First draft of SOP for Masters of Public Health...review please?

[shebadeba1990]

Below I have included my first draft of my SOP for a Masters of Public Health. I have also included an additional and optional addundem, because my undergrad GPA is 3.0 - RIGHT on the border of most grad school cut-offs. I would appreciate any and all advice! Perhaps help me find my blind spots? Anything I should mention/did I get too personal? Thanks!!!

We all experience a watershed moment at some point in our lives. My watershed moment was on August 9th, 2012. This was the day I got sober; a proud accomplishment I am strongly maintaining to this day. This was the moment I grew from a somewhat niave and unfocused young adult into a strong, capable, and highly motivated woman. This is the moment that marks the realization of my passion for public health as well as my committment to pursue the failures and hypocracies in U.S. drug policy as my career.

My personal journey through life has taken me places I had never dreamed of. However, I am a firm believer that one's mistakes in life can, with hard work, lead to one's greatest achievements. I have spent the last 3 years totally consumed with educating myself on the history, sociology, and politics of drug use in America. During my senior year of college, I pursued various upper-level criminal justice, sociology, and social work classes to further round my eduction on this topic. The more I learn about U.S. drug policy, the more I see that drug addiction and drug-related crimes are first and foremost a public health issue and not a criminal pursuit.

I want to be an advocate and educator for change in U.S. drug policy. I see the damage that the philosophy behind The War on Drugs has caused, from mass incarceration, to a strengthening of the black market, to the billions of dollars wasted on a harsh and offensive law enforcement and criminal justice system. I see the barriers that current U.S. drug policy constructs against addicts, which allows for communicable diseases to flourish as a result of inadeuqate access to clean and safe resources. The U.S. is misappropriating their resources by continuing to fight drug use as a criminal matter and I believe that no significant gains will ever be made until U.S. policies begin to treat drug use, abuse, and drug related crimes as a public health issue.

I lived in Portland, Oregon for 5 years while pursuing my undergraduate degree. This city is quite progressive in drug use policies, relative to many other major metropolitain areas across the United States. Portland boosts free needle exchanges, free detox centers, and strong rehabilitation programs with city sponsorship. I have recently relocated to ********, Texas due to my fiance's career, and the United State's current policies and practices in regards to drug use have further revealed themselves as utterly detrimental. I see the incredible violence that the drug war causes on the nightly news and newspaper covers; I can gauge the misunderstanding of drug addiction by the ridiculous amount of drug offenders who are sentenced to hard federal time with no offer of a rehabilitation option. At this point in my life, I am absolutely thirsty for change and have every motivation in the world to pursue these changes through a career in public health.

What attracts me specifically to the Masters of Public Health program at ******** ******** University is the interdisciplinary methods of teaching, allowing the student to trailor their studies to both issues at their local community-level but also broaden their core competencies of global public health problems. I am aware of what my specific passion in the field of public health is, but I believe that ******** ******** University's program would further transform my passion into a well-rounded and fully developed professional competency. I believe that a complete education and mastery of public health is absolutely necessary to successfuly accomplish my goals in public health policy; this is something that I know the program at ******** ******** University will be able to provide.

What I have to offer the Masters of Public Health program at ******* ******** University is an untamed passion, a unique prespective, and an incredible capacity and motivation to succeed. I am a powerful individual who has been lucky enough to discover my true purpose in life and I know that the program provided at ******** ******** University will help me to achieve my dreams. My decision to go to graduate school is far more than a building block to my future; it is the only way I can possibly accomplish the widespread changes for the betterment of public health that I feel is my responsibility to do so.

Addendum:

As is evident from my academic transcripts from Portland State University, I began my college career with a committed love of learning that is reflected in my outstanding academic records and academically based scholarship, as highlighted in my resume. However, a history of drug addiction can also be intuited during the middle of my college career, where my grades dropped, following an all-too-predictable pattern. After my junior year of college, I took a much needed break from my schooling to recover and heal from my drug addiction. During this time I not only gained an incredible sense of awareness about myself but I also began to see the many failures and hypocricies in U.S. drug policy.

I was once told that in order to find my passion, I should discover my weakness. It is because of my personal struggles and subsequent recovery from drug addiction that I found my passion in public health. I returned my senior year with a strong focus of what I wanted to learn and a renewed sense of learning in general, which is evident in my class choices and strong grades that I received during the 2014-2015 school year. I do not regret any choices I have made in the past because it has made me the person I am today; and today I am a strong, powerful young woman who is confident of her path in life and will stop at nothing to pursue her passion.

[shebadeba1990]

Excuse the formatting, cutting and pasting it onto this forum screwed it all up.

[velua]

naive

don't use the word various

consider avoiding splitting infinitives

five, not 5

no comma before relative

today I am a strong, powerful young woman confident of my path in life and will stop at nothing to pursue my passion.

Beyond that, it can be a bit risky to make political statements in a SOP, and I think you should focus more on your background/qualifications (academically). It's not going to be much with a 3.0, but can you talk about courses you've done well in? Do you have any research experience?

[Sword_Saint]

I would echo many of the things mentioned by "Velua" above, with some of my own comments as well:

 

 

These sections had grammatical errors / tense inconsistencies:

 

"This was the moment I grew from a somewhat niave and unfocused young adult into a strong, capable, and highly motivated woman. This is the moment that marks the realization..."

 

"round my eduction on this topic"

 

"allowing the student to trailor their studies"
 

"a unique prespective, "

 

General Comments / Feedback:

 

- If you think you need to discuss your GPA / courses, do what you must, but the admission folks already have that information available by looking at your transcripts. They can see what courses you took during your senior year, and will readily be able to tell if and by how much your GPA fluctuated. Explaining why that happened may be important, but consider spending less time on things that can be learned from looking at your transcripts and other application materials. 

 

- I am not entirely sure if teaching methods can be interdisciplinary. Substantively, courses can be interdisciplinary, such as "Critical Behavioral Health Problems" having content for psychology students and criminal justice students, two different disciplines; for a teaching style to be interdisciplinary I imagine it would require teaching methods from multiple disciplines. This is not what you convey as an example of interdisciplinary teaching however.

 

- You specify policy reform in regards to drug use as an area of research interest for you, but perhaps you should consider aligning your research interests with specific faculty that also have that specialization at the university you are applying to. If there are no faculty at this university with your research interests, and you are unable to apply to other schools, consider bending your SOP a little and including research interests of one or more faculty that are as close to your interests as possible.

 

For example:  my research interests include the application of GIS technologies to predictive analysis and crime mapping, fields that Dr. [bLANK] at your university is one of the foremost scholars on.

 

- Lastly, I'm not a public health student, so I have no idea what goals someone could or should have in public health occupations or what those occupations would be exactly, but, you say that: "I believe that a complete education and mastery of public health is absolutely necessary to successfuly [sp] accomplish my goals in public health policy". You never list or explain what those goals are, you implicitly suggest them at times, but do not explicitly state them. I would recommend doing so.

 

 

Those are the biggest things that stood out to me, I highly recommend having a few pairs of eyes read through your SOP to find the typos and mistakes before submission, assuming you haven't submitted it already.