Content provided by EssayEdge.com.
Put Harvard-Educated Editors to Work for You!
Graduate School Statement Samples
This section contains five sample graduate school personal statements:
Why Graduate School? Essay
My freshman year at Harvard, I was sitting in a Postcolonial African Literature class when
Professor Ngugi wa Thiong'o (the influential Kenyan author) succeeded in attracting me to
the study of African literature through nothing more than a single sentence. He argued that,
when a civilization adopts reading and writing as the chief form of social communication, it
frees itself to forget its own values, because those values no longer have to be part of a lived
reality in order to have significance. I was immediately fascinated by the idea that the written
word can alter individual lives, affect one's identity, and perhaps even shape national identity.
Professor Ngugi's proposal forced me to think in a radically new way: I was finally confronted
with the notion of literature not as an agent of vital change, but as a potential instrument of
stasis and social stagnancy. I began to question the basic assumptions with which I had, until
then, approached the field. How does "literature" function away from the written page, in the
lives of individuals and societies? What is the significance of the written word in a society
where the construction of history is not necessarily recorded or even linear?
I soon discovered that the general scope of comparative literature fell short of my
expectations because it didn't allow students to question the inherent integrity or subjectivity
of their discourse. We were being told to approach Asian, African, European, and American
texts with the same analytical tools, ignoring the fact that, within each culture, literature may
function in a different capacity, and with a completely different sense of urgency. Seeking out
ways in which literature tangibly impacted societies, I began to explore other fields, including
history, philosophy, anthropology, language, and performance studies.
The interdisciplinary nature of my work is best illustrated by my senior thesis ("Time Out of
Joint: Issues of Temporality in the Songs of Okot p'Bitek"). In addition to my literary
interpretations, the thesis drew heavily on both the Ugandan author's own cultural treatises
and other anthropological, psychological, and philosophical texts. By using tools from other
disciplines, I was able to interpret the literary works while developing insight into the
Ugandan society and popular psychology that gave birth to the horrific Idi Amin regime. In
addition, I was able to further understand how people interacted with the works and
incorporated (or failed to incorporate) them into their individual, social, and political realities.
On a more practical level, writing the thesis also confirmed my suspicion that I would like to
pursue an academic career. When I finished my undergraduate career, I felt that a couple of