If anyone would be willing to critque my personal statement, it would be greatly appreciated. Any and all advice would be welcome.
When I began my undergraduate degree at the University of Southern Maine, my interests, like many other undergraduate psychology students, was in clinical psychology. However my interests took a drastic change at the beginning of my junior year when I discovered how fascinating the study of memory is. The catalyst for this change was a cognitive processes class taught by Dr. Scott Brown. The lectures Dr. Brown gave over contemporary models of learning and memory enamored me and caused a shift in my interests from clinical psychology to the psychology behind memory. Initially my interests in the area of memory were in the effects of emotion on learning and implicit retrieval, although my interests in memory have recently changed as well.
An article published in Scientific American's August, 2013 issue, “Perchance to Prune”, proposed a new way to look at the effects of sleep on memory that has given a new direction to my research interests. Authors, Giulio Tononi and Chiara Cirelli, suggest that during NREM stages of sleep synchronous neural activity serves to degrade synaptic connections. Through this degradation synapses that were strengthened during the day remain stronger than the weak synaptic connections that were freshly made that day. The result would be an increase in the strength of an individual's most frequently used synapses.
While reading Tononi and Cirelli's article, the proposed hypothesis and mechanisms of NREM sleep began to remind me of the effects of seizure activity on the memory of epileptics. Due to the connections that can be made between this newly proposed theory of NREM sleep and epilepsy, an area of research that I would like to pursue would be to further look at the possibility of epilepsy being related to NREM sleep, and the effects of anti-convulsants on NREM sleep patterns in non-epileptic individuals. After receiving a Ph.D my goal would be to continue researching the relationship between sleep and memory, as well as teaching at a university level. Through teaching I would hope to inspire psychology undergraduates to pursue an interest of some of the less popular areas within psychology.
Currently I am working with Dr. Elizabeth Vella in the development of a research protocol to be submitted to the institutional review board by the end of the current semester. The protocol in development deals with biological reactions to Facebook induced stressors. I am also working with other student research assistants to complete a presentation on personality trait correlates to ADHD, this data will be presented at the Eastern Psychological Association conference in Boston in March of the current year. I am also currently working with Dr. William Gayton as a teaching assistant. As Dr. Gayton's teaching assistant I am responsible for facilitating in class discussion, holding private tutoring sessions, and holding review sessions before exams. I am also involved in the development and grading of exams, and the grading of extra-credit assignments.
Acceptance to the University of Hawaii at Manoa's Ph.D in Behavioral Neuroscience program would be the first step in achieving my goals as both a professor, and researcher.