Give comment on my Letter of Motivation

Hello everyone,

Could you please read my Letter of Motivation and give comments?

I was born and raised in Vietnam, a small, S-shaped country in South East Asia.

Walking around in Hanoi, Viet Nam’s capital, the boundless energy can be felt everywhere. People whiz by on scooters, buy and sell everything from phones to food in the countless small shops, and run to and from to get to school or work. Viet Nam is young, growing, and anything feels possible. It wasn’t always thus. A mere 30 years ago, the country was one of the poorest in the world. In 1986, the government introduced “Ð?i M?i”, a series of economic and political reforms, and steered the country to becoming a “socialist-oriented market economy”. Today, Viet Nam is one of the stars of the emerging markets universe. Anything from Nike sportswear to Samsung smartphones is manufactured in this ASEAN nation. But what the price of “overnight” economic success is and what we have forgotten on the way of economic development are two questions bouncing back and forth in my mind while I was growing up.

Starting school, I learned that 54 ethnic groups in Vietnam have different ways of agricultural production. Some use "slash and burn" cultivation techniques, which are only feasible if lands are left to recover for a long period. As the population increases, the growing demand for food forces the farmers to shorten the land-rotation cycle, causing extensive deforestation, soil degradation, and erosion. I wondered what our government could do when rural Vietnamese life is autonomous and village-oriented, and families rely on the principle of "self-sufficiency" to augment needs. Now Vietnam is proudly a major exporter of many kinds of farm produce including rice, coffee, cashew, pepper and rubber in the world. Our agriculture sector in the past years mainly relied on intensive farming techniques which helped raise crop productivity but caused ecological imbalance and made land less fertile. Besides, land and water environments in rural areas have been seriously polluted due to crop protection abuse and pesticide residues in farm produce are still high. Like almost everyone, I expected “someone” to tackle those issues with some miraculous policies or solutions.

Not until I took actions, did I realize that I was not the voiceless in the society. At the age of 15, I moved to Hanoi to study in a specialized high school at Vietnam National University. In the first summer of high school, I was chosen to represent the school at the Asian Young Leaders Convention in Singapore. After attending the convention, I came back and started to tell everyone what I had seen and what I thought could be applied and how to do it. To my surprise, teachers and other students truly listened and helped me out to create a project to realize what I expected. That very first step encouraged me to have faith in community power.

As I entered university, I joined a group of young people, from university students to fresh graduates, who loved and worried about traditional culture types of arts. We understood the power of media and used that tool to raise awareness and pushed the public attention to traditional cultures. Working at the NGO Volunteers For Peace Vietnam (or VPV for short) put me in touch with development issues. VPV holds several projects to support the local community and contribute to Vietnam’s development: building schools in rural and mountainous areas, sending volunteers to support local schools, supporting centers for children with special needs and holding seminars, workshops and capacity building training for youngsters. Besides my main tasks of coordination and communication, I was honored to join a gender-based issues project funded by Erasmus+. During the project, together with my teammates, I planned and carried out a project tailor-made for Vietnam’s situation. This project also inspired me to write my bachelor’s thesis: “How gender stereotypes are reflected in Vietnam’s media and its effects”.

This year I find myself in that difficult and frustrating transitional period between undergraduate and graduate studies. Though I would have preferred to directly continue graduate school after graduation, I opted to take a year off. A year away from school, I reasoned, would afford me the time needed to recuperate from an exhaustive undergraduate education, gain some perspective, and work on fulfilling the knowledge and experience I need to have a more proper view on developmental issues. I am volunteering on a bio-dynamic farm in Germany. I chose to have practical experience in agriculture because I believe Vietnam has bigger potential in this field rather than destroying the natural resources to industrialize. Also, I want to get insight into how developed nations deal with their own problems. And, finally, a break from school has given me sufficient time to search and research for graduate programs that best suit my needs.

The program of Development Management of Ruhr University Bochum looms large in my mind, largely because of its outstanding faculty and interdisciplinary approach to different aspects of development. I do not doubt that the program will meet the criteria of intellectual rigor that I have set for myself, for my education, and for those I have promised to serve, as it provides an ideal climate for me to develop my cross-disciplinary interests.

Thanks in advance