Statement of Purpose

This society normally expects 18-year-old students to choose a career path, develop the necessary competencies, and perhaps enter a profession very different from their original perceptions. The lucky few find true vocations; I pursued my first choice but found it lacking. Fortunately, the painful experience of crashing gave me the opportunity to see what I learn, where I go, and what I enjoy without an arbitrarily chosen objective. Thus my desire to enter ***appropriate field name having to do with second language acquisition**** is based on a pattern of evidence rather than vice versa. The idea that my nebulous skills set could be useful in this field occurred only recently. I had long talked about going to graduate school in a language-related field, but it was while serving as a volunteer teaching assistant in conversational English classes for visiting Japanese students this year that the details took shape. Suddenly, a large set of my experiences, especially those from the preceding year and a half, fit together as useful data for a professional in second language teaching and research; the classes taken just for fun and late-night conversations began to seem like the building-blocks toward a career.

Upon further examination, still more elements harmonized. Many areas I like most about physics - the research environment, the frequent chances to travel, and the chance to exercise analytical thinking abilities – are equally features of applied linguistics. On the other hand, the opportunity to find a position directly helping people - either by teaching them or by finding better ways to teach them second languages - seems far more exciting.

As a Southern child of Northern parents, I already had a strong awareness of language by the time I entered kindergarten due to the discrepancies between my accent and vocabulary and those of my fellow students. While I quickly picked up that "Kleenexes" are the same thing as "tissues" and that "fixin' to" indicates an activity in the immediate future, this initial "culture clash" inaugurated a life-long fascination with dialect and culture. I still adore quizzing people who use words in slightly different fashions to uncover layers of connotation.

Later, I found that I enjoyed foreign language; this led to taking an extra year of French in high school and two more semesters than the physics degree's foreign language requirement in college. However, the desire to speak and write at a near-native proficiency level (and the belief that such was possible) was further sparked in the summer of 2000. As part of the Center for Astrophysical Research in Antarctica's Research Experience for Undergraduates program, I went to UC Berkeley as a research assistant; by chance, my housing assignment was at Berkeley's International House. I spent my time outside of work that summer getting to know students from all over the world; I learned more about world cultures and geography than I thought imaginable. In addition, I learned a lot about communication; I became much quicker at producing synonyms, definitions, and gestures to clarify unknown words; I learned to speak slowly and clearly and to watch my interlocutor for signs of understanding or lack thereof. I developed a huge admiration for all these students in my peer group who had the courage to go overseas and speak a foreign language full-time.

The following academic year, I submitted an application to the International Student Exchange Program. In the fall of 2001, I headed for Besançon, France, to spend a year at the Université de Franche-Comté. The first semester there, I spent most of my time at their Centre de Linguistique Appliquée (C.L.A.) taking classes in French language, culture, and society; these substituted for most of the upper-level French courses required to get a bachelor's degree in the subject at Tennessee Tech, leaving me free to take practically anything I liked the second semester. Among my courses at the C.L.A. was a general linguistics class; it intrigued me sufficiently that in the second semester I gravitated toward the Department of Sciences du Langage. These classes, primarily in linguistics and semiotics, greatly deepened my interest in these fields.

For six semesters, I have been a teaching assistant in physics and astronomy labs. When I reached college, I was so quiet and terrified of public speaking that I never imagined myself as a teacher. However, when I took the T.A. position, I quickly found I loved the classroom experience. While helping to teach physics may seem worlds away from teaching foreign language, in many ways they are alike. For example, I know from my experience as a foreign language student that anxiety is one of the biggest obstacles that a professor can help remove; similarly, in physics, most of my students' biggest problems were simple fear of math. Over time, I have learned strategies such as breaking problems into chunks and quickly coming up with three or four different explanations of the same thing to increase the probability that I find one that works for a given student.

Through Tennessee Tech's Honors Program, I have also been able to gain experience at leading discussions. I coordinated the "Mindful Movies" series last semester. My responsibilities included finding thought-provoking films, showing them to Honors students, and leading discussions about the films' contents. The most difficult part of this task was coaxing groups of reticent students to speak; while I do not claim to have mastered this art, I certainly improved enough to eliminate most of the awkward lulls in conversation.

Finally, my sole experience in teaching English as a foreign language was working with a group of Japanese students from Dohto University. With them, I discovered exactly how much I missed the challenge of communicating through a language barrier, which I had actually grown to enjoy in France. For six hours a week, I worked with groups of six to ten students on conversational English. Sometimes we had exercises to do together, but most often, we just had a general topic to discuss. To share my pleasure at getting to know them, I organized a bowling trip in conjunction with the Honors Program. One of my favorite memories from this year is from the Waffle House where most of us went afterwards: nearly every table in the place was filled with a mix of American and Japanese students miming, writing, and talking to each other about a full range of topics.

My current professional goal is to obtain the qualifications to make an impact in second language research and/or teaching. Ideally, I would like to work at a language institute where the opportunity to do both exists; I’m convinced that a master’s degree under your program would be an excellent step toward this. Thanks very much for your consideration.