Sample Personal Statement Social Work (MSW)
by Talha Omer, M.Eng., Cornell Grad
In personal statement samples by field.
The following personal statement is written by an applicant who got accepted to Masters’s program in Social Work (MSW) with a concentration in Gender and Sex studies and a specialization in LGBTQ. Variations of this personal statement got accepted at Columbia University and UNC-Chapel Hill. Read this essay to understand what a top personal statement in Social Work should look like.
You might also be interested in reading this Sample MSW Statement of Purpose that got admitted to Michigan University and the University of Washington.
Sample Personal Statement in Social Work (MSW)
If you ever have a candid conversation with a male transgender sex worker in Bangkok, you shall be left both wiser and disquieted. Wiser because you will realize that she is performing gender; she walks, talks, and acts in a way that reinforces an impression of her being a woman. And disquieted because you will become aware of the acute lack of sexual health education and the omnipresent danger of HIV and AIDS among the members of this population.
But, of course, the eight-year-old ‘I’ was nothing like ‘You.’ My first encounter with a transgender sex worker happened while I sat in the backseat of my father’s car, waiting for my parents to return from the grocery shop that they often frequented. As she knocked on the glass window to beg for change in the typical, hyper-feminine style of a Southeast Asian transgender, I was just left in a total state of wonder. I do not quite remember exactly how wonderment pounced on me; perhaps, the artificiality of her loud and extravagant make-up, exhibiting the genuineness of her being, caught my fascination and curiosity. Or maybe it was the bounce in her gait, displaying resistance and self-assurance, that I felt was admirable and exceptional. I cannot say for sure, for I do not know. Although, I do know this: I also have a bounce in my gait. And as I’ve grown older, it has only become more pronounced.
In Thailand, everybody performs gender. However, the consequences can be dire if gender is not portrayed as mandated by political, social, cultural, and religious institutions. Indeed, for women, but explicitly for those who do not fit neatly into the gender binary or are non-conforming in their gender presentations. Discrimination, persecution, and murder cases are frequently reported and then forgotten. Consider the case in which the burnt remains of a transgender person were found in Bangkok – the political heart of my motherland.
However, this is not, as often characterized, a problem of religion; nothing in the scripture prescribes stoning, lynching, incarceration, or the penalty of death for ‘homosexuality’ or transsexuality.’ These varying laws in Muslim-majority countries show that the problem is often a literalist, ill-informed, and prejudiced policymaker reading into the text ‘punishments’ that do not exist therein. Lebanon, for example, legalized same-sex sexual activity in 1951. While Saudi Arabia and Iran can both prescribe capital punishment for these intimate, private performances. For the last year, as a regularly published columnist for New York Times Opinion Op-ed , I have tried to mainstream the cause and consequences of policing gender, sexuality, and identity in Thailand. In my first column, “A Tyranny No Different,” I showed that Thailand’s Penal Code section 377, which criminalizes same-sex behavior, has absolute semantic similarity with Sub Section 175 of the Third Reich and that this provision, which we now have common with 42 former British colonies, was introduced into the legal system by the British Raj. Dominant groups inside the country today use coercion and hegemony – making this a Public Policy problem.
My academic progress at university has been my most challenging rendition till now. After completing high school, I had to take a year off from my pursuit of happiness – education. Not having the financial means necessary to undertake undergraduate studies, I had to supplement it by seeking employment. I chose the profession which was both morally uplifting and financially rewarding – teaching fifteen to twenty-year-olds. With a credible background in public speaking, my performance in education management and policy began by emulating the Greek sophists. As a freshman, I started coaching forensics, debating, and public speaking at schools in my city. And during my sophomore year, I was promoted to coordinating and teaching the General Certificate of Education Advanced Level on Government and Politics and Global Perspectives.
During these last six years, I have come to chair the Forensics, Debate, and Public Speaking department and remain the youngest high school faculty member at three campuses of Thailand’s largest private school network. While engaged in this fray against the leviathan of financial scarcity, I had to sacrifice 22+ hours a week, and because of this, my grades were maimed. This performance had much in common with Alice (of Wonderland), for, like her, I, too, tried to learn “as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” I learned to accept that responsibility can be thrust on one by fate, and one must deal with it with stoicism and courage. I learned that time could both be managed and raced against. But most importantly, in both taking and giving lectures, I learned that education is the only institution for real and visceral change. As my students used the individual and collaborative research skills taught in my courses to answer tense policy questions – for their final Cambridge assessments – concerning gender, sexuality, human rights, climate change, and others, their minds became freer; I witnessed Rationality vanquish Ignorance.
At university, I majored in Political Science and was fortunate enough to authorize courses on Western Political Thought and Political Philosophy. It was during this time that I realized that Public Policy is the contemporary version of old philosophical questions asked by, for example, Plato in “The Republic,” Al-Farabi in “The Virtuous City” or John Rawls in “Justice as Fairness”: how should states enable their citizenry to lead a good life; how does a government balance Liberty with Authority. What is Justice? A philosophical inquiry led me to the works of Judith Butler and Michel Foucault, which helped me become self-aware of the legitimacy of my performance as a member of the non-heteronormative population.
Philosophy also helped calm my existence, bruised by social contingencies as it was, rekindled my spirit for policy and parliamentary debating, and led me to perform well at both national and international tournaments. I won ten national championships and received full funding to represent Thailand at two United Asian Debating Championships. I traveled to Macau, China, and Singapore. In Singapore, we became the only Thailand team to reach the octo-finals of Asia’s top parliamentary debating championship (UADC) in the tournament’s history. Against 120 teams from across the continent, Thailand was ranked 7th, prevailing over teams from India, China, Indonesia, Japan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and others.
The crescendo of this performance was when I successfully defended the motion “This house would prosecute parents who actively suppress the sexual orientation of their children” against the host institution, Nanyang Technological University of Singapore. Though my parents may have made bad financial choices, they never chose to suppress the nature of my being. Yet, as an awry, bent clay pot, the dynamics of Thai society have given me an acute awareness of the forms of suppression. And I have often felt Henley’s “foul clutch of circumstance” searingly and intimately. So this motion was a chance at retribution; meeting the heteronormative on the elysian fields of reason and explaining to them the cruel outcomes of their policies; outcomes of suppression, conversion, guilt, and shame, that were both harmful and dehumanizing.
If I am to acquire the tools to test the policy outcomes of the institutions that manufacture, regulate and enforce gender, sexuality, and gender norms, I must go to the country which was the birthplace of the Queer Liberation Movement. A country that extended its hate crime law to include sexual orientation after the murder of a single individual, Matthew Shepherd, because of the bounce in his walk; a country which, after the decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, made their “union a little more perfect.”
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