Myspace Re-Post #21: This time, it's personal!

Note: Re-posted from my now-defunct Myspace blog, where it was originally posted on December 4th, 2007. This post was also hosted as the only post on a separate Google Blogger account from June 25th, 2008 until quite recently (March 10th, 2017, to be exact). Let us hope this will end its long lonely wanderings in cyberspace...

Hello out there all you lovely listeners! I'll bet you've been wondering where I've been...

Tee hee, course I don't really believe that. But I'm going to tell you anyways! I've been buried under a pile of work, with a special emphasis on applying to graduate schools in psychology.

That's going pretty well. I'll be sure to keep y'all up dated on if and when and where I get in anywhere.

So I've spent the past month or so researching schools and working on what is generally known as a "Statement of Purpose." In this statement, you are expected to detail what (within psychology) you are interested, why you are interested in it, why you're a good candidate for grad school, why the given school is right for you, yada yada yada. The point is that once you've come up with a carefully crafted, revised and vetted general essay, you simply need to make a few small changes for each school, and you're otherwise pretty much done.

Except for the fact that Berkeley, alone among schools that I am aware of, ALSO requires a personal statement! What is a personal statement, you ask? Why is a personal statement, you ask? What more is there for you to say after the whole friggin' statement of purpose thing, you ask?

Well, Berkeley answers: "In an essay, discuss how your personal background informs your decision to pursue a graduate degree. Please include any educational, familial, cultural, economic, or social experiences, challenges, or opportunities relevant to your academic journey; how you might contribute to social or cultural diversity within your chosen field; and/or how you might serve educationally underrepresented segments of society with your degree."

So, that should be pretty clear, right? No, not really? Well then you can understand why I put off writing the damn thing until last night, AKA the night my application was due!

Now I managed to pull something together with a little help from my friends, but I didn't really have time to run it through the wringer, so out of a general sense of curiosity and narcissism, I thought I would post this essay, in its entirety, on my myspace blog!

Pretty crazy, huh?

(Hey, shut up. I wasn't talking to you!)

Here's the essay. If there's anybody out there, let me know what you think!

My personal background is somewhat unusual, as I was raised as an Orthodox Jew, yet had numerous meaningful encounters outside of my community that have combined with my upbringing to lead me on a unique academic journey. Being an Orthodox Jew meant that I lived in a heavily Jewish neighborhood, attended Orthodox Jewish schools, and had only Orthodox Jewish friends while I was growing up. My community was very insular, and personal interaction with the wider culture was strongly discouraged. Despite this fact, I was exposed to other cultures and modes of living from a very young age. My grandparents and many of my other close relatives were Jewish but not Orthodox, and as a child I used to play with the children who lived on my block, regardless of their ethnic or religious background.

In high school, I began to more actively pursue engagement with the outside world. For example, I used to frequent a used music store near my high school during my longer breaks. This was in part driven by my budding fascination with rock and roll, but there was also a social aspect to my regular visits. I had struck up a friendship with one of the clerks at the store (who, it later turned out, was also the owner) simply by asking for his opinion on some of the CDs that I was considering buying. I was fascinated by my newly discovered ability to form friendships with people from outside of my insular religious community. I began to think about the basic commonalities that all people share, with a particular interest in how individuals come to form complex relationships with each other, both within and beyond group boundaries. By meeting other employees at the store, I was able to test out new ideas and theories that I had developed about how normal social interaction was structured.

I began applying a similar mindset to other social gatherings that I encountered. I joined an orthodox youth group that organized large conventions where hundreds of teens could meet one another. The array of different people I encountered at my first such convention dazzled me. I was particularly struck by the fact that I was continually meeting new people, and thus had a continuous supply of new encounters with which to experiment, so to speak. These encounters allowed me to learn a great deal about myself and my interpersonal style, as well as how people meet and become friends on a more general level.

Later in high school, my focus began to shift to the formation and evolution of informal social groups. This interest arose naturally enough, as I found myself stuck in the middle of a series of intractable conflicts between some of my closest friends. Often these conflicts boiled down to differences of personal preference and taste, and yet this seemed to be a sufficient basis on which to divide a unified group into two or more distinctly separate groupings. By senior year of high school, the web of my social affiliations had grown so complex that I felt the need to draw a diagram depicting the interrelationships of over twenty of my friends. In creating this diagram, I somehow felt that I was advancing my understanding of the dynamics which influenced who became friends with whom.

In the summer before my senior year of high school, I participated in a summer arts apprenticeship program conducted by the City of Chicago that drew teens from every part of the city. I was in the "Performance Poetry" group, where we not only learned to write poetry in a particular style, but also to "perform" it. I made some very good friends in this program, and maintained contact with them during the school year by attending poetry readings throughout the city. In this way, I also came into contact with a broader subculture surrounding spoken word, poetry readings and coffee shops. I was fascinated to discover a social world all around me of which I had previously been ignorant.

That same summer, I began working as a vendor at Wrigley Field on a part-time basis. I soon grew to love this job, not merely out of my interest in baseball, but also because it gave me a window into the inner workings of human nature. Vendors were paid on commission, and I had to hawk my wares myself. I enjoyed the opportunity to test out my naïve theories of how people could be influenced to buy a product from me. When selling peanuts, I noticed that whenever I threw a bag to a distant customer, several other people would suddenly express interest in my product. Soon I was looking for every possible excuse to toss someone a bag rather than hand it to him or her, and I began to nonchalantly toss a bag up in the air and catch it myself if I found myself in a slow aisle. I enjoyed this work experience to such an extent that it was to serve as my primary means of employment the following three summers.

As senior year progressed, I thought a great deal about what course I should pursue in life. My high school encouraged its students to remain within the bounds of the Orthodox community, even while pursuing higher education, by recommending that we attend specific colleges (such as Yeshiva University) that are largely populated by other Orthodox Jews. The idea of continuing the social and cultural isolation that had been imposed upon me by my community did not appeal to me. I looked to my college years as a time when I could branch out and meet individuals from diverse backgrounds, to learn about their values and way of life. I also hoped to find a peer group that was as interested as I in striving for a deeper understanding of human social interaction. I bucked the trend and applied to many secular colleges, including Harvard, where I eventually matriculated.

In my first semester at Harvard, I enrolled in "The Evolution of Human Nature," in order to explore some of the questions I had about human relationships and social interaction. To my delight, I found that many of these questions could be answered by adopting an evolutionary perspective, and I spent hours in conversation with several of my classmates, discussing the implications of the course's material for our own lives. The following spring, I took "Introduction to Psychology," and found that I was most fascinated by the chapters on personality and social psychology. By the end of the year, I had decided to major in psychology, with a particular focus on social psychology.

My coursework in psychology and such related disciplines as biology and sociology answered some of my questions about human behavior, but this is not what drew me most strongly to the field. Rather, I increasingly found that I was able to articulate and frame the questions that had always aroused my curiosity. By learning about past experimental studies, I was able to imagine how some of my favorite questions could be explored in the future. Every new piece of information that I learned seemed to raise another question. My curiosity for knowledge of the workings of human interaction was boundless.

That curiosity is what continues to drive me to this day. I have become familiar with the day-to-day challenges and demands of experimental research in psychology by working in psychology laboratories during six semesters of college and in my current full-time position. Yet still I find that the more I learn about interpersonal relationships and social interaction, the more fascinated I am by the intricate workings of our complex human nature, and my list of questions only seems to grow longer with each passing day.