From Taco Bell to Tanzania Essay example -- Graduate Admissions Essays

From Taco Bell to Tanzania   I lived until the age of 18 in Lacey, Washington, a small town do up mostly of the strip malls and Taco Bell fast food restaurants that line Interstate 5 from Portland to Seattle. Very few of my high school classmates left this town, and preferably moved back into the service industries and lower rungs of state bureaucracy where their parents had worked before them. For those of us who wanted to leave, the only routes, at the time, seemed to be the military or higher(prenominal) genteelness. Since, by middle school, I had been tracked into college prep courses, I assumed that I would go to college but did not know where or what to study.   In our garage, my grandfather kept back issues of National Geographic dating to the 1920s. The summer before starting high school, he paid me to dust them and it was then that I ascertained something called Anthropology which, when studied, appeared to lead to a more interesting life in a more interesting p lace. For my Freshman Physical Science courses SCIENCE CAREERS DAY, I wrote Anthropology defeat as my career goal, though I knew nada at the time about the discipline besides the name.   I likewise chose a college which I knew nothing about - Lewis and Clark in Oregon - because the brochure mentioned that there were several dozen overseas programs available through the school. Though I could have gone to India, Indonesia, Ecuador, Australia, Korea or many other countries, I decided to apply for Kenya because the year before I had read a book about nomads and the program included a unit on nomadic pastoralism and ecology.   After rereading this book much later, I discovered it to be an incredibly sappy, melodramatic and condescending ... ...conflicts in other areas of genial life.   In the summer of 1994, I had the opportunity to travel to Tanzania on an SSRC Predissertation Grant to begin to establish affiliation, research clearance and possible fieldsites. I have b esides made contacts at the district level with officials and academics in the area. Though I already speak Kiswahili, the national language of Tanzania, I also have made arrangements to study Maa, the language of the Kisongo Maasai and WaArusha who live in the district in which I will be working. I am looking forward to working in Tanzania not only because of its political stability and unique history as a nation, but also because of the opportunity to generate information about children and education in pastoral communities there, a topic which is still under-researched despite the restructuring of national curriculum in recent years.