Audiology PHD Personal Statement Chinese Applicant

Your PHD Program in Audiology at the University of XXX (UXX) is my first choice for graduate school for several reasons in addition to its sheer excellence and impressive ranking. Since I was raised in Taiwan, XXXX has become my second home, returning here for school at 17. Now 24, I will soon be completing the Bachelor’s Program in Communications Disorders at UXX and I have come to very much love my university, think of it as home, and thus ask for the honor of completing my education where I feel most comfortable.

I see your program as the perfect place to grow as a successful audiologist. My undergraduate education at UXX in Communications Disorders is complemented by my 6-month internship in an Audiology Clinic in Taiwan assisting with patient care. Among the highlights of this experience was performing the pure tone audiogram (PTA) under the supervision of the Audiologist. I have also been teaching in an after-school program here in Dallas and I have served as a volunteer in a nursing home along with my church group for several years.

My experiences in life have helped me to become a patient and compassionate person and I see these as most certainly among the greatest gifts of the successful Audiologist in her labor each day to do all that they can to help people to hear better. I look forward to working with people of all ages with a focus in my research on older patients since this is where the need is most concentrated. I am a young Chinese woman who is full of life and a very hard worker and I want to have a long professional lifetime that is full of both children and older people since both are an integral part of my personal professional vision for making my fullest contribution to society, especially here in America and perhaps also back in the country in which I was raised, Taiwan, at least at some point in my career. Your program will prepare me to make my fullest contribution through both research and practice to helping people to hear better through the use of cochlear implants in particular.

I was born in Texas in 1991 since my father was earning his MBA at the time. When I was 4 months old, however, we moved back to Taiwan. Thus, I grew up totally Taiwanese, but enrolled at UXXX in August of 2012, fulfilling my dream. My Audiology class stole my heart and the project that I completed for this course brought me the greatest joy so I decided to make it my life work.

My undergraduate years at UXX gave me a foundation to make very important contributions in my internship with the Otorhinolaryngology clinic in Taiwan. I had the enormous privilege of attending to a great diversity of patients with many different types of hearing issues in our clinic. One gentleman, for example, had great difficulty understanding people when they spoke quickly and he had struggled with this problem for many years and would often choose writing as a form of communication to compensate for his hearing problem. I thus came to investigate writing as a potential tool for the Audiologist through the use of an application on a smart phone or tablet that could interpret verbal stimulation into words and then provide a connection with a certain hearing aid through Bluetooth, so that when a person hears something, the application interprets it and displays the words in the form of subtitles.

Thank you for considering my application to your program.