Robyn's Personal Statement: 2nd Try
Mozart wrote his first composition aged 5. Picasso discovered his talent for painting aged 9. I penned my first poem aged 7. I have always had a love of reading and writing that differed from children of my age. While they giggled at the adventures of Spot, I revelled in the rich description of Frances Burnett’s The Secret Garden.
Literature has moulded my entire life and I hope to one day write literature that will mould the lives of others. It played an integral part in choosing my A level courses. With politics, I could exercise my love of debating, which began when I competed in debating competitions, and examine the power of rhetoric in shaping our political system. With my love of international literature, such as Balzac’s Old Goriot and Puskin’s Eugene Onegin, came my decision to study French. I always felt that when novels are translated, they lose the authors lexical and syntactical crafting and so I have since become determined to be fluent in French, in order to better understand the literature. English literature and language allowed me to study how writer’s craft their work as well as analyzing it. I also loved the creative writing element of the course and the wide range of novels we would read. Law gave me the understanding of our legal system and allow me to go on to teach it in a simpler way. I created and presented a stop & search rights assembly for year 10 and found the challenge of entertaining while teaching an exhilarating affair.
While the first, this was not the last time I taught or organised teaching opportunities for students. Two others and I won funding from Sports Relief to run a 12 week kickboxing class for 20 sixth formers, which students finished with a level 1 kickboxing qualification. I was also a teaching assistant in a year 9 and 10 English class for 8 months. For the year 9 class, I went on to teach a GCSE preparation lesson and from the year 10 class I met two girls who I began to mentor. In the future I hope to become a social entrepreneur and use my talents and reputation as a writer to end young people’s apathy towards reading.
Given my love of all things literary, it will come as no surprise that when I discovered this course my heart not only skipped a beat but completed a triathlon. The idea that my time would be spent reading and exploring the works of a wide range of authors as well as writing and developing my own work made me determined to do whatever it took to ensure I would be reading my name on the top of an acceptance letter. I have been on both an Arvon foundation and Poetry School writing course and subscribed to The Writer’s Magazine. I created Home Grown Writing, a blog in which I post all that I write and for my part-time job I write legal articles for a barrister. More recently, I was published in an e-anthology, entered several poetry competitions and was chosen to be the news & creative writing editor for the school magazine. I also read a large variety of books from Maureen Freely’s The Other Rebecca to Tolstoy’s War & Peace, with my favourite being those that push their society’s boundaries such as Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Hardy’s Jude the Obscure.
One experience, however, has prepared me the most for the demands that this course will require. I was chosen out of 60 applicants by the Hummer Tuttle Foundation to be part of a group of young people on a US-UK leadership and dialogue programme. It involved months of residential weekends with 100% attendance, research and presentations in order to prepare us for a 2 week trip to the US with Americans and Iraqis. This experience gave me a never-ending list of skills, including leadership, independent learning and the ability to balance heavy workloads with a social life.
My aim in life is to become a novelist and poet and so this course is perfect to the letter. I have myself have taken many steps towards this and now look to you to hold out a hand and help me take the final leap in achieving my dream.
Robyn
Literature has moulded my entire life and I hope to one day write literature that will mould the lives of others. It played an integral part in choosing my A level courses. With politics, I could exercise my love of debating, which began when I competed in debating competitions, and examine the power of rhetoric in shaping our political system. With my love of international literature, such as Balzac’s Old Goriot and Puskin’s Eugene Onegin, came my decision to study French. I always felt that when novels are translated, they lose the authors lexical and syntactical crafting and so I have since become determined to be fluent in French, in order to better understand the literature. English literature and language allowed me to study how writer’s craft their work as well as analyzing it. I also loved the creative writing element of the course and the wide range of novels we would read. Law gave me the understanding of our legal system and allow me to go on to teach it in a simpler way. I created and presented a stop & search rights assembly for year 10 and found the challenge of entertaining while teaching an exhilarating affair.
While the first, this was not the last time I taught or organised teaching opportunities for students. Two others and I won funding from Sports Relief to run a 12 week kickboxing class for 20 sixth formers, which students finished with a level 1 kickboxing qualification. I was also a teaching assistant in a year 9 and 10 English class for 8 months. For the year 9 class, I went on to teach a GCSE preparation lesson and from the year 10 class I met two girls who I began to mentor. In the future I hope to become a social entrepreneur and use my talents and reputation as a writer to end young people’s apathy towards reading.
Given my love of all things literary, it will come as no surprise that when I discovered this course my heart not only skipped a beat but completed a triathlon. The idea that my time would be spent reading and exploring the works of a wide range of authors as well as writing and developing my own work made me determined to do whatever it took to ensure I would be reading my name on the top of an acceptance letter. I have been on both an Arvon foundation and Poetry School writing course and subscribed to The Writer’s Magazine. I created Home Grown Writing, a blog in which I post all that I write and for my part-time job I write legal articles for a barrister. More recently, I was published in an e-anthology, entered several poetry competitions and was chosen to be the news & creative writing editor for the school magazine. I also read a large variety of books from Maureen Freely’s The Other Rebecca to Tolstoy’s War & Peace, with my favourite being those that push their society’s boundaries such as Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Hardy’s Jude the Obscure.
One experience, however, has prepared me the most for the demands that this course will require. I was chosen out of 60 applicants by the Hummer Tuttle Foundation to be part of a group of young people on a US-UK leadership and dialogue programme. It involved months of residential weekends with 100% attendance, research and presentations in order to prepare us for a 2 week trip to the US with Americans and Iraqis. This experience gave me a never-ending list of skills, including leadership, independent learning and the ability to balance heavy workloads with a social life.
My aim in life is to become a novelist and poet and so this course is perfect to the letter. I have myself have taken many steps towards this and now look to you to hold out a hand and help me take the final leap in achieving my dream.
Robyn
2 comments:
oo, you're a maureen freely fan? i loved her new book, enlightenment. have you read it?
i havent actually! whats it about?
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