The study of Communication Sciences and Disorders is a most natural choice for me because of my sheer love of language and communication, combined with my love for teaching and helping people to communicate better, especially children. I have the greatest language ability in Russian and I am working on becoming a near native speaker of English. I now live, work, and study in New York City. The Master’s Program at XXXX is my first choice for graduate school primarily because of the sheer excellence and rigorous nature of your program.
I am also very much attracted to your central focus on early intervention. I see your program as the ultimate preparation for providing speech therapy services for children from low-income, multicultural and marginalized backgrounds, providing support to the families and to the children a chance to fulfill their potential. I look forward to a lifetime of giving my all every day to inspire, motivate, and empower children with difficulties communicating to overcome those difficulties to whatever extent it is possible.
Raised in Azerbaijan for the first 6 years of my life, we moved between Belarus and Russia until coming to the USA in November of 2009 and I am now a permanent resident. Since I came to the USA, my dream of going to graduate school to become an SLP professional has been growing in leaps and bounds and I am very highly motivated to excel. While still in Russia, I studied linguistics (including computational), various languages (Spanish, French) and education, earning my degree in 2007. Now, my dream is to put my education to good use as an SLP professional here in America; first, by learning everything that I can in your program at XXXX.
I am most thankful for the fact that I learned Spanish very early on since I traveled to Spain with my family for 2 months each trip, going 2 consecutive years when I was 13 and 14 years old. Thus, while I do have a Russian accent in Spanish, it is not nearly as strong as it would be if I had learned Spanish as an adult. I am also making progress at improving my conversational French. I am especially dedicated to the recovery and improvement of my Spanish because I want very much to be able to help children learn to communicate better for whom Spanish is their primary language. I have become aware of the great need that exists in this regard serving as a volunteer with the organization Jumpstart, in Brooklyn, a program for children from at-risk, low-income families.
Recently, I also started volunteering at an adult care home and I have been involved for some time with both Walk for Hearing and Walk for Autism. I have observed numerous diagnostic and treatment sessions in both English and Spanish and I was active in my student Speech and Hearing Society while completing my BA in Speech Language Pathology at Brooklyn College, graduating September 2015. I began volunteering before coming to America, working with children in an orphanage in Belarus. This has helped to inspire my passion for a lifetime of service helping children.
Having always been near the top of my class, I received a full scholarship that covered my 5 years of tuition, research and student conference participation. After graduation I worked as both a teacher and as a project manager, finance specialist, international sales manager, and quality audit manager. It did not take me long to realize that the corporate world is not for me. While obtaining my first BA degree in Linguistics I worked as a teaching assistant, a camp counselor with children from orphanages, including many with communication as well as behavioral problems; and I realized that there was no comparison with the business world where I did not find any sense of profound meaning, nothing like I do when I am helping children to do new things that they have never done, saying things that they have never said before.
I grieved for the situation of so many special needs children in Belarus, simply locked away out of sight for the most part, generally orphanages. It was in this period that I became engaged with social justice issues, concerning the welfare of children. I have invested a lot of time and practice in photography, which I am convinced will serve me well as an SLP professional. I also love sports, especially water and swimming, which I also plan to put to good use as I practice in the future. At some point, I hope to create a non-profit organization for special needs children with developmental disorders (like autism) and create special events to help stimulate their interaction with their environment, surfing for example.
This coming summer, 2016, I will be participating in the WAVE Program in Lima Peru, teaching English to local children and working on my Spanish. I also plant to explore and learn about some of the resources in Peru for children with communication and language difficulties.
Thank you for considering my application to XXXX.
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