Applicant from Azerbaijan, Criminal Justice

My family is originally from Azerbaijan and I am a near-native speaker of Russian. While I was still a small child when the Berlin Wall came down, the Cold War continues to color my existence, intellectual interests, and professional aspirations. My family and I, my husband and now our children, all of us are permanent immigrants to the USA and the USA will always be our home. Nevertheless, on both professional and personal levels of identity, I stay informed about where we came from: not only Azerbaijan, but especially Russia and Russian/American relations – in fact, anything having to do with the former USSR. I am fluent not only in Russian and English, but also Turkish and Azeri. I hope to put my language skills to good use in the future, at the service of keeping America safe and strong. My ideal professional position would be working for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). I plan to strengthen my application to this organization primarily by earning a graduate degree in Criminal Justice from the University of XXXX at XXXX.

I hold a Bachelor’s Degree in Criminal Justice from the University of XXXX and I feel strongly that this is the right time for me to go to graduate school and prepare myself for my maximum professional and intellectual contribution to our world, our story, the quest for justice and security on our troubled planet. My husband is attending the U of X at XXXX and if accepted to your distinguished Master’s Program in Criminal Justice, I would be able to commute alongside him. I am very excited about your new CRJ Program beginning this fall and I hope very much to be selected.

It would be a special honor for me to study under and be guided by Dr. XXXX. I especially admire her work with respect to the psychology of adolescence because I see this area as particularly important to understanding the challenges of criminal justice and public safety, working to keep young people out of the criminal justice system, and how to best deal with them once they are in there; and I see this as true on both domestic and international levels. One need only look at the ages of the terrorists who killed more than a hundred people in a nightclub in France a year ago, or 13 at the heart of Barcelona last week: they were young people barely out of adolescence.

Speaking on the telephone with your department, I am most grateful to Dr. XXXX as well who encouraged me to hurry and submit my application. I also keenly look forward to learning from him as much as I can about individual rights in the international arena as they relate to constitutional law. I have several friends who are CRJ majors at U of X and they all rave about Dr. XXXX’s lectures.

I am generally secular but from a Muslim family, and I understand Islamic thinking. I also stay up to date in my reading about events in the Middle East as well as the former Soviet Union, as much as I can, especially since Russia intervened in Syria. My family moved to the USA from Azerbaijan when I was 13. I have visited Russia with my parents and I have also been to Canada with my husband. I am not only orally fluent in Azeri, Russian and Turkish but I speak and write all three languages quite well. Thus, I see my language ability as perhaps my greatest professional asset and, along with my graduate training, it is my hope that it might attract the interest of the CIA and I might be given an opportunity to work for this agency.

I am passionate about individual rights, inmate rehabilitation, and against capital punishment as an unnecessary evil. Thus, I might not seem to be the ideal candidate for a position with the CIA; but, in the long term, my wildest dream is to have a humanizing influence over this organization, helping to make it accountable in terms of respect for human rights, to the extent to which this is possible in an extremely conflictive world in which the US remains the top player.

My application to the University of XXXX is simple, I seek to better myself and be a good example to my children. Completing your program will also help me to make my very best contribution to society and make the whole world a safer and perhaps more just place. As a result of earning my Master’s in Dearborn, I look forward to continuing on at some point and earning the PHD. I am a child of the Cold War and I know a great deal about Russia in particular. I have studied Russia's geography, history, and politics virtually my entire life. I think that I could be a great asset to the CIA. In fact, a CIA recruiter has already encouraged me to apply for the position of Intelligence Collection Analyst. I think it would be wise, however, to wait to apply until I am armed with a Master’s Degree in Criminal Justice from the University of XXXX.

I thank you for considering my application.