Scholarship / Interactive teaching - GKS GRADUATE PERSONAL STATEMENT [NEW]

Hello, This is my personal statement and I need some feedback :)

Thank you in advance

personal statement

- Motivations with which you apply for this program
- Family and Education background
- Significant experiences you have had; risks you have taken and achievements you have made, persons or
events that have had a significant influence on you
- Extracurricular activities such as club activities, community service activities or work experiences
- If applicable, describe awards you have received, publications you have made, or skills you have acquired,
etc.

I have spent three years being a language teaching assistant and four years volunteering as a teacher during my undergraduate study. Delivering lessons to students and designing their language learning activities by using interactive teaching methods to improve their cognitive skills are simply what I love to do as I can share my knowledge and ideas of language and linguistics as my subject with others. Besides, with my passion for linguistics, I was appointed to be a master of ceremony for an international agendum and a translator for a series of international discussions held on my campus in 2016. At the end of 2017, I was then chosen as the Arabic Language Student Ambassador. Forasmuch as I have dedicated myself to children and education, I was appointed to be Youth Moslem Peace Ambassador in mid-2019 and contributed to social activities in Community Learning Center, Malaysia.

My lovely mother is surviving from epilepsy and neurological disease. Hence, I had a dream of serving as a doctor who cures patients when I was a child. However, due to the fact that my parents suffered from a debt-ridden condition for a dozen years, I decided to delve into linguistics and found that Neuro-Linguistics can function as a panacea to neurotrauma patients. As a result, I am quite sure I can still make my dream come true. Linguistics has encouraged me to analyze language phenomena that emerge in my surroundings as well. For instance, the basis of foreign language teaching has not changed that much in the past 17 years, inviting students only to memorize formulas and vocabularies without knowing how to construct sentences as native speakers. Theferore, I compiled a contrastive study of collocation phenomena between 3 languages for my bachelor thesis with the intention of increasing the language learners and teachers awareness about the importance of syntax and semantics in language acquisition. As quoted Thomas G. Masaryk, "As many languages you know, as many times you are a human being" has opened my mind to other languages. One of them is Korean Language, which I started learning through attending courses in 2019. It turns out that Hangeul shares similarities with Hijaiyyah (Arabic alphabet) in terms of articulation points and phonological changes to some extent. Besides, the derivation of Korean words is captivating.

Apart from the aforementioned, the advancement of technology has indirectly contributed to the rapid spread of fake news and phishing sites. In Indonesia, around 800.000 hoax sites and over 88 million cases of cyber-attacks have been recorded by the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology between January and April 2020. This condition has raised my concern over the language styles used in such news and sites since 5 years ago. The provocative style mostly arouses the public's curiosity to click the sites and eventually read the contents. In order to fight against hoaxes, I was then echoed to become a journalist and an educational content writer in some online platforms for about five years, since I do believe that these small moves would make changes rather than just staring at the monitor.

In my personal perspective, completing a bachelor's degree does not suffice to be an eminent linguist. This reason particularly motivates me to take a step further by pursuing a master's degree. In this regard, studying in South Korea, the county that witnessed the lower rate than the OECD average for a patient dying from stroke and highlighted the great potential in the medical devices industry seems highly promising to me to rehabilitate people with brain injury by practicing speech therapy. In addition, the existance of tech giants such as Samsung, LG, Kakao Talk, Naver, and even newly established Scatter Lab, which constantly develops AI and NLP, will give me an insight of how to put the knowledge acquired into practice. I really hope to develop a language learning application that helps learners to get instant feedback by utilizing Artificial Intelligence (AI). On the other side, in response to the emergence of fake news and phishing sites, the implementation of both AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP) in cognitive psychology and computational models of intelligence will help me to build a software which can prevent mobile phones from receiving harmful contents.

South Korea, the global innovation leader, also known as the biggest research investor and the greatest nation that emphasizes education. Studying at the top research center will obviously boost my motivation to do a lot of academic journal-standard articles. The Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at Hankuk University for Foreign Studies, Cognitive Science at Seoul National University, and Cognitive Science at JeonBuk National University offer most courses that are currently unavailable in my country. This means attending those courses will let me dive into additional linguistics and cognitive science areas.

Being raised in an economically challenged family makes me impossible to obtain a higher degree, but I feel very confident that GKS by NIIED will be there to give me a hand for realizing my goal as a lingustic all-rounder. Then, given its excellent reputation, I have no doubt that studying in South Korea is a perfect choice for me to conduct in-depth research in the field of applied linguistics and cognitive science so I can dedicate myself to the public and linguistics students, afterwards.