Personal Statement: My Approach To Higher Education

My intellectual trajectory/biography is characterized by my enthusiasm for immersion into the fields of my personal and professional interest and excitement for new discoveries. I have always been fascinated by the power of knowledge and seeking explanations for social and political paradoxes; in combination with my patience for in-depth research processes and a solution-oriented motivation, these are the main drivers that push my pursuit for an academic career. I have been a passionate reader and writer since I remember. While other children went to play with their friends, I visited the public library in my hometown once a week and read all the books that seemed interesting to me. I remember the day when I couldn’t find anything appealing
While I started my B.A. at the University of Regensburg with a double mayor major in Political Science and, Spanish Philology and Cultural Studies in 2006, I began to study Turkish in 2007 as well. All three subjects translated into long-developed term interests of mine: While my fascination for social and political processes led me to scientifically explore politics, my second mayor major allowed me to get insight to the Spanish-speaking part of the world, encounter different, less euroEuro-centric perspectives and allowed me to develop a comparative mind set. My ambitions to learn Turkish resulted from very personal reasoning. I grew up in an area of Bavaria with a large Turkish minority and due to my looks appearance I have always been associated with them by the majority population . At some point in the beginning of my 20smy early 20s, I decided to learn more about this population and hence, study the language. Put differently, I wanted to see what is ‘the content’ of the identification I have been attributed with. In 2009, I spent one semester as an exchange student in Istanbul at Marmara University. This experience was for various reasons significant for my further educational path. On the one hand, living abroad and studying in an international environment allowed me to gain cross- and transnational perspectives, and developed my capacity to adapt to new contexts and social systems. On the other hand, the seminar Citizenship and Migration (held by Sandrine Bertaux) was crucial for my further academic orientation. It was in this class that I first studied about transnational migration and its impacts on the identification of different migrant generations and where; that I encountered the work of sociologist Rogers