Masters Counseling MFT Immigrant Personal Statement

MFT Personal Statement Examples

A recent immigrant from Romania, I have now been living in the US for two years working extremely hard at bringing my English skills up to a professional level. I worked as a practicing psychologist for 1 year in a Romanian nursing home before I immigrated to the USA and began studying and working with patients with Alzheimer’s who I came to adore and still miss to this day. I also volunteered in my country as a group facilitator and counselor at a shelter for domestic violence victims. I currently volunteer at Southwest Hospital in City, State, where I help discharge patients. I pay special attention to the counselors that I work with in the hospital, and I am learning a great deal by befriending them. They have also encouraged me to apply to graduate school in counseling.

Now thirty-five, my studies have led me to the firm conclusion that mental health challenges are best addressed in the context of the family. Thus, I have decided to focus my Master’s Studies on Marriage and Family Therapy and your competitive program at ____ University is my first choice for graduate study primarily because of your strength in this area of Counseling Psychology.

I hope to contribute to the celebration of diversity in your program as a woman, an immigrant, and someone with a lifetime of experience as an ethnic minority. Since I was born into a Russian community in Romania, my first language was Russian. Only when I went to school did I learn the Romanian language along with Romanian cultural values, attitudes, and biases, including negative stereotypes of Russians. 30 years later I have been living through the struggle of integration once again, and, I like to think, with equal success.

Becoming a professional counselor here in my adopted land means fulfilling my heart's desire, quenching my intellectual curiosity, and rebuilding my professional directions. My determination to pursue the study of counseling dates from an early curiosity about brain function. Another prominent factor that helped to set me on a course towards further professional study in psychology was the fact that my mother was misdiagnosed with a personality disorder and administered a treatment that turned her into a withdrawn lethargic before my eyes. The desire to help my mother was a great spark that ignited my passion for mental health issues. Hence, I switched my undergraduate major from linguistics to psychology. My instructors served as role models and inspired me to embrace psychology as a career because of my enthusiasm for our field. I have benefitted from personal counseling, which has also left me eager to study psychology on a graduate level at ____ University.

It is my intention to focus on the Marriage & Family Counseling track as a student in your program at ____ for several reasons. First, my own experience as an immigrant together with my observations of other immigrants have provided me with both an awareness and a passion for addressing the special mental health challenges faced by immigrant families. I am also aware of and seek to respond to the especially great need that exists for counseling and family therapy within my own immigrant community as well as other immigrant communities. Becoming a professional psychologist in the USA and re-creating my profession in a new language and a new system, represent an incredibly special triumph for me as both a professional and a recent immigrant.

I am also concerned with the fact that 50% of marriages in the USA will end in divorce at current levels. This fact alone highlights well the need for more marriage counseling. I would consider it to be a great privilege to assist people to overcome stressful situations and to fend off challenges to a successful, functional family life. This is undoubtedly one of the reasons why the professional prospects for family therapists are exceptionally good.

After thoroughly reviewing a substantial number of counseling programs I have chosen to apply to the Marriage & Family Counseling track in your program at the University of ____. The University of ____ offers a diversity of master's degree programs which constantly produce stellar graduates, a fact reflected by the high pass rates for your graduates on the licensure examination. I am also drawn towards your program due to its COAMFTE and CACREP accreditations which offer a dual licensure track. Your students also have prominent levels of success in internship placement and excellent post-graduate employment opportunities. Most of all, however, it is my dream of participating in clinical training through the Clinic for Individual & Family Counseling since this would allow me to work with the populations of my interest. I am a good fit with your program at ____ University because of the diversity of students that you help to become multiculturally competent counselors helping their respective communities.

I am incredibly pleased to have had the experience of working as a psychologist in Romania before coming to America, spending one year at a nursing home. My principal responsibilities were to conduct clinical interviews, assess and record daily functioning status, guiding therapeutic interventions, and organizing recreational activities. This experience gave me insight into the broad variety of family dynamics that often accompany mental health challenges. Prior to my year in the nursing home, I completed an internship at a local domestic violence shelter as a counselor, facilitating group counseling and providing community education and problem-solving assistance. Since moving to the US, I have stayed busy working at Southwest Hospital in ____ and I have also learned a lot because of my work helping to discharge patients, which has also improved my communication skills in English enormously.

I consider myself a solid candidate due to the relevance of my volunteer and professional experiences, on the one hand, and my education on the other. I am highly motivated and persistent. Mature, calm and very emotionally stable, I am most often praised for my listening and observation skills along with my empathy. I have consistently pursued my dream. My career switch happened early on, since I was 26 years old when I decided that working in an office would not fulfil me and a degree in languages is not what I want. It wasn't like a moment of epiphany but, rather, the result of a persistent and growing passion to be able to make sense of my social world in psychological terms. My inclination to find and explain things around me in a psychological way was persistent. Early on, I concluded that that if I wanted to know the root cause for everything, I must first understand the human mind.

In adolescence I remember having many friends who shared their secrets with me because they knew that they could trust me. When I learned that some of my older friends were reading Freud and Jung, I started reading them too, although I did not understand them very well at the time, they stayed with me. In my Romanian culture many girls became teachers because this was a safe option that pleases most parents. Thus, I became a teacher and went on to study Russian and French languages. I completed 50 hours of training in Cognitive-Behavioral Techniques and Clinical Hypnosis at AHPCC, Bucharest Romania. After graduation, I found employment in an international pharmaceutical company. Psychology was seen as an extravagant option, a fancy choice with nebulous outcomes and I was not allowed to make such a fanciful choice early on. I studied hard and with pleasure. After earning my master's degree in clinical psychology, I was lucky to find a job in my field and thrilled to land the position at the nursing home. It was the most fulfilling period of my life. But I got married to an American citizen and here I am. It was a difficult decision to make because I knew that I would have to put my career in psychology on hold for the time being. But I have now been here in America for two years and I am completely free to fully immerse myself in graduate studies. I consider myself to be highly computer literate but also entirely self-educated in this area.

Thank you for considering my application to your program.

Masters Counseling MFT Immigrant Personal Statement