PERSONAL STATEMENT

Personal Statement

Personal Statement

Since childhood, I have been fascinated by the constantly changing world that we live in, wanting to understand and explore the causes and effects of current and future human interactions. During my teenage years I started listening to the BBC World Service and reading internationally recognized journals and magazines. I have become convinced that a third level education relevant to world affairs would help me gain knowledge that would allow me to pursue a wide range of possibilities. My current career ambition is to find a suitable role within an international organisation, such as the UN, ideally with specific focus on assisting people who have been displaced due to civil unrest, war, famine or other natural disaster.

I was born in Australia to a family of political refugees who had escaped communist Czechoslovakia. After my country's Velvet Revolution, my family returned to Prague, the capital of a then newly formed democracy. This radical change helped to widen my perspective and see the world from a different point of view. Today I am a bi-national avid traveler, having visited more than 40 countries. I have attended six exchange programmes with partner schools: one in Sweden, one in Germany and four in France. I have also been on two volunteer programmes with Earthwatch, firstly being in Spain, where we helped gather information to design marine protected areas and then in Tanzania, helping to determine the impact of forest fragmentation through monitoring rainforest bird populations. The Tanzanian expedition in particular was an eye opener, not only because of the local cultural differences and the poverty, but also because of the amount of teamwork and hardship we had to face living in a remote area like the Usambara Mountains. The experience also made me aware of how foreign countries and NGOs are helping to alleviate the poverty in Tanzania.

Through studying international relations and politics at university, I hope to be able to understand the globally interdependent world in which we live. What are the causes of the current situation in international politics? How will the picture change in decades to come? What influences the main actors to operate in the way that they do? The scope of these debates fascinates me and I anticipate studying them at a higher level.

Part of why I want to study this subject is because it encompasses several different fields. EH Carr's 'Twenty Years Crisis' linked 'The Wealth of Nations' to the harmony of interests doctrine and I found it interesting how models of inter-state relations have evolved in reaction to new ideas and world events. I have also read Robert Kagan's essay 'Paradise and Power', on American-European relations in which he invoked philosophers Hobbes and Kant in order to compare the European rule and process approach to the more unilateral and power-based American style. The way theories from these centuries-old texts could be applied to governments in this decade interested me, so I later read Rousseau's 'Origin of Inequality' and Machiavelli's 'The ...