The Peace Corps requires two short essays to be written, a cross-cultural experience essay and a motivational statement. I welcome any advice or recommendations about mine, as my application hasn't been submitted yet and changes can still be made.
Cross-cultural experience My most educating experience regarding cross-cultural understanding would have to be my experiences in higher education, primarily as an instructor. As an undergraduate student of the sciences, I had classmates, instructors, and professors from other cultures. I never thought about the differences between us or about our similarities. How did our experiences differ? As an undergraduate student, I never asked myself that question. My days were consumed with just getting through lecture after lecture after laboratory class, hoping for the end result of a satisfactory grade. At most, my interest was limited to just finding a way to best work with students from different cultural backgrounds during group exercises and projects.
As a graduate student, specifically as a graduate teaching assistant and later as a part-time faculty instructor (2005-2009), I gave the question of our differing experiences quite a bit more thought. Doing so helped me modify my class activities to make the most impact possible on the greatest number of my students. Every semester, I would get a new roster of students. Most of them called Kentucky home, whether they were from very small Appalachian communities or larger urban areas. Urban education versus rural education issues created some problems, of course, but the primary issue usually revolved around the few-to-several international students that were enrolled in my classes every semester.
Over the years, I have taught students from multiple countries in Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe. Communication issues were sometimes problematic, especially when it came to difficult scientific terminology. A larger dilemma, though, was how to help my foreign students understand that their countries faced similar environmental and biological troubles, or worse, as the Kentucky ecosystems we discussed in class. How would I help them gain the knowledge that environmental concerns were global, not just local? I didn’t want them to just be able to pass exams, but rather to understand that they had a direct impact on the quality of the environment and ecosystem that they lived in, whether it was in a rural community in eastern Kentucky, in a larger urban center, or in rural China. Finding out exactly where they came from and the cultures to which they were accustomed allowed me to tailor the class to the specific issues that would affect their lives in their home countries.
Connecting the class to their lives, not just giving basic information about biological processes, was a top priority. It is that connection that encourages people to strive to change environmental and ecological standards. With some students, I met that goal and succeeded in creating enthusiastic students of ecology. With others, well, let’s just say I was doing wonderfully to just break through the language barrier enough to teach the basics. I tried, though, and the looks in their eyes when they really understood how they impacted the world around them was worth it all.
Motivational Statement
Becoming a Peace Corps volunteer is a dream that I have held for quite a while. In the past, I’ve let life and my own insecurities get between me and my dream. Now I’ve decided to take the bull by the horns, so to speak, and change that. By becoming a Peace Corps volunteer, I have the chance to not only broaden my own horizons, but to possibly help entire communities learn how to live in an environmentally-friendly, economically-beneficial manner.
In the United States, the idea of “eco-conscious” usually involves owning hybrid vehicles, drinking filtered tap water instead of bottled, and eating expensive organic meats and vegetables. The international communities that the Peace Corps serves generally don’t have many of those luxuries, though. Instead, the “eco-conscious” behaviors and practices that the Peace Corps may try to encourage involve sustainable harvest of timber, reforestation, erosion control, and eco-tourism. To put it simply, the Peace Corps teaches communities to conserve the unique resources of their surrounding environment while showing them how to make a living from those resources.
That, to me, is what being an effective conservationist is all about, conserving and maintaining ecological resources, improving access to those resources, and providing ways for a community to generate income from those resources. That is why I got my Bachelor’s degree in Wildlife and Fisheries Science and am currently finishing a Master’s degree in Biology. That is why I completed an environmental education internship. I want to help individuals and communities learn to value the amazing resources they may have surrounding them, whether it’s rain forest, coastal estuaries, or a savanna. By helping them learn to value those resources, even if it’s just for the economic profit that they create, those resources will be conserved for subsequent generations.
