Statement of Purpose

I recently wrote a Statement of Purpose for a graduate school application. Instantly, I reflected on the past five to six years of my life and my path to my overall purpose in life. It extends far beyond graduate school. I realize that people are unfamiliar with my career path, so I have included excerpts from the statement.

I am originally from Bamberg, SC, which is an hour away from Columbia and closest to Orangeburg, where I attended Bamberg-Ehrhardt High School. It was there in my AP English course that we read the works of Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Shakespeare, and other iconic literary writers. Mrs. Lisa Deibel, my English teacher, always told me that my writing was superior and that I should pursue it as a career. I also enrolled in her Teacher Cadets course where I first learned about pedagogy, psychological theorists such as Piaget and Maslow, and valuable classroom instructional strategies. Mrs. Deibel later told me that I should also pursue a career in education. However, I neglected her counsel and pursued an undergraduate degree in business administration and management at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, SC. After graduating there and after five years in the business field, I realized that it was not my passion; I discovered that Mrs. Deibel was right. In college, I should have pursued my true passion which is writing and teaching...

Upon leaving the business world, I received a master’s degree in English from National University near San Diego, CA. My coursework included literary criticism, the Romantic and Victorian periods, and major authors such as Walt Whitman and F. Scott Fitzgerald. I wrote my graduate thesis entitled The Blackness of Darkness: Africanism and the Africanist Presence in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which is based on Toni Morrison’s derivative of African American literary criticism. After graduating, I received my first teaching position at Hampton School District 2 in middle level English/Language Arts. Three years later I accepted a position as a full-time instructor teaching developmental English, freshman composition, and literature courses at Morris College in Sumter, SC, where I am in the third year of my tenure. In 2012, I was awarded the Advisor of the Year Award at Morris...

During my years in education, I have also developed as a writer. In 2013, Claflin University in Orangeburg will publish a pedagogical essay I wrote entitled Back to the Future: Approaches to Best Practices in Reflective Teaching. I also have compiled a collection of poetry that I will publish this year entitled The Very Least of Me, and I am completing a fiction novel entitled City of David that I would like to publish this year as well. Moreover, I am a member of the South Carolina Writers Workshop and have attended its annual conference in Myrtle Beach. The group meets semi-monthly to read and critique each members’ writing samples of various genres, including poetry and fiction...

I ended the statement with this...Preparation remains the key to success in any journey toward purpose, and I will pursue [it] diligently because it is the beginning of my life’s work.