Letter of intent: purpose and key components

Letter of Intent

This brief document serves as my letter of intent to apply to your prestigious doctoral program. The important and necessary items that will be covered in this document include my motivations for earning a doctoral degree, what I envision doing differently when my degree is complete, the topic or topics that I have on my mind when it comes to my Direct Practice Improvement project and where I plan to do most of my practice hours. While there are a few places that I could go for my doctoral program, your university is the one that clearly stands out above the rest.

When it comes to why I am getting my doctoral degree, I happen to know that many to most people really do not need a doctoral degree to advance within their field or so their job. However, there are certain positions in certain fields that require or at least encourage people to get a doctorate. For the most part, those positions are academic and high-end leadership in nature. I might do the former when I move forward in my career and my life but I know I wish to achieve the highest echelons of nursing leadership and I know a doctorate from a prestigious and well-run school will assist me in doing so. I am not naive enough to think that the doctorate will just open a lot of doors for me. I know I will still have to learn, grow, expand and develop independent and beyond what a doctorate degree from your university would do for me. Even so, a solid foundation of education, best practices and habits will get me on the right path a lot quicker and there are some qualification sand experiences, such as a doctorate, that very few people attain and use. In short, it is not a fix-all or something that will just get me where I want to be overnight. However, a doctorate would be a huge part of helping me along the way and gets me started on the right foot.

A lot of what I would do differently after I complete my doctorate is already known and apparent to me. Indeed, I know enough to know about many best practices, the use of evidence-based practice, proper academic research, the important duality of validity and reliability and so forth. However, I also know that a doctorate would help me perfect and improve on those things as well as learn other advanced precepts including proper implementation, planning and a true high-level view of where medicine has been and what direction it is going. As for how this can and should correlate to what my DPI will be, I have a few ideas in mind. Sure, there are many things that are just a matter of finding the right combination of procedure and medicine. However, there are other things and topics that are much more vexing and troublesome. A great example would be falls of elderly and vulnerable patients and how to prevent them without violating the human and civil rights of the people involved. It is one of those things where preventing falls is technically easy if certain ethical items are ignored. However, restraining and the use of bed alarms are illegal or unethical in the eyes of many so this means that other ideas and tricks are needed to reduce falls, if not eliminate them. Perhaps truly eliminating them is impossible but we should try to lower them as much as possible without being cruel and inhumane.

Finally, I think it would be best to do my practice hours in a well-rounded hospital so that I get exposure to all of the important realms and types of care including emergency, infection control, surgery, chronic disease management, rehabilitation and mental health, just to name a few. Age- and demographic related differences such as pediatrics, gerontology and so forth are important. There are also disease/disorder divisions like oncology and rheumatology. I may very well latch onto some types of care over others. However, being a leader in the nursing and clinician field means needing to be well-versed and well-rounded and a hospital would be a great place to instill and enforce that ideal.