Statement of Purpose
Sample Statement of Purpose
Statement of Purpose: Please describe your aptitude and motivation for graduate study in your area of specialization, including your preparation for this field of study, your academic plans or research interests in your chosen area of study, and your future career goals. Please be specific about why UC Berkeley would be a good intellectual fit for you.
The writer of the statement below was admitted into UC Berkeley's History Department. With her permission, I reprint her essay parsed with my commentary about why it works as a winning essay.
"Luscious fare is the jewel of inordinate desires,"1 cautions2 the author of The Gentlewoman's Companion (1673), one of many early modern conduct books I surveyed this past year for an honors thesis entitled "'Chaste, Silent, and Hungry': The Problem of Female Appetite in Early Modern England, 1550-1700."3 As indicated by the title, this project explores a provocative but as of yet scarcely studied facet of early modern gender constructions: female food desire.4 I use the word "desire" here rather deliberately, as early modern definitions of appetite extended well beyond the physiological drive to eat to encompass all those physical (and shameful) longings associated with the body. And, in a culture where women were by definition immoderate and sensual, female food appetite, I argue, constituted an unruly5 desire that demanded both social and moral discipline. In brief, my research concerns the patriarchal control of women's bodies in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England vis- -vis a cultural idea about food desire and satiation as suggestive and immodest.6
In lieu of a formal introduction of my research interests and aspirations I offer a summary of my senior thesis, which earned me the 2003 Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research at the University of California, Davis.7 This first venture into serious historical scholarship has affirmed my passion for early modern culture
Statement of Purpose: Please describe your aptitude and motivation for graduate study in your area of specialization, including your preparation for this field of study, your academic plans or research interests in your chosen area of study, and your future career goals. Please be specific about why UC Berkeley would be a good intellectual fit for you.
The writer of the statement below was admitted into UC Berkeley's History Department. With her permission, I reprint her essay parsed with my commentary about why it works as a winning essay.
"Luscious fare is the jewel of inordinate desires,"1 cautions2 the author of The Gentlewoman's Companion (1673), one of many early modern conduct books I surveyed this past year for an honors thesis entitled "'Chaste, Silent, and Hungry': The Problem of Female Appetite in Early Modern England, 1550-1700."3 As indicated by the title, this project explores a provocative but as of yet scarcely studied facet of early modern gender constructions: female food desire.4 I use the word "desire" here rather deliberately, as early modern definitions of appetite extended well beyond the physiological drive to eat to encompass all those physical (and shameful) longings associated with the body. And, in a culture where women were by definition immoderate and sensual, female food appetite, I argue, constituted an unruly5 desire that demanded both social and moral discipline. In brief, my research concerns the patriarchal control of women's bodies in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England vis- -vis a cultural idea about food desire and satiation as suggestive and immodest.6
In lieu of a formal introduction of my research interests and aspirations I offer a summary of my senior thesis, which earned me the 2003 Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research at the University of California, Davis.7 This first venture into serious historical scholarship has affirmed my passion for early modern culture