University of Pennsylvania Admissions Essays

This may be pretty lame, but I'm going to post the short essays that I wrote for the UPenn application. The first question was simply asking if I had been put on academic probation for cheating in college. The second is about how I became interested in Environmental Studies. The third describes conceptually what I expect out of the curriculum in the program. The last one deals with how I would apply a Master's degree in Environmental Studies to my career. I thought this may be a relevant thing to post, since it pretty much gets into my head and very briefly explores my thoughts about environmental issues. Does is pass the "haha" test? If anybody actually reads these, just remember that these are admissions essays to a grad school program, so they may make me sound like I'm a little full of myself. This is the nature of the beast...

1) No, I have never been placed on probation, dismissed or suspended from any college or university for reasons pertaining to academic integrity or any other reason.



2) I have always loved biology and nature. I was fortunate to live in Monterey, CA during the beginning of elementary school and spent a lot of time around the tide pools, finding banana slugs in the woods and exploring Monterey Bay Aquarium. At the College of William and Mary I majored in biology because I enjoyed learning about living things and how they work together. During high school and college I was also drawn toward community service. In college I was the service coordinator for our campus chapter of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. I organized service projects for approximately 100 students, which included working with kids at the juvenile detention center, volunteering at homeless shelters and working with organizations similar to Habitat for Humanity. I was also learning about global social justice issues in our chapter of International Justice Mission. A meaningful event that we facilitated was the Alternative Gift Fair. This was an event during the holidays when we invited various organizations to come to campus and sell gifts to students who wanted to buy things that were made in an environmentally or socially conscious manner. This could be anything from fair trade chocolate and coffee, to buying livestock for an underprivileged family in another country, to buying carbon offsets.

I did not make a deep connection between my interests in social justice, service, and nature during college, but had every opportunity to do so the year after graduation. At that time, I participated in a program called the Young Adult Volunteers (YAV), which is a service mission organized through the Presbyterian Church (USA). I lived in a house in Tucson, AZ with six other volunteers, who each had a full time volunteer position. Mine was to work with a Mennonite organization that did emergency home repairs for low income residents around the area. I saw a lot of depressing living situations and learned how to fix swamp coolers, furnaces, roofs, plumbing, water lines, some electrical, build decks, tile bathrooms, and hang drywall. Each of my housemates received a $300 stipend every month and contributed a portion of that to a communal pot, which paid for food and utilities. We drew up a house covenant, promising to strive for an ecologically low impact life style, to get involved in our community and to solve our inevitable conflicts with civility. Our lifestyle involved riding bikes as our primary mode of transportation (a ten mile commute each way to and from work for me), buying locally and organic when possible, recycling, harvesting rainwater, composting food scraps, utilizing a gray water system, getting a portion of our hot water from a solar heater, hanging our clothes to dry, and experimenting with a composting toilet system. These practices made us think deeply in a whole systems manner and allowed us to consider ways to close loops of consumption, which would otherwise create an unnecessary waste of resources and energy.

This was a different lifestyle and a different slice of society than I was exposed to in college or growing up in suburban neighborhoods. Despite the close living quarters and very different personality types, we became a very close community by the end of the year. I realize now how important that sense of community is to me and how it is closely tied in with environmental issues. We used a fraction of the resources in our house per person last year than the typical single family home. Riding bikes everywhere gave me a greater appreciation of the distance between places and actually gave me a better understanding of our local environment. The weather, when and in which direction the sun set, which direction the wind usually came from and slight changes in altitude become much more noticeable and important when experiencing them outside the confines of a car. I found myself thinking of ways that it would be easier and safer for pedestrians and bicyclists to get around the city, and the impacts that these changes might have on a sense of community and the amount of resources consumed.

This year I am an intern with the Office of the Federal Environmental Executive in Washington, D.C. In this position I have been able to observe how the Federal Government imposes regulations on itself to green its operations. Dealing with over twenty agencies and trying to get them onto the same page is always a challenge for our office, but it has been valuable to me to see how this system operates. It has also allowed me to have exposure to numerous organizations that develop green standards for buildings, cleaning products, electronics, transportation, office products, travel, hotels, and nearly any other household or industrial item. I have seen how important Executive Orders and legislation are when guiding the government towards environmentally friendly policies.

A degree in Environmental Studies is a great fit with my various interests. In mid April I will begin work on a local organic farm to learn sustainable agriculture techniques and how local economies, especially Community Supported Agriculture, operate. I am interested in looking at the issues of restoring and preserving nature from a social, economic, and policy making perspective, in addition to exploring the environmental science behind the issues. It's important that these various perspectives communicate so that solving environmental issues does not cause the economy unnecessary harm or cause the working class to suffer.



3) As an MES student I hope to pursue an interdisciplinary curriculum that explores environmental issues from the natural science, land use management, policy making, social and economic perspectives. As environmental consciousness becomes a major part of mainstream thinking in all fields, it will be important to understand the effect of environmental policies on the economic and social realms. We have to find a way to live in a sustainable way within our environment without destroying the business world or putting low income citizens at a disadvantage.

It would be easy to develop a policy that only hybrid and electric cars will be allowed to be sold. However, without providing reliable access to mass transit or gradually restructuring the automobile industry, this policy would bring down the car companies and put lower income people at a severe disadvantage. There would be no way for a huge portion of the population to afford these expensive vehicles. Multiple policies and components need to work together in order to have effective solutions for environmental issues. Development of mass transit, implementation of policies that favor pedestrian oriented urban development, building infrastructure for renewable sources of energy, researching new battery technologies for vehicles and policies to protect biodiversity are just a few examples of initiatives that could work together to lower our impact on the environment.

While taking this broad, interdisciplinary approach to learning about environmental issues, I also hope to be able to concentrate my studies on classes that deal with the urban environment. I am excited about exploring how integral our largest built creations, cities, can be in lowering our impact on the environment and approaching a sustainable existence. I can also see synergistic opportunities in urban development to facilitate a sense of community and place, while reducing some of the physical or geographical barriers that currently separate various social groups and economic classes much of the time. This type of whole systems approach is what I am hoping to pursue in the curriculum as an MES student.




4) Upon completion of the MES program, there are several related career paths which I would be happy pursuing. The specific career options I consider will undoubtedly evolve while I develop in the program, but I am sure I want to work to improve our built environment. This could be accomplished by working with a non-profit organization, such as Smart Growth America, which organizes and advocates for growth policies that will reduce dependence on cars and create more pedestrian friendly urban settings. I would also be open to the possibility of working with an environmental consulting firm, which would provide advice to businesses and developers to reduce their impact on the environment. This job could involve not only evaluating the services provided by those businesses, but also the operation of their businesses. By pursuing higher LEED certification, implementing Environmental Management Systems and purchasing EnergyStar certified office equipment, among other things, a business could conceivably save a substantial amount in their operating costs.

As I mentioned before, I am also interested in service learning. I would find it very fulfilling to work for a non-profit or some other organization that facilitates service learning opportunities for kids, which would be based around exploring our impact on the environment. We could work to remove invasive species from an area and then learn why they can be harmful. Another project idea is to restore riparian buffers of streams and then learn about the ecological functions these buffers serve. One more idea is to develop an organic garden on the grounds of a school or in an abandoned lot and learn about sustainable agriculture. My hope is that these kinds of activities would allow the kids to develop an understanding of how much we rely on nature in our own lives and to learn to make a difference through service work.

I want to become a professional who will have an impact on promoting policies for sustainable development or connecting youth with nature and planting a seed of responsibility in them to care for it. There is no doubt that a Master's degree in Environmental Studies would make me much more qualified to pursue these goals.