Personal Statement

Program: Teenager & Juvenile Developmental Psychology

In my undergraduate program, I received education across two fields—a degree program in law at the Law School of XX University and a degree program in psychology at XX University. My rigorous academic trainings across those two fields have given me necessary qualifications for pursuing a more advanced program either in psychology or in law, endowing me with a unique advantage in interdisciplinary knowledge.

As far as I am concerned, law and psychology are reciprocal. They all pertain to human behavior. As a matter of fact, my thesis in law, entitled “XXX “explores juvenile delinquency by examining the complicated psychological factors of the younger generation of China in family, school and neighborhood settings. However, there are essential differences between them. In terms of the causal relationships of human behavior, law is primarily concerned with the treatment of the consequences of human behavior while psychology probes into the motivations that cause people to act as they do. In the framework of human relations, law aims at orderly and well-regulated social relationship while psychology, with its interventions into the process of human development, seeks to facilitate the healthy development of the individuals.

While law and psychology are both indispensable to the proper functioning of our society, when it comes to making a choice between those two fields in which to pursue a graduate program, I decide to opt for a program in Developmental Psychology. My decision is motivated by the fact that law can only deal with the aftermath of human behavior whereas psychology can provide preventive measures against possible negative human behavior. Child & adolescent psychology, a field I am interested in, may facilitate the development of healthy personality structure that may enable children and adolescents interact with the society in a harmonious manner.

I have received sound academic trainings that a student of psychology can expect in China, excelling particularly in Developmental Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Experimental Psychology and other core courses, all of which have imparted to me the necessary theoretical knowledge. My 87/100 GPA in Psychology has made me the top student in my class and the winner of a series of the university’s top-level scholarships. As an undergraduate, I have attempted at some tentative research by submitting essays and research papers to provincial-level and university-level journals (please refer to my Resume). In performing those researches, I find that I have benefited considerably from my solid mathematics foundation and the related methodology—my score for the Advanced Mathematics course is 98/100 while the SPSS was nearly full mark. I have mastered important statistical and quantitative methods, computer programming and LISREL with much facility and I excel in designing experiments and preparing questionnaires.

I started to perform formal academic research at the Developmental Psychology Lab in XX University two years by working as a research assistant to Prof. XX, a leading Chinese scholar on social development in childhood and adolescence and peer relations. By focusing on the peer relations, social cognition, social self-concept, attributions, and past social experiences, I completed a full-length research paper XX, which became a poster presentation at the XX. My research indicates that in addition to maintaining an appropriate level of social self-concept and optimistic attributional style, it is essentially worthwhile to emphasize another two strategies to improve the positive peer nominations: to pay special attention to the attributions to negative events of the life, and to attribute social popularity or success to some stable causes. Based on my distinguished academic performance, I attended the XX and the XX.hxw.red