PEACE CORPS APPLICATION ESSAY
On May 11, 1996, a DC-9 aircraft operated by ValuJet Airlines, carrying one hundred five passengers and five crew members crashed over the Florida Everglades. I was thirteen. I wrote my first personally assigned article of the incident and reported it to my father, who smiled. A dream began. I have always loved to re-tell accounts to people, important ones that relayed all the facts. Therefore, my journey to becoming a journalist began.
At twenty-four, some fourteen years later, I am still in pursuit of the same dream, graduating from college with an Undergraduate Major in American Studies, and minor in Communications. Over the last fourteen years, time has not changed much, in addition to my love for journalism; I have developed a strong liking to cultures independent of my own. I thrive on pursuing new experiences and the educational opportunities they present.
Above all, I feel that this example best describes my abilities as an honest, diligent, accountable hard worker. Attributes that surpass minimal envisions by the Peace Corps
Traveling abroad for the duration of 27 months, I am certain, will bring a multitude of unpredictable educational endeavors. With great experience however, I have learned, also comes great struggle. I feel that the greatest barrier for me will be a language barrier. I have experienced this in my travels abroad to the Island of Curacao, N.A., although frustrating at times, the experience brought me basic skills in communicating with islanders who speak the native language of Papiamento.
This experience applies specifically to the latter half of Core Expectation number two: Share your skills, adapt them, and learn knew skills as needed. At times, I have found, that when you are so far from your natural element, situations that provide opportunities for adapting personal skills, are at times, easily over looked, in the heat of vexation. This is something I anticipate to be my greatest challenge, welcomed most warmly to overcome.
Overall, I await the worldly knowledge offered by the Peace Corps. It will be a wealthy investment of my time that will expose me to outcomes that are not effortlessly produced in traditional educational settings. It will certainly attribute greatly to my expectations of pursuing work in the field of journalism beyond my years in the Peace Corps.
Hi Katrina,
This is a very, very well written essay! There are no punctuation or grammar issues, and the voice is both engaging and compelling. The only advice I think I could offer would be to revise the first paragraph. The way it's set up is an excellent lead-in to the rest of your essay, but you have some wiggle room with the number of words left. It might help to make it a bit more obvious that your father isn't, say, smiling at reading about the crashed airliner! (not that they won't figure it out, simply that the first time I read it, I interpreted it poorly)
Hope you get in! Thank you for your service :)
Cameron
