Thank you for advice. I am most grateful. Tried to revise my SOP somewhat, hopefully it is better now. Still having trouble coming up with anything "unique", though...
After I've spent a year working as an assistant manager in the sociological and marketing research company, I want to return to academic study and to study [….] at graduate level at [….]
As a child, I've been drawn to advanced reading, TV and video games of the type that my relatives considered above my age. Their worry about it's possible effects on me sparkled my interest in statistics and in quantitative media studies, and so before long I could point out the assumptions, suggest alternative hypotheses and argue for the most plausible one.
This interest in studies of media effects been with me through college, where I've became especially invested in a course of sociology of advertising. Later, I took a year-long course in PR and Advertising in order to learn more about media effects from the perspective of those whose task is to produce them. One of the most interesting things I've noticed is that, while in social sciences the extent of media effects remains an open question, the marketing approach as practiced usually takes the strong effects paradigm for granted and traces the variance of effects to the qualities of a particular message. Also, while social scientists are concerned with the effect mass media might have upon the values and stereotypes held by the populace, those working within the industry sometimes consider themselves constrained by what they perceive as popularly held stereotypes and are hesitant to move away from them in their fear to lose their audience.
This discrepancy formed the line of inquiry which I pursued as an MA student at the Central European University. This work brought me into familiarity with major qualitative paradigms (as my previous education focused mostly on quantitative methods), and added the ways to integrate qualitative and quantitative methods to the list of my interests. I’ve been commended for appropriately utilizing quantitative as well as qualitative methods in my work, for carefully considering and formulating my argument and for the clear-eyed approach to the limits of the particular set of data.
My current work as an assistant manager in a research company handling the questions of organizing fieldwork gave me an invaluable understanding of unexpected problems a planned research program might face during attempts of putting it to practice, and allowed me certain insight into how to design a research so that it would face fewer distortions during execution.