Is my personal statement sending the wrong message?
Posted: Thu Nov 17, 2016 8:56 pm
I feel like my personal statement seems a little too loosy-goosy and I feel like it makes me look non-committal. What do you guys think? Any critiques overall?
Early in my collegiate career I became fascinated with the field of optics and decided to delve deeper by participating in some experimental optics research. This included talking with Thorlab vendors, designing, constructing and testing various optical systems, including Michelson, Fabry-Perot and Dual Wavelength Interferometers. After gaining this experience I was fortunate enough to get a summer internship at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Labs (LLNL). This internship provided me the opportunity to design and test experiments that characterized the reflectance of replacement materials used for NIF’s Near Backscatter Imaging (NBI) and Full Aperture Backscatter (FABS), as well as being tasked with assisting in experiments at the Jupiter Laser Facility. Throughout this time, I was immensely impressed and excited with the work and used any spare time to try and receive some meaningful advice from the scientists there about my future career. All the advice suggested that I’d need a PhD and that it would take about ten years until I was qualified enough to work at NIF. To a twenty-year-old kid, who was never able to answer the question “what do you want to do in 5 years?” with anything more than “solve challenging problems”, this was a bombshell. It’s not that I was afraid of the challenge, or the difficulty, but rather the lengthy commitment to a field that I, until recently, had had little experience with. Admittedly, the general notion of a PhD was intimidating, with fears of becoming overqualified, pigeon-holing myself and the general prospect of not making any money for 5 or more years. However, I enjoyed the challenge my research provided and decided a BS in Physics wasn’t enough. I hoped that a MS in Mechanical Engineering would provide me the challenging research I desired without the time commitment of a PhD.
As I finished of my MS, I realized that I loved every minute of my research, even when it was agonizing, and was lucky enough to get a good position as an engineer with a company that was in the forefront of researching and developing rocket engines. Yet it soon dawned on me that as an engineer my “research” focused very little on the actual science involved in rocket engines, leaving me pining for the days when I was researching new science fields rather than new ways to make the same analysis. I eventually realized the time commitment of a PhD was nothing compared to the time commitment of working in a field that was only technically challenging and didn’t fill my need to research novel and interesting science. I ultimately made the decision to fully commit to pursuing my PhD by quitting my job and joining an experimental group hunting for dark matter at the University of California at San Diego. While this work isn’t related to optics, it has provided me the opportunity to again take a proposed experiment from published articles to fruition, as well as supplementing my confidence that pursuing a PhD is the correct choice for me.
This peculiar path has given me a uniquely qualifying background: the ability to flourish in graduate-level classes; the capacity to perform high level research; the capability to take a complicated project from start to finish; the experience of presenting and competing in conference competitions; the skill of designing, constructing and testing my own optical systems; as well as the hindsight that this the right decision for me that can only come from making the wrong one.
Thanks
Early in my collegiate career I became fascinated with the field of optics and decided to delve deeper by participating in some experimental optics research. This included talking with Thorlab vendors, designing, constructing and testing various optical systems, including Michelson, Fabry-Perot and Dual Wavelength Interferometers. After gaining this experience I was fortunate enough to get a summer internship at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Labs (LLNL). This internship provided me the opportunity to design and test experiments that characterized the reflectance of replacement materials used for NIF’s Near Backscatter Imaging (NBI) and Full Aperture Backscatter (FABS), as well as being tasked with assisting in experiments at the Jupiter Laser Facility. Throughout this time, I was immensely impressed and excited with the work and used any spare time to try and receive some meaningful advice from the scientists there about my future career. All the advice suggested that I’d need a PhD and that it would take about ten years until I was qualified enough to work at NIF. To a twenty-year-old kid, who was never able to answer the question “what do you want to do in 5 years?” with anything more than “solve challenging problems”, this was a bombshell. It’s not that I was afraid of the challenge, or the difficulty, but rather the lengthy commitment to a field that I, until recently, had had little experience with. Admittedly, the general notion of a PhD was intimidating, with fears of becoming overqualified, pigeon-holing myself and the general prospect of not making any money for 5 or more years. However, I enjoyed the challenge my research provided and decided a BS in Physics wasn’t enough. I hoped that a MS in Mechanical Engineering would provide me the challenging research I desired without the time commitment of a PhD.
As I finished of my MS, I realized that I loved every minute of my research, even when it was agonizing, and was lucky enough to get a good position as an engineer with a company that was in the forefront of researching and developing rocket engines. Yet it soon dawned on me that as an engineer my “research” focused very little on the actual science involved in rocket engines, leaving me pining for the days when I was researching new science fields rather than new ways to make the same analysis. I eventually realized the time commitment of a PhD was nothing compared to the time commitment of working in a field that was only technically challenging and didn’t fill my need to research novel and interesting science. I ultimately made the decision to fully commit to pursuing my PhD by quitting my job and joining an experimental group hunting for dark matter at the University of California at San Diego. While this work isn’t related to optics, it has provided me the opportunity to again take a proposed experiment from published articles to fruition, as well as supplementing my confidence that pursuing a PhD is the correct choice for me.
This peculiar path has given me a uniquely qualifying background: the ability to flourish in graduate-level classes; the capacity to perform high level research; the capability to take a complicated project from start to finish; the experience of presenting and competing in conference competitions; the skill of designing, constructing and testing my own optical systems; as well as the hindsight that this the right decision for me that can only come from making the wrong one.
Thanks