personal statement
Maximum : 500 words
When writing your personal statement, you should consider the following topics:
· Why do you wish to take this particular course of study?
· Why are you applying to the School?
· How does it fit into your career objectives?
Accessibility, a word I frequently heard, read and cited during my days in Nepal, is pivotal to my understanding of public and global health issues. Before I started my internship at Dhulikhel Hospital, I had expected to see the distribution of medical resources. Instead, when I visited the outreach centres for the first time, some unexpected scenes caught my eye: the installation of cooking stoves, community-based micro-health insurance and the active promotion of reducing toxins in farming. Those miscellaneous initiatives didn't seem to align under a common purpose, and their sheer scope raised one question in my mind: What is the role of those initiatives beyond offering medical services to the local community?
Reconsidering the question alongside the information I had obtained from interviews with my seniors and observation during my internship period. I recognized where the goal of the projects converged: promoting accessibility. Trying to classify the projects according to their focus on accessibility, I realized that the centres were attempting to ensure that its patients have access to a safe local environment and health facilities. From that point onwards, I turned my efforts toward the problem of accessibility when understanding healthcare issues.
After I completed my internship in Nepal, I spent six months in Uganda away from the university, through which I gained substantial first-hand experience and enriched my interests by designing a healthcare project. My central focus in the project was the deteriorated role of Village Health Teams (VHT)-a primary health provider in rural health initiatives - in the community I lived due to misplaced healthcare resource distribution. Only one person had charge of 1000 households' health issues, which thereby lowered the patient's access to basic medical resources. No matter how much I contemplated the method for accessibility, it was obvious that main agent of intervention must be government. Without policy-level intervention, would my small-scale project really improve patient's accessibility? That question became watershed moment of my career objective; evaluating and monitoring the international healthcare projects of South Korea as healthcare project consultant.
How do we tailor health program framework in international projects? Answering to question would be the prerequisite of finding applicable method and the first step toward my career objective. I aim to find answers to those question and appreciate holistic understanding of healthcare system and dynamics between health policy and intervention within policy-making process. Thus, I am attracted to MSc in Health Policy, Planning & Financing, which specialized seminars hosted by alumni of LSHTM and modules of policy analysis in LSE. From your program, I expect to gain a holistic perspective of method for economic policy analysing and system intervention for health promotion. I strongly believe that the interdisciplinary natures of LSHTM and LSE would enrich my academic insight and narrow my academic interest in finding applicable methods where health system and accessibility intersect.