Personal Statement
The field of psychology is an in depth look inside the inner and the outer world of the human
and animal mind and perception. It’s fascinating to dig down deep into the mental processing of
the mind. The different subspecialties in Psychology make the profession broader to
understanding what was for so many years’ unknown. For this reasons I want to obtain higher
level of education in the Psychology/ Counselling field.
Since I was little, I wanted to become a doctor who is able to listen and understand one’s
concern. I realized that I did not have the burning desire to become a medical doctor. The
profession did not interest me; it was my perception of the profession that had caught my
fancy. However, I became initially interested in psychology when I was helping a cousin who
was having problems at home and was considering suicide. I felt so helpless trying to deal with
her problems and I decided to learn more about human behavior and how to help those in
need. As I studied psychology more and more, I found what excites me most of all were the
investigation, dissection and understanding of problems that I saw around me in the world.
I found psychology courses stimulated me to think and explore my world as I took small
seminars in development, psychopathology, personality and behavior analysis.
Dr. Hannah Kyaw Thaung's behavior analysis seminars gave me good critical and analytic skills
through our repeated analyses, discussion and practice of both basic and complex behavioral
principles. Along with my personal researches, I started with a broad question, wondering
whether young adults' substance use behaviors were related to both sensation seeking and
their friendships and if so how. Once I narrowed my ideas, collected and analyzed the data, I
had to deal with the frustration of getting results that did not support the hypotheses. I did
more data collection and analyses for a poster presentation at the Society for Prevention
Research annual conference, and in post-hoc analyses I found that while I had studied the
sample as a whole, males and females had different predictors of alcohol use. Even though I
hadn't supported my original hypotheses, this gave me ideas as to why. I am currently
volunteering in Suicide Prevention Myanmar (SPM) and Myanmar Psychology Institute.
I have volunteered in Family Preservation Services with families whose children have been in
state custody trying to keep the families together. It's difficult work; I saw kids every day who
are very young but who have already had pretty tough lives. Many of these children could be
case studies of multiple risk factors. As some here have put it, they are "damaged." Those
experiences have really driven my thinking about how abuse, divorce, and familial discord
interact to affect children in their social interactions, their view of themselves and the world,
and the future predicted for them. Through my self-studies, including my volunteering
experiences, I was introduced to the issues surrounding adolescent substance use. I found
myself very interested in both the specific issues of adolescent substance use and the ideas of
how an adolescent's context, whether it is familial, environmental or peer, could affect the
adolescent's life. I would like to find ways to help kids like those I saw have more promising
lives. I am interested in studying child and adolescent mental health, particularly issues of
substance use, risk and resilience, pathology and aggression, and how social and family context
affects each of these issues. Essentially I am interested in ways in which we can make growing
up less difficult, particularly for high-risk kids. I see myself spending my career primarily in
research and teaching. I see it as crucial to have research that is well informed by clinical
practice, and clinical practice well grounded in research. I also see it as necessary to ensure that
research is properly disseminated, and that under-served areas gain increased attention as
targets of study and clinical practice assistance. For example, most of the state in Myanmar
does not have a strong university presence, and I believe that the social service programs here
suffer from not being up to speed on the latest in clinical developments. I'd like to develop
prevention programs and interventions to help address what I choose to specialize in, and a
position as a university professor would be the ideal way to achieve this goal. Further, I am very
attracted by the prospect of teaching and mentoring college students about what I love. I
decided to apply to Carleton University for several reasons. I am attracted to Carleton
University by the strong emphasis on research and methodology. Particularly, the strong
preventive focus of the Child Clinical area and Personality and Social area of emphasis are ones
that meshes well with what I am looking for in a program. The Clinical Psychology program at
Carleton University has everything I am looking for in a program, just as I feel I have what
Carleton University should be looking for in an incoming student. I would be very excited to join
the incoming class at the University for 2021’s fall term. I feel I am well prepared to enter
graduate study, and my strong motivation and career goals are a good match for what Carleton
has to offer.
