Grew Up in an Underdeveloped Urban City

¶ … grew up in an underdeveloped urban city where the poverty and social conditions hindered me from getting an appropriate education.

Like Rafe Esquith, I believe that this has given me a special empathy to people from societies similar to mine. I understand them. Take just a few days ago, for instance. I was stopped by robbers at gunpoint who forced me to continue to drive. Many others, I suppose, would have been afraid. I can't say I wasn't, but more than that. I was them. I was with them. I understood why they were doing this. I pitied for their childhood, and I wished to help them.

TEP's two-year graduate program offers specialized urban teacher preparation in the form of a two-year intensive Master of Education (M.Ed.) program in teaching for social justice in urban communities. Yes! This calls to me. But far more resonant with me is your objective: " [to] provide high quality pre-service education and to radically improve urban schooling for California's racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse children…through teaching and learning that provide students the skills, dispositions, and insights they need to recognize and subvert social injustice across their academic and life trajectories" (http://centerx.gseis.ucla.edu/teacher-education/pathways/two-year-graduate-program).

I might have failed in my life. Indeed, I failed my college entrance examinations and this gave me an inferiority complex right through the age of 20. At that time I felt lost and adrift, obsessing over who I am, where I am from and what I suppose to be. But I believed that life has given me these lessons not as failure but as dictionary specifically crafted for me to crack open and learn from.

In 2002, I was accepted in the UCLA extension ESL program. However, I had to give up my opportunity due to taking care of my infant son. In the meantime, I taught myself Education and English Language and Literature through the online Open University system, and now, mother of teenage children, I'm here to apply for this school again. To achieve my dream -- to be another Rafe Esquithe - I need a more sophisticated and profound program of study than that that I can ever achieve independently, and I know that UCLA can give it, because I believe UCLA to be superb with its reputation, excellent faculties, facilities, alumni and researchers.

My objectives are to deepen my studies toward a doctoral degree, and to conduct intensive research in aspects of the home enviornment that affect children's intelligent and mental development. Personally, I think society's most challenging but important job lies in nurturing children properly in order that they be responsible and productive human beings. Some times, children don't always have the chance. Their poor and ugly background gives them a rough card in life. I would like to be another Rafe Esquith who can help them turn this 'knave' into a 'Queen of Hearts'.

The Kiersey test showed me I had to be a teacher. In my heart of hearts, I believe so too. I have always felt this way even when working as a medical technician. I think its more of a missionary pull than seeing education as a career -- to give something of myself to others; to help others, through education, achieve that that I never had the chance to achieve.