In May of 2003 I graduated Cum Laude from Willamette University with a major in Sociology with honors. During school and after, I have consciously made decisions geared towards making myself an excellent graduate school candidate capable of innovative research and effective teaching. After graduating I decided not to apply directly to a doctoral program, but instead to experience life outside of school for a few years. I did not feel ready to go back without studying the real world first. I wanted to gain a better understanding of life outside the halls of academia and obtain valuable experience that would make me a better sociologist. I decided to move to Madrid, Spain to become an English teacher. Making this decision completely on my own, I moved halfway across the world without knowing anyone on the other side. I found a job working at two different English Academies, teaching classes of various sizes to students of many different ages and skill levels. Concurrently with my teaching English, I studied Spanish in a ten hour a week intensive course. Thus I experienced class as both a student and a teacher at the same time. After two years living in Madrid, I now have extensive experience which will help me in any Teaching Assistant position that I gain. During the summers in between living in Spain I traveled to Seward, Alaska to work for a wildlife and glacier cruise company. The first summer I was there I lived on a remote island in Resurrection Bay with only fourteen other employees. My second summer I lived in Seward working as a customer service and reservations agent. The contrast between the remoteness of Alaska and the bustling urbanity of Madrid was remarkable, and experiencing both has increased my understanding of society on the macro and micro levels. Much like teaching English in Spain, living in Alaska working for the tourism industry was something unlike anything I had ever done. But I like to do things I am somewhat uncomfortable with if I feel I can learn from it. I like to put myself in new situations so I can see how I react. The first time I stepped outside of my native background was my junior year of college when I studied abroad in Prague, Czech Republic. I chose a former Soviet territory because I knew it would be more challenging than living in a more developed Western European country. I also knew it would stand more in contrast with American culture. Leaving my native surroundings helped me appreciate my own way of life; cultural mores I had taken for granted as automatic I realized were not so. I know what it means to be an American only because I have seen what it means not to be. All these different experiences outside of the classroom have led me to further develop my Sociological imagination through direct contact with other cultures. During college I also took advantage of the opportunities I had to learn and become involved. My enthusiasm for Sociology was not confined to what my classes required of me. Although my senior year of college I enrolled as a part time student in order to save money, I audited four classes – a drugs in world history class, two philosophy classes about Kierkegaard and Epistemology, and a Symbolic Interactionism class. As I was quite interested in the topics, I completed many of the writing assignments and tutored other students as well. At Willamette I was a leader in the Sociology department. My junior year I was awarded the James B. Bjorkquist Sociology Award for outstanding achievement of a junior in Sociology, and my senior year I won the C. Wright Mills Award for outstanding achievement of a senior. I worked for the department as much as I could, developing their website, grading papers, and tutoring other students. Professors specifically solicited me to tutor some students when their own tutors were not helping enough. I was a leader in other aspects of school as well. My sophomore and junior year I was a tour guide and overnight host, and I was an Opening Days student orientation leader for three years, guiding the incoming freshmen through the college transition. In addition I worked at the Writing Center for three years, helping students develop and improve their essays. There I had the dual benefit of garnering teaching experience as well as honing my own writing skills, which will no doubt serve me well all through graduate school. My senior year I had the chance to gain valuable research experience through writing my honors thesis. With a grant I received from the Sociology department, I performed a qualitative content analysis on the media and the way they construct subcultures, using the hippies of the 1960’s as an example. I presented my paper in front of a group of colleagues at our Student Scholarship Day. I learned a tremendous amount throughout the entire research process, and in graduate school I look forward to the opportunity to study even more topics in depth. All of these activities I did because I enjoyed them, but also specifically with the goal of making myself a competitive candidate for graduate school. I played a part in a variety of departments of my university, and I also involved myself with different aspects of the community. In order to gain more understanding of applied Sociology, I volunteered at the Mid-Valley Women’s Crisis Service, a nonprofit organization in Salem, Oregon dedicated to helping women in spousal abuse situations. There I helped write grant applications to fund the center, offering me excellent practice for writing research proposals. I also fielded calls to the crisis hotline, which sometimes required me to transport women to shelter. My time spent working with MVWCS allowed me to apply some of the ideas I had been learning in my Sociology classes in school. I saw theories I had learned about domestic violence and drug abuse manifested in the real life situations I saw. I am most interested in qualitative Sociology, especially in the fields of Social Interaction, Social Psychology, and Symbolic Interactionism. I also find the study of subcultures, deviance, and media quite intriguing. I explored all three of these topics while researching my senior thesis, and I look forward to studying any or all of these topics in graduate school. I already have a Sociological imagination, and I want to expand it further. Although not presently enrolled in school, I think about Sociology all the time. I see examples of theories I studied or concepts I read about in my daily life, which is, after all, why I love Sociology so much. It is inherently relevant on our daily lives. What I learned in undergraduate school about Sociology barely scratches the surface of the discipline, and I want to delve deeper. My experience so far has prepared me to begin a life of serious academic study at the graduate level. My extensive teaching, research, and writing experience will aid me not only in my own studies, but also in helping professors’ studies. It will also make me a more effective teacher. There are myriad other professions I could choose, many of which would not require me to go back to school, but I believe achieving my goal of a Ph.D in Sociology would make me the happiest and most satisfied with my life.