I'm currently applying for Graduate Studies: for a Master's of Education with a focus on either curriculum or policy.
I have to provide a "Statement of Academic Intent," up to 3500 characters in length as a part of the application.
If you have never heard of this statement, know that I haven't either. I have yet to question my professors about its usual consistency... but I can guess - just from the name.
I thought that before I showed my tentative statement to a professor, I'd get some feedback from the general public (criticism is welcome and encouraged)
Here's what I have so far:
To whom this may concern,
I will to do something in this statement that most of your applicants, in their desperation to get a position in your program, would only do in their dreams. I will speak from the heart.
I've been interested in a Masters of Education ever since my victory lap in High School. In that year, I helped to create a program, under the Kiwanis, that educated students about social justice and facilitated community activism: a Kiwanis Educating Youth Club. (KEY Club) We started with six members including myself and a representative of the Kiwanis. By the end of the year, we had roughly 20 members and we were ratified as a KEY Club within KEY Club International. Within this organization, I started to understand the transformative power of education: I learned that education is a tool of activism.
As such, in university I eventually started a similar organization, but with academics instead of "direct-action" at its core. The organization is called Students Teaching Students, and rather than focusing on small-scale activism that mostly affected short-term change, the organization affected long-term transformation systemically through education.
This Masters of Education is an extension of this "educational legacy."
Through this masters, I intend to acquire the understanding, skills, and contacts to affect even greater systemic change by reforming North American high schools.
I believe education, and more specifically: high schools, are at the core of social justice issues in North America, and as such, it is within high schools that we can collectively affect the greatest impact on our communities. The systemic difference between an adolescent dropping out of high school versus graduating and going off to a post-secondary institution is enormous, and often taken for granted.
How many times have you heard university and college professors gripe that high schools create the inadequacies of modern college and university students? That high schools have left students apathetic, complacent, undisciplined, and devoid of the skill sets necessary for scholarship. I'm personally sick of it. If they're so sure that high schools are the problem, why do they pursue scholarship in our universities and colleges while the real fight is left to those less qualified and less impassioned? They would rather bide for change in the Ivory Tower than tend the battlements on the front lines in our public schools.
I have already chosen against becoming a university or college professor because of this situation. Because I will not turn my back on the masses. I intend to continue Theodore Sizer's struggle, here in Canada.
This is my Statement of Academic Intent: I intend to use education to make the world a better place.
For those that care, I actually submitted this as is, with the addition at the end "If you doubt my sincerity, remember I just paid $100 to tell you this." For those that haven't read the posts published after this one, I was accepted based on this document. I still giggle occasionally that they accepted me based on a document that indirectly criticized everyone in the Faculty of Education.
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