Asian American studies personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

The book that pushed me towards this subject was Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, which I picked up from a returns trolley while shelving at the library where I work. I had expected a straightforward memoir and instead found something that moves between family talk, myth and silence, and refuses to explain itself for an outside reader. It made me think about the stories in my own family that only ever arrive in fragments, and about how differently migration gets written about depending on who is doing the writing. From there I read John Okada's No-No Boy and Cathy Park Hong's Minor Feelings, and I began to see Asian American studies as a field with its own arguments rather than a collection of individual books. What interests me most is how a category invented for census forms and immigration law became something people organised around. I want to study how exclusion legislation, wartime incarceration and Cold War labour recruitment shaped who was allowed to be American, and how the model minority idea was used to manage other communities as much as to praise this one. Studying this from Britain also appeals to me. I grew up with British debates about integration and belonging, and reading American material gives me a way of seeing how particular our own language is. I am applying now, at twenty-nine, because I have spent several years reading around the subject in my own time and want the discipline of sustained argument, primary sources and proper criticism rather than my own impressions.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

I took A-levels in English Literature, History and Business Studies at seventeen and went straight into work, which at the time felt like the sensible choice. Returning to study this year through an Access to Higher Education Diploma in Humanities has been the most demanding and the most rewarding thing I have done. The course covered literature, history and sociology, and taught me to work with evidence rather than opinion. In the history strand I wrote an extended piece on American immigration restriction in the early twentieth century, using digitised newspaper reports and the text of the 1924 Immigration Act. Working with those sources showed me how much of the argument for exclusion was made in the language of science and public health, and how quotas encoded ideas about desirable ancestry. My tutor's comments on that essay taught me to stop summarising and start making a case. In sociology I studied ethnicity and identity, which gave me vocabulary for things I had noticed but never named, including racialisation and the difference between individual prejudice and structural disadvantage. I also had to learn academic writing conventions from scratch, and I now keep a reading notebook with page references, questions and disagreements, which has made my essays far more precise. Alongside the diploma I have been teaching myself to read scholarly articles properly, working slowly through journal pieces on diaspora and comparative racialisation.

What else have you done to prepare outside of education, and why are these experiences useful?

I have worked as a library assistant for three years, and before that in a clothing shop and a garden centre. Library work suits the way I think. I handle reservations and enquiries, run the weekly homework club for teenagers, and helped rearrange our small local history collection after a donation of photographs and parish records arrived in no order at all. Cataloguing that material taught me patience with primary sources and the value of describing something accurately before interpreting it. I have also learned to explain unfamiliar systems clearly to people who are tired, hurried or anxious, which I expect to matter in seminars where people come from very different backgrounds. For the past two years I have volunteered at a Saturday English conversation group run from a community centre, mostly with recent arrivals from South Asia and East Africa. I mainly make tea, set out chairs and talk. Listening to people describe how paperwork, work permits and family separation shape their lives has given practical weight to what I read about immigration policy. At home I have been recording interviews with my mother about leaving Kenya as a child and about my grandparents' journey from Tamil Nadu, transcribing them properly and noting where memory and documents disagree. Outside all this I play badminton in a Tuesday league and grow tomatoes on a shared allotment, which keeps the reading in proportion. Studying part of my life around a job has made me organised, and I intend to bring that steadiness to a degree.

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