I need some help with my personal statement, please!

Hi all!

I am now preparing for a scholarship which ask me for a 2 pages personal statement. Here is my draft. Though It was revised by a retired English professor, I still want to hear other comments to make it better. As someone in my country says, the more we are trying, the more we will achieve. Please, look over it for a while and give your sincere advice!

PERSONAL STATEMENT

As a young and motivated industrial pharmacist, I always bear in mind a big dream about becoming a scientist who can bring numerous kinds of advanced medicines to reality. To fulfil my ambition, studying postgraduate program in Switzerland will be an amazing transitional step which helps me be fully equipped before starting my academic career.

I was born and grew up in Vietnam, a developing country. In my childhood, it was so hard to find high quality drugs. We had to depend mainly on foreign medicine for specific. Recently, the situation may be slightly enhanced. However, there were still a lot of poor children and elders had to wait for gradual deaths in desperation. Witnessing and hearing about those predicaments everyday, a flame of ambition has been burning inside me and urging me to become a drugs formulation scientist. By learning industrial pharmacy, I can improve health and life quality of many people not only in Vietnam but also in other developing countries.

To prepare for my dream, I was seriously trained myself necessary knowledge and skills. During my high school, I chose to specialize in chemistry, a fundamental subject for a medicine career, and achieved some awards. For example, I had got gold medals in some local and nationwide Chemistry Exams, HD Certificate (highest class) and D certificate (second class) in Chemistry Examination organized by Royal Australian Chemical Institute. Especially, I obtained honorable Third Grade Certificate in National Examination of High School Students. This achievement brought me directly to University of Medicine and Pharmacy Ho Chi Minh City without attending any entrance exams.

Despite those trivial successes, I have never stopped learning for five years at undergraduate school. I tried my best to obtain good academic results. In addition, I became a research assistant in Organic Chemistry Department from my second year. Actually, I was one of the youngest RA in my Faculty at that time. This position helped me a lot to accumulate basic laboratory, time management, problems solving and leadership skills for a prospective scientific career. For instance, in 2008, I and some classmates made up of a team which was in charge of a medicinal chemistry project. During this time, we have encountered various obstacles in synthesizing, extracting, analyzing target molecules. As a team leader, I had to assign evenly our duties and encourage other members to gradually finish our job. It is that project which supplies me with first valuable working experiences. Subsequently, I attended three internships at a private drug store, a hospital and a pharmaceutical factory one after another. Those trips brought me a full perspective of different pharmacy careers. In my final year, I changed my research interest to industrial pharmacy which is also my ultimate target. Under another professor’s instruction, I conducted my minor thesis about pharmaceutics. Owing to that period of time, I had opportunities to practically contact with numerous new concepts about pharmaceutics and related fields from my and my friends’ works such as mixing, granulating, drying, tableting, capsulizing, UV – vis spectrophotometry, High Performance Liquid Chromatography system, Transdermal delivery, Nanoparticles technology…I had been working diligently and got 9.5/10 mark for my thesis. For me, conducting researches is always joyful especially when I saw round, simple tablets, my first products, came out from tableting machine.

On the other hand, I also spent time joining many types of extracurricular activities such as donating blood, playing with poor and handicapped children. Those activities kept me remember about my dream of devoting myself to community. I also played sports, organized and performed in music shows. Those things showed me the importance of team spirit, leadership besides academic learning and helped me keep healthy body and mind.

After graduating from university, I worked in a pharmaceutical factory to keep learning technical skills applied to large scale machines and formulations which has not been mentioned in university yet. I was assigned to formulate a tablet which contains a very unstable active ingredient: perindopril erbumine. After researching documents and trying some potential formulations, I finally recognize the key which is volatility of that substance. By adding a suitable coating layer, now this drug can be produced successfully and stably. Although it seems to be very simple, that solution tackled one of the most difficult questions of my company. Afterwards, I am trying to build other formulations: Ginkgo biloba, Danazol, Quetiapine… and learning other dosage forms such as suspension, soft gell, cream…

As far as I am concerned, Switzerland is one of the biggest pharmaceutical centers in the world with many famous corporations such as Roche, Novartis…Therefore, I strongly believe studying postgraduate program in University of Basel, the oldest Swiss university, will help me to attain my long term goal of becoming a senior research pharmaceutical scientist. For my intended choice in postgraduate school, I would like to study nanosciences. Recently there have been a lot of newly emerging nano drugs that help people more efficiently treat fatal and persistent diseases such as hepatitis, anemia, cancer…Nevertheless; this technology is still a mysterious field which needs more intellectual efforts to be improved and perfected. Furthermore, the production expenditure is still enormous which in turn leads to a very high price for each final product. Patients everywhere especially those in developing countries need more effective therapies to overcome their conditions. However, they cannot have enough money to afford those expensive drugs. For example, each Hepatitis C patient has to spend about 200 US Dollar, a gigantic amount of money, for one Pegasys® injection. Hence, nano pharmaceutical technology need to be further improved to reduce manufacturing cost in order to bring affordable therapeutics for every people. Accordingly, I want very much to contribute my ability to develop this field of study and fulfil my ambition of formulating advanced medicines for patients regardless of their nationalities and finances.

Speaking of my future plan, if I was granted this scholarship, I would make full use of this chance to study in-depth nanotechnology. Certainly, during my stay in Switzerland, I am also going to learn German in order to better understand the culture and everyday life of your beautiful country. Afterward, I will find a Research&Development position in a nano biopharmaceutical company to apply my knowledge in practice. I intend to start my profession researching about treatments of hepatitis, which is infected widely in many developing countries, such as pegylated interferons, nano vaccines…After ten years working in industrial field, I will return to my university or other pharmacy universities to impart my knowledge and real experiences to next generations. They will in turn broadly spread and intensively develop nanotechnology to benefit the worldwide patients. Finally, I want to become a bridge connecting developing and developed countries’ scholars in order to focus worldwide intellectual talents on pharmaceutical field and bring more chances to developing countries’ student who want to study abroad.

Given my academic background, practical experiences and especially powerful motivation, I believe that I am a promising candidate for the Swiss government scholarship program.

Thank you for your consideration of my application.

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