My background has prepared me for excellence in Anthropology as an avid student of both Science and the Humanities. Born and raised in California to Filipino and Japanese parents, close friends consider me a world traveler. I have been to the UK and the Philippines several times throughout my life as I have close family in both places. I have also spent significant amounts of time in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Europe. In addition to my native English, I speak, read, and write French at an intermediate level as well as communicating conversationally in Tagalog at an intermediate level, and Japanese at a basic level. My multiethnic family prizes education as much as diversity and I have been raised in such a way as to develop my appreciation for humanity on a global scale.
However, growing up in a multiethnic household I never felt fully able to integrate into either side. To others I may have seemed to be fully both but for most of my life I had felt like I was neither one. I usually felt like an outsider looking in. Studying both sides, gathering data, learning to communicate on a surface level about myself to others outside of my family. This has allowed me to feel comfortable amongst people that I finally concluded I would never be able to fully understand or identify with. I'm a traveler, an adventurer, an environmentalist, and a storyteller. I learn a great deal from the stories of those who I admire most. I see many good people in this world, and I want to be one of them.
I have come to see Anthropology as holding important keys to optimal lifestyle choices in today’s world, particularly with respect to evolution, the environment and mental health. The master's program in Applied Anthropology at ____ University is my first choice for graduate school for a variety of reasons ranging from the sheer excellence of your program to its location. I am an especially good fit with ____ given my central interests in Applied Anthropology, including Psychoneuroimmunology, the health ramifications of ecological “adaptation and maladaptation” and preventative health and harm reduction practices in the context of Ethnomedicine and pluralistic healing processes.
I hope to contribute to the growing body of research that seeks to better identify and understand causes of trauma as they relate to psychopathology, sharing in the search for effective, ethical, and sustainable achievements in mental health worldwide, based on natural remedies and cycles as manifest by the literature in both Anthropology and Psychology. Our mental health systems worldwide reach only a small fraction of the people suffering from mental disorders, most of whom are discouraged from seeking treatment due to cost, social stigma, or perceived ineffectiveness of such treatment. I'd like to develop more multi-dimensional approaches to treating things like depression, working to shed greater light on the sort of evolutionary pressures that many now believe underlie depression, anxiety, and other common forms of mental or psychological discomfort. In this way, as a scholar and investigator, I seek to contribute to our struggle against the prevalence of suffering and disability, leading to greater sustainability in human development, with our minds more in tune with our bodies.
I have volunteered at the Egyptian Museum in San Jose CA. – as well as the Youth Theater in Long Beach. I am most comfortable traveling alone and enjoy very much spending time with local populations. I am experienced in wilderness risk management and know how to utilize topographic maps and navigation techniques. With a proven record of accomplishment in methodological research, I have spent a great deal of time developing the necessary conceptual tools for a lifetime of research in Anthropology, applying theories and methods in Anthropology to issues in the field of global mental health. I graduated from the University of Concordia in 2017 with a degree in graphic design; my focus had been on the history of art and the promotion of conservation and community through digital media. I had transferred to Concordia from the University of Hawaii at Manoa where I studied computer science with the aim of developing protocols required for automated processing and the manipulation of data. Living in Hawaii, I developed a great passion for the environment and the exploration of human experience through visual and symbolic meaning. In California, I joined the Northern California Geographical Society and began working with a start-up cannabis distributor as a marketing consultant and database designer for strain profiles. In 2018, I had the opportunity to travel to Peru and explore the Amazon Basin. It was here that the trajectory of my interest in Anthropology was refined and directed towards the study of mental health and the epistemology of medical anthropology. Conducting preliminary ethnographic fieldwork, I paid especially close attention to the healing systems of the region and the ethnopharmacology of various culturally significant plants and their relationship to “eco-tourism” as well as “Spiritual Extractivism”. I met and interviewed numerous tourists who had traveled to the area to receive treatment for mental trauma and addiction that they felt Western biomedicine could not alleviate.
After this watershed experience in Peru, back in California, I earned the equivalent of an associate degree in Anthropology for transfer at Diablo Valley College studying under Dr. Chris Mercer and Dr. Steven Johnson of the Institute of Practical Evolutionary Anthropology at DVC. In the summer of 2019, I had the opportunity to participate in a bioarcheological program excavating bronze and iron age burials in central Thailand, receiving credit for fieldwork from NC State University.
My central career goal is to apply the principles and ethnographic knowledge derived from anthropological scholarship towards the mediation between a patient’s understanding of their condition and that of the clinician - and the way in which that mediation is influenced by the cultural context. I seek a full immersion experience at ____ in the complex relationships between culture and mental health. Because my focus is on both the cultural and biomedical aspects of mental health, I especially look forward to studying under Dr. ____ at ____ whose expertise in Bioarchaeology I very much admire, particularly his work on the biochemical genetics of alcoholism. I also hope to learn a great deal from Dr. ____ with respect to the sociocultural status of biological health, as well as Dr. ____ concerning trauma patterns among prehistoric societies of central California. I want to engage in in-depth analysis of the adaptive relationship between human groups and the biotic and non-biotic environments they inhabit. I yearn to engage in research in medical anthropology, particularly structuralism, biology, and psychoneuroimmunology, and their relationship to mental disorders, especially those that have become prolific today. I am most eager to elaborate, modify, and continue to test hypotheses about the complex historical and cultural relationships between mental health, maladaptation, and genetic expression.
Thank you for considering my application to Anthropology at SJSU.
MA Applied Anthropology Statement of Purpose Example
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