Dear reader,
I am preparing a personal statement for the GKS scholarship, Graduate 2022 which is supposed to be a maximum 2 pages with the following instructions given:
- Educational background
- Significant experiences you have had; 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 would love to receive any feedback possible on the essay as a whole and on whether or not I am making it too personal and not professional enough. Thank you in advance for your help! It is basically an essay about how I came to study what I study through events and people that influenced me (my family), why I want to do a master's in Korea and not Netherlands and why the GKS scholarship.
PERSONAL STATEMENT
As a daughter of an adopted mother, for a large period of my life I struggled with having a part of me I knew nothing about. Although my mother was born in OO, South Korea, she left the country too young to remember anything about the Korean culture or language. I always felt like I was less Dutch than my friends at school but I could not understand what was different about me. We ate the same Dutch breakfast (Hagelslag op brood, which is simply bread covered in chocolate sprinkles), spoke the same Amsterdam dialect and played the same games during recess. Yet, I felt like an outsider with no idea what the reason was.
My whole life changed when my mother sought help from OOO, an association for Korean adoptees in the Netherlands. They helped her find the adoption documents from her old orphanage that eventually led to my mother contacting her biological family. We travelled together to OO to meet our family in the summer before I started high school. Their English was bad, and our Korean non-existing, so my family hired a translator to help us communicate. Even though we could not directly communicate, in only a matter of hours we had formed a very special and strong bond with our family.
Though I loved my new-found family, I now struggled even more with my identity. Was I Dutch? Was I Korean? Neither, or both? My mom signed her, my little brother and me up for Korean language classes at a Korean School in the weekends. Not only did we learn the language, we learned a lot about the culture as well. As my knowledge of Korea grew, I identified myself more strongly as Korean. Interestingly, I started to feel a stronger connection with my Dutch side at the same time as well. By virtue of my affinity with languages, every time we returned to Korea, I knew more Korean than the last time, which my family responded to with cheers and applause. My eagerness to get closer to my family and to be able to translate between us and our family is what motivated me to do the bachelor Korea Studies.
Before deciding I wanted to apply for Korea Studies, I always aspired to be a doctor. In the Dutch education system, students choose a profile with a fixed set of courses they will follow in their third year until the sixth year, in which they graduate. There are two social profiles ("Culture & Society" and "Economy & Society" and two profiles which focus on exact sciences ("Nature & Health" and "Nature & Technology"). My teachers advised me strongly against choosing an exact sciences profile, since the social sciences were where I received the best grades. This, however, I believe not to be the result of my abilities, but my interest in languages over exact sciences. The reason I feel this to be true, is that I received the 1st price for the annual Spelling Contest in my first year of high school, as well as the 2nd price for the annual Mathematics Contest in the second year. Not only did I end up choosing a more exact profile anyway, I decided to do both of them. The fact that my teachers did not think I could do it, made me more motivated to show them I was strong enough and more resilient than they thought.
Besides working extra hard to acquire good grades in school, I volunteered at the outpatient clinic of the Netherlands Cancer Institute. Additionally, I was given the opportunity to shadow one of their oncologists for a day. While these were all amazing experiences, I felt like I missed the link between my love for Korea and my passion for helping people in this profession. Eventually, I simply followed my heart and decided on Korea Studies, even though I did not know how I could help people with my knowledge in the future.
Instead of committing to one profession fully, this time I aimed to explore as many fields as I could. I applied for a minor in Journalism and took up various parttime jobs, including a sales assistant job at a Korean supermarket, a support services assistant job in the finance department and the job that I have now had for 4 years as a receptionist at the American international law firm XX XX, the Xth highest grossing law firm in the world. Despite the fact that I learned how to navigate in a big corporate office and how to deal with busy and highly demanding people, working for a company of which the main objective is to earn the most income did not attract me.
I believe that helping and connecting with people is something that has always been a part of me, in my personal life I enjoyed teaching English to Korean children and adults, became the neighborhood babysitter and often baked pastries or cooked meals for my friends and relatives, but my biggest goal related to my study was to become a bridge between my mom and her Korean family. Now, I want to expand that into a bigger vision, becoming a bridge between South Korea and the Netherlands and attempting to give back to the nations that made me the person I am today. More specifically, I would love to either help Korean adoptees in the Netherlands or Overseas Koreans in South Korea with the social and cultural struggles they might encounter in both countries. In order to fulfill this dream, I am currently focusing on social and cultural aspects of the South Korean society, with a thesis on South Korean feminism and how politics are affected by the cultural changes. Additionally, my regular trips to South Korea, the last one being 9 months for a Korean language course at XX University, provide me with new insights into cultural and societal changes time and time again and the ability to compare those with the ones in the Netherlands. Last year, I started recording these differences and I began regularly uploading videos on YouTube. This made me even more excited to work as a liaison for both countries and provide a smooth exchange of culture between the two.
For this reason, I think it is important for me to gather more knowledge of International Relations and the right way for countries to communicate and work with each other. In my home country, there is only one Master program I can follow on the study of South Korea, but for me it lacks courses related in International Relations, which is why I decided to look for a Master's in South Korea itself and thankfully, many South Korean universities merged these two studies together in some or many ways.
In addition to the fact that without a scholarship like the GKS, I do not have the financial abilities to pursue my studies in South Korea, I think that being able to receive the Global Korea Scholarship is such a fine and almost unattainable accomplishment on itself that, like my teachers telling me I should not choose an exact sciences profile, it pushes me even harder to prove I can in fact attain even the unexpected. In the case that I do get chosen for this scholarship, I pledge to take this passion with me and use it to strengthen the bridge between South Korea and the Netherlands.