Motivation Statement
I am attracted to the Peace Corps because its two main tenets, travel and service, interest me. I believe I have sufficient tact and training to live in a foreign country and work for others. Francis Bacon wrote in his essay on travel, ““Travel in the younger sort is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience;” he then goes on to describe a lasting association with a foreign culture which involves total immersion, deep personal relationships and continuing contact. Bacon and many other authors wrote about the difference between a superficial trip and true travel; however I have never really had this sort of experience, and experience with other cultures has been limited at best. In high school and early in college I studied Latin and Greek, believing that they would help my mastery of English and expand my understanding of western culture; however I now regret never learning to speak a modern language. In college I had a concentration in history, which is a sort of travel in which the student must seek to understand past cultures with an open mind. However, books and artifacts are severely limited and cannot substitute for actual experience. I hope to continue my education now by living abroad for an extended period of time.
To a large degree I was shaped by my high school, a Jesuit boy’s school which chose as its motto the phrase, “A Man for others.” All of its students had to perform community service in order to graduate, and I spent several weekends at a hospice for terminal cancer patients. In college, however, classes and work limit my time and I have not reached out as much as I would have liked. The service aspect of the Peace Corps is also important for me, and I hope to be more than a traveler in whichever country I work in.
In addition to these reasons I wish to test myself in a new environment. I have spent well over a decade in school and now hope to put my education to use. I have studied under teachers who told us students that we were being trained to think, that we could work through a wide array of problems as they arose by approaching them logically and weighing our options. I believe I can put this sort of ability to use serving others and I hope that I can react to new situations as they arise. I dislike backing away from challenges, and after every failure I spend hours thinking about what I could have done differently, about how I could work harder to change the next result. I believe that service in a foreign country could be the most difficult and rewarding thing I have done thus far in my life, and I am excited about the prospect of working abroad.
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