crucial stage of both the physiological and psychological development. Chinese Special Education starts with handicapped and mentally retarded children aged 7 and only 80% percent of handicapped Chinese children receive pre-school education, forming a sharp contrast with the United States where 100% handicapped children enjoy government-sponsored early educational services. Most alarmingly, the literature on early-stage intervention in China accounts for only 1.6 % of the total literature on Special Education. All those points to the serious nature of existing studies in China in the field of early-stage intervention. I am convinced that the United States’ leading position in Special Education is closely correlated with its advanced researches in this field. I am also convinced that only by integrating myself into the advanced American system of Special Education can I grasp the essence of this profession. This constitutes my motivation in apply for an advanced degree program at your most prestigious university. The knowledge and the expertise that I can acquire from your fruitful education will enable me to make important contributions to China in the field of Special Education which sorely needs the infusion of international perspectives.