The following is my personal statement for one of my grad school applications, essentially responding to the question of what obstacles to education I have overcome, and how my graduate studies will increase student diversity or serve disadvantaged groups. You may recognize some sentences from other things I have posted here, but perhaps this repackaging is of interest.

I have not personally experienced much financial hardship nor particularly challenging cultural barriers, and the truth is, my pursuit of an advanced degree is an admission that I am unsuited to more direct interaction with world problems. If I were completely committed to serving the less fortunate, I would be working in a favela in Recife or in a refugee camp in Afghanistan. The most pressing problems in the world today have little or nothing to do with linguistic research. But the most pressing problems are also the most overwhelming, and any improvement on these issues is difficult to notice. I don’t believe I am optimistic enough to deal directly with the most serious problems, and I need measurable signs of progress. Because of that, and because I am probably incorrigibly intellectual, I need to find a place for myself in academia, where I can do some public good without having to measure my life’s work against an insurmountable problem.

On the other hand, I have perhaps lived an unusual life thus far, and I do indeed feel a responsibility to serve the public good. I grew up on the Colombia center of SIL International, in a rural region near the border between the Amazon and Orinoco river valleys. It was a small community of people from all over, and I had frequent contact with indigenous and mestizo cultures. My family is deeply religious, but highly values critical thinking. My own thinking eventually led me to reject the faith I grew up with, but I was left with a sense of personal responsibility to serve the less fortunate. We felt quite poor when we periodically returned to the States, but we were wealthy compared to the people of the neighboring communities. I saw true poverty there, which I have since seen in other countries, but never in the US. With that beginning, I have never felt quite at home in American culture, though after so many years in school I am beginning to feel that academia is a home culture. I speak Spanish fluently, Portuguese okay, and Mandarin not too poorly, and I know something of quite a few countries, but that is not so abnormal in a linguistics graduate program.

My motivations for research arise primarily from curiosity about how mind and society work. Language is a subset of human behavior that helps us understand how our brains work and how our interpersonal relationships are built. This is a long way from solving any world problems, but I do hope my research will help us build in that direction.