How have your background and life experiences, including cultural, geographical, financial, educational, citizenship status or other opportunities or challenges, motivated your decision to pursue a graduate degree at the University of Michigan?
For example, if you grew up in a community where educational, cultural, or other opportunities were either especially plentiful or especially lacking or are undocumented or DACAmented, you might discuss the impact this had on your development and interests. This should be a discussion of the journey that has led to your decision to seek a graduate degree. If you will be a graduate student with Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival (DACA), it is important to mention DACA in your personal statement since this is a consideration for some financial aid.
So I want to emphasize a theme:
1. Until I entered college, I lived in and studied in China, where I had very limited access to the online learning resources (Google, Facebook, Wikipedia…ect are banned in China)
2. I am very curious and eager for knowledge, during my high school, I learnt how to bypass the internet censorship by setting up VPN, HTTP proxy. I also learnt some basic Python and JavaScript programming during the process.
3. When I entered UCSB, I was enthralled by the availablility of the abundant resources (unlimited internet access, free library documents, and high-performance research lab hardwares), and the freedom for us to choose whatever classes we want. (Unlike in China, where students have very limited freedom to choose thier class) With three years of exploring, I found myself especially interested and talented in the area of Natural language processing (NLP).
4. University of Michigan has very excellent academic resources, especially in the area of NLP, so I wish to apply to a graduate school.
So I want to depict myself as someone whose ability was previously limited by the resources, but studying aboard gave me the oppotunity to explore my potential without limitations, and I wish to further explore my potential at graduate school.
I have attached my draft for my previous PS, you may duplicate the highschool part (second paragraph), but please don’t focus too much on the the university part (third and fourth paragraph)
