Personal Statement

When I applied for grad school, I had to write a personal statement, so naturally I chose to write about superheroes. To this day I believe that this essay is the primary reason I was accepted.

Batman and Superman. To many, they are the two most well known comic book heroes in the world. But to me, the represent the dichotomy of humanity: what we would like to do, and what we can do. While it would be great to be able to crush coal into diamonds in our bare hands or fly across the planet in the blink of an eye like Superman, mere mortals are not capable of such feats. Instead, we must be like Batman, and do everything we can to do some good in this world. To me, I’ve always seen science through the eyes of Batman: still dreaming, but dreaming about what good we can do now, with what we already know. This is why when the majority of my classmates went the way of research, I went the way of analytical work.

I have always been interested in science; even in high school, I was one of the few students who were actually interested in pursing any form of science beyond graduation. I took every science course offered and was always at the top of my classes. I was respected among my teachers as being a very capable lab student. When it came time to attend college, I chose chemistry over other sciences because I felt that chemistry offered a many more opportunities for direct use of its principles in every corner of the world and in everything that we do. Also, my father had been a chemistry student and I always appreciated his analytical abilities and felt like that was a trait that I wanted to learn.

In college, I worked hard to learn the basic scientific principles I would need later, and I always became a student that my fellow classmates relied on to be a leader in the lab groups. My hard work made me eligible for the senior honor’s program at the university, and my research in unnatural amino acid synthesis gave me the opportunity to become familiar with a number of analytical methods well beyond the scope and duration that the regular class laboratories allowed.

Since graduation, I have been employed at an environmental testing company in the organic analytical department. I have been solely responsible for the volatiles analyses we conduct, and as a result I have learned an enormous amount about the maintenance and operation of the gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer as well as about the ability to analyze problems and figure out their solutions.

I believe a master’s degree in forensic science will give me the knowledge I will need to be an effective and positive addition to this growing field. It is my dream to continue to use my knowledge of chemistry and my analytical disposition in new and exciting ways, and I feel that forensic science is the best way for me to do that. Most importantly, I don’t feel that I have learned enough yet to be as effective as I could be and continued education will undoubtedly be the best course to take. As for specifically selecting the University of Illinois at Chicago, UIC consistently came up at the top of lists when I searched for forensic science programs as well as being recommended by the criminal justice faculty at my undergraduate university. And while a number of universities may offer forensic science master’s degrees, UIC has the added benefit of a big city experience. I have resided in Mississippi for nearly my entire life, and while I have definitely enjoyed my experiences, I would love the chance to live in different part of the country and in a different kind of environment.

I selected forensic science because I enjoy its practical applications as well as the tremendous good it can do in using our knowledge of science to protect everyone. As I gradually developed as a scientist, I came to understand what I enjoyed the most about chemistry: using a set of clues to solve a problem. Everyone enjoys a good mystery and I enjoy solving them.

College

Back in 2004, I used to write movie reviews for the USM student newspaper, the "Student Printz". Because I occasionally feel lazy, and it seems a shame that all of five people ever read these, I've decided to repost them here, in the original versions that I emailed to my editor, Noel, all those years ago.

“Stay with her. It's the best advice I can give you. Oh, that, and bring rubber flip-flops in the shower. I got warts all over my feet.” This was the best advice given to Mike Dexter (Peter Facinelli) for college in the movie “Can’t Hardly Wait”. College is always represented on the silver screen as some larger than life entity. More chilling than a thousand knife-wielding maniacs, college as a movie topic is a powerful force if only because of the gravity of the reality following it. It drives men to foil administration at every turn to either graduate or stay in it (“Animal House”, “Van Wilder”). For high school students in movies, it’s something even more frightening: ‘the next step’ (“American Pie”).

Typically, college and high school kids were relegated to the lower echelon on the movie pyramid, having to settle with partying naked in graveyards just in time to get eaten by zombies or causing some great political cataclysm (“Return of the Living Dead” and “WarGames”). Then someone realized that people enjoyed watching movies where these characters weren’t doing some outlandish activity and instead did things that people their age actually do. For high school, the story was always the need to move forward: graduate, go to college, get a job, and sever the old friendships with people you probably won’t see again. Sometimes though, it’s just about remembering the good times and keeping your friends as you move forward, from Spicoli ordering pizzas in Mr. Hand’s class (“Fast Times at Ridgemont High”) to Preston Meyers getting his high school sweetheart (“Can’t Hardly Wait”).

College movies, it’s a different story: find purpose, graduate, move into the ‘real’ world, at whatever cost. In “Dead Man on Campus” two roommates try to find a suitemate desperate enough to kill himself so they can stay in school and inadvertently discover what they actually want to spend the rest of their lives doing. In “Road Trip” an accidentally sent tape of a sexual encounter to his girlfriend forces Josh Parker to realize what he needs to make it in college. If high school was about keeping your friends and finding yourself, college is about finding where you need to go and getting there. The worry is that you graduate without having it all figured out, and then you get sucked back in to college or into affairs with controlling women (“Old School” and “The Graduate”).

Regardless, it seems that everyone manages to drop into the role of adult just in time, and this is the climax of the picture.Remember that no matter what happens once you get ‘out there’, you’ve always got the memory of what happened during your time here. If there is one thing that all these movies can teach us, it is that life is not about the ending credits, it’s about the story before the credits. College loses it mysticism after you spend some time at it, and undoubtedly the real world will too. Like Mike Dexter, we tend to linger and hang on to the familiar, but high school and college are only gateways to the rest of our lives.

Aloha, Mr. Hand.

Graduation Shows

Ah, the graduation showcase: the time honored final send-off for the recent graduates of an improvisation training program. It’s kind of like prom for improvisers; everyone gets dressed up, really nervous, some people kind of don’t even want to do it, but in the end, you’re glad you went. Afterward, everyone shakes hands, high fives, takes pictures, and then hits the bar. These showcases offer a unique opportunity for an improviser’s friends and family to finally get to see what their junior improviser has been up to every week for a year. It also affords a special chance for the senior improvisers to see the new crop and start picking who will get picked to go on to the main stage.
It’s this last purpose that can make the graduation show one of the most emotionally wrenching times for the members of that class. Let’s face it: if you are even remotely interested in doing improv, then you are heavily invested in getting a spot on the main stage. Main stage means more practice time, stage time, prestige, and presumably the chance to hobnob with the experienced folks in hopes of teaming up with them. It’s usually seen as more than just a stepping stone: it can easily be the big “break” that leads to all sorts of stuff. And for this reason, your fellow classmates will gladly slit your throat if it means they get picked over you. (For a bunch of comedians, improvisers take this stuff very seriously.)
The iO (formerly Improv Olympic) shows have a big leg up on the local program in that there are multiple shows, instead of the one (Duhn, duhn, duhn). What’s strange is the kind of overnight kind of switch that occurs with your classmates; these are people you joked with after class, grabbed a beer with, saw improv shows with, but just as soon as the specter of getting picked for a team settles in, all bets are off. Suddenly everyone is only interested in performing the best show (which is often interpreted as “the kind of show that gets you noticed”). Suddenly this one show becomes the end all be all. I have provided the following time line to get you familiar with the insanity, which is primarily applicable to those who have eight weeks of shows:

1. Two weeks before your first show – there is a flurry of emails between the members of a group. Everyone is heatedly arguing for a coach, practice time, etc. and everyone just generally seems to have their panties in a bunch. Also, a group of people will want to go see the current round of graduation shows (“To see what to expect.”), and another will adamantly oppose seeing the show (“I don’t want to get distracted/nervous.”) You also discover that Gmail can actually keep an email string with 300 replies active. Those guys are amazing.
2. First two shows – people are exceedingly nervous about performing, mostly because they want to impress the people who will ultimately pick them for teams. After they get off stage, they realize that none of the people who are picking are even there. Strangely, no one seems nervous about performing in front of family and friends.
3. Third and fourth shows – these will be the worst two shows you will perform. The early excitement over performing has passed; everyone gets a little sloppy when they realized how good that other team is. Everyone seems to say “Why should we even bother? That whole other group is going to get picked!”
4. Fifth, sixth, and seventh shows – these are progressively the best shows you will ever do, as everyone is slowly finding their respective grooves, figuring out the games/forms, and actually starts to have a good time.
5. Eighth show – this will, contrary to logic, not be your best show. It will be sort of like your third best show. At this point, everyone has just kind of given up worrying about the whole damn thing, and is really just having a good time. Plus, everyone realizes this is the last time you will ever perform together (Expect lots of hugging, picture taking, and making plans to get together and practice). (Improvisers love making empty promises like these. It says something about our mindset that we do an art form that necessitates a non-planned, free-wheeling attitude. That is, we’re as a whole unmotivated.) Also, this is the show the recruiters are watching.
6. A Week-ish after your last show – you find out who gets picked, and who didn’t. Generally there are no surprises. You also discover that you still talk to the people you actually enjoyed improvising with, who may or may not have been the “best” ones in class.

Now, that all having been said, I did go to graduation show this week (and did see the recruiters sitting in the time-honored recruiter spot: the back row, with a clip board). The graduation show serves as an interesting case, though: it is a show after all, but then again it kind of isn’t. There are some people who will never make a team, some will move afterward to some other city, others may drop out entirely; but the real purpose of the graduation show is to give your friends and family an opportunity to come see what you’ve been doing – to watch you be funny, and put on a good show. The graduation show isn’t supposed to be groundbreaking; it’s supposed to be polished enough to feel good about and for all your friends to see just how freaking funny you are. A graduation show should be simple, because it’s easier to show off your talent that way. I make this last point because improvisers tend to overplay things when they’re trying to show off; they want to do the hardest form, the craziest games, and play everything hard core because they feel like they need to blow people away. (The lesson here: that never works.)
So, to my fellow graduates (and soon to be graduates): Enjoy yourself, ignore the man in the back row, play with abandon so your friends can laugh at you, and for god’s sake, give the emails a rest.