Undergraduate / UC personal statement, political science [6]

Hello!
Yes, i am one of those last minute type of people and find therefore find myself once again in distress with my work. This is my first attempt to put my thoughts on the first UC prompt to paper and i really appreciate suggestions on content and structure.

Thanks, billy

Prompt #1 - What is your intended major? Discuss how your interest in the subject developed and describe any experience you have had in the field - such as volunteer work, internships and employment, participation in student organizations and activities - and what you have gained from your involvement.

Ideas have consequences. As obvious and manifest this simplicity may be, I have seldom come across a truth more profound and universal than this saying by Richard Weber. People with grand ideas are the ones who have determined the course of history and created these different realities that we dwell in, sometimes in a spirit of great progress and other times leading humanity and civilization to the edge of existence. This is distinctively why it is my objective to make the knowledge of how social structures are set and which ideas have brought about what manifestations in government, intrinsic to my awareness. The marriage of philosophy and history, Political Science is my intended major.

This focus of interest and perspective, through which I have absorbed my hitherto education, have always been deeply ingrained in the person I am. Having lived in Mongolia, East Germany, Austria and for this last year now the US, I have seen and experienced a variety of forms of government and though of course not always fully aware of this, now in retrospect and in the position to compare, a fascination in how different people have chosen to live under a different set of agreements and in how these consequently distinct forms of government have affected in a way that nothing else can the lives of the people, was inherent to me. Born in the fall of 1989, about the time when the Berlin Wall fell, constituting what to many meant the end of the Iron Curtain and the defeat of communism as a political doctrine in many countries that were now at their very end of capacity, I see myself as a child of change. Change for the better, for freedom, security and justice breaking away from oppressive and destructive regimes, as had been the communist one. And I have seen this change with my very own eyes, have experienced its immediate consequences on my very own life, yes in fact I was nurtured by it in my quest to understand the workings of how ideas manifest into political reality. I came to understand finally why it was that my parents left my home country, where the ideology of communism that was conservative in its core had rotten the processes of democracy, hopelessly infringing on peoples civil liberties and human rights. I started to question my prevailing ethos of merely assuming the legitimacy of government action. It is this real life experience of my parents living in such a self defying regime as young and ambitious students that really enforced a notion of precaution when it comes to proceedings that seem to overextend the governments scope or are arbitrary in nature even in today's political process. But my parents were lucky to circumvent Soviet "reeducation" and avoid indoctrination by leaving the country for Eastern Germany which then still was communist, but far more liberal then the situation in Central Asia had been. Here voices of protest demanding that change that was soon to come were loud and public. This was the spirit of activism that inspired my parents of the promises of the west, freedom, equality and the prospect of self-realization and was instilled in my world view growing up. Opportunity and security were the foundation of our life in Austria, where my parents finally settled and I was able to thrive from the social system that was distinctive to a small state unity that is mainly focused on domestic issues. I now came to understand by experiencing myself the benefits of a government, that is very inwardly focused to ensure the welfare of its citizens, how Austria's form of government helped it to prosper and which of its policies might have counterproductive effects, in a conflict between the freedom of action that I have now experienced saucer-eyed in the US and the categorical insurance of equality. It was exactly this conviction that everyone ought to have the same, fairly high equality of outcome, that gave me and all other students in Austria access to a highly qualified yet public high school education, which I have embraced full heartedly.

In this journey of escaping the ruins of a totalitarian regime to come to the States, one of the most liberal and progressive countries in the world, I have gained a very intrinsic and personal appreciation for the ideas that have driven the major developments in world history and the specific processes of how they did so. Reading the great Western classics of Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes and Locke further inspired me and truly made me understand the importance of ideology as the main force to write history. Given my own background, the questions that will not only prevail throughout but also guide my future studies are ones of international dimensions and magnitudes.