STUDENT PAPERS ARCHIVE

My 2003 Admissions Essay to UCLA Urban Planning

I got admitted.

With my advisor and mentor Professor Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris on graduation day at UCLA Urban Planning, June 17, 2005. [Photo by Jonathan Pacheco Bell]

My 2003 statement of purpose to the UCLA Master of Arts in Urban Planning program responded to this prompt: “Give a concise description of past and present educational and employment experiences and of how these experiences have led to the choice of urban planning as a career objective; and a statement describing a specific focus in research interests or practice-oriented goals.”

By this point in life, I’d figured out what I wanted to do. This statement of purpose was my personal call to action. I was then, and still am today, accountable to these words. And over the last two decades, I’ve been doing the work I set out to do here.

An editorial note: this essay was intended for an internal admissions committee. I’ve split the original’s excessively long, academic-style paragraphs and made minor typographical edits to improve readability for a wider readership.

One salient experience comes to mind when I think of how I decided to pursue a career in urban planning: experiencing inequality as an undergraduate student at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-arc). In January 1998, I transferred from East Los Angeles College to SCI-arc, the first student from the Eastside community college to advance to the Westside avant-garde design school. Confident in my abilities and determined to excel as an architect, I assumed the transition to SCI-arc would be easy. It was not! For the economic, cultural, and ethnic differences I would encounter prevented my seamless transition to SCI-arc.

SCI-arc was located in a tony, predominantly White upper middle-class area of West Los Angeles. A self-supported institute with expensive tuition and minimal financial assistance programs, SCI-arc attracted mainly wealthy students who could afford a full-time architecture education. The demographics of the school were revealing: one-third of the student body were affluent students from Europe and Asia, and most American students were Anglos who were educated at prestigious East Coast universities before coming to Los Angeles. Without on-campus housing, many of these students chose to live in nearby upscale communities such as Santa Monica, Venice, and Marina del Rey.

I, however, did not enjoy these privileges. My home was twenty-five miles away in Montebello, a working-class, predominantly Mexican-American suburb the Los Angeles Times recently described as the 10th least diverse city in California. As a student at East Los Angeles College, I worked various part-time jobs to pay for my education; in order to attend SCI-arc, I had to quit working to study full-time. My financial aid and savings barely covered SCI-arc’s tuition and material expenses, so, unlike my counterparts, I could not afford to relocate near the school. Thus, I commuted to SCI-arc everyday an hour-and-a-half in traffic, while many of my peers rode bikes from their apartments to the school, which spared them from the kind of exhaustion and frustration I felt from being stuck in daily gridlock. As one of the few working-class Latino students attending SCI-arc, I quickly felt socially and economically unequal to my new classmates. That feeling of inequality made it difficult for me to assimilate into SCI-arc’s tight-knit, cliquey subculture and I struggled to stay on par in the school’s fiercely competitive environment. By my second semester, my productivity faltered and I eventually failed two courses. I left SCI-arc in December 1998 after only two semesters in attendance.

In retrospect, experiencing inequality at SCI-arc was the critical turning point in my academic career. The ordeal opened my eyes to a societal problem I had previously only read about in textbooks. Now, having experienced inequality myself, I wanted to do something about it. But in order to make a difference in society, I determined that I first needed to develop a better understanding of the various social, economic and institutional causes of inequality — the interrelated sociopolitical forces that shape society and the built environment. Thus, I set aside my architecture studies to pursue a bachelor’s degree in political science. With renewed resolve, I set my sights on the political science program at California State University, Los Angeles (CSULA), a program I was drawn to for its diverse student body, accomplished faculty, and affordable tuition. Before transferring to CSULA, I returned to East Los Angeles College for two semesters, completed the undergraduate core requirements, and in August 1999 earned my Associate of Arts degree, graduating in the top five percent.

At CSULA, I designed an interdisciplinary political science curriculum that provided me a broad theoretical base from which to research inequality. My program of study integrated the disciplines of sociology, anthropology, Latin American studies, political science and law, enabling me to thoroughly investigate the causes and consequences of inequality. In courses such as Political Sociology, Nature of Politics, Race, Racism and Human Variation, Race and Culture in the Americas, Civil Rights, Rights and Justice in Communication, Judicial Process and Criminology, I researched: 1) power relations, stratification, and inequality among disadvantaged social groups; 2) the comparative history of racial/ethnic and class inequality in the US, Latin America, and the Caribbean; 3) differing biological and cultural conceptions of race; 4) the history of de facto and de jure segregation in the US and relevant case law addressing race, class, and gender-based inequality; and 5) bias in the US criminal justice system based on offenders’ race, class, and gender.

My research papers enhanced my multifaceted study of inequality. For example, I wrote papers on class conflict in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, property-based inequality in John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, police officers’ reliance on suspects’ race and behavior in determining police actions, school redistricting in Louisiana and its impact on African-American voting rights, and racist motives behind American Indian land reservations in 18th century America. In particular, my final paper for Race and Culture in the Americas was developed as a service-learning project for economically disadvantaged high school students. I am proud to report that my case study on the Royal Proclamation Line of 1763 — the British-created border across the Appalachian Mountains that segregated American Indians from Anglo colonists, a geographic boundary which helped inspire the US to carry out Manifest Destiny — was donated to a local high school library to assist students with social studies research.

All in all, through diligent research and writing at CSULA, I honed my analytical abilities, broadened my perspective, and achieved academic and personal maturity. More importantly, my research taught me a vital lesson about inequality: I learned that it is deeply-rooted in American society; and because various social, economic, and institutional forces work to maintain it, inequality functions as a pervasive structural obstacle preventing disadvantaged social groups from achieving upward mobility and social integration. Ultimately, this realization galvanized my resolve to root out inequality. I believe the most effective way I can make a decisive difference is by attaining an urban planning education.

A Master of Arts in Urban Planning from the School of Public Policy and Social Research at UCLA will provide me with the knowledge and resources to help eliminate inequality and bring about social change in the built environment. I am specifically drawn to the Department of Urban Planning for its commitment to educating socially responsible urban planners. After visiting the department’s website, I was thrilled to read the message from the Chair, Dr. Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, which indicated that the urban planning faculty is “[committed] to applied, action-oriented, problem-solving research and teaching that is particularly concerned with socially, economically and politically disadvantaged populations.” That commitment to achieving social change through grass-roots urban planning education is what I am seeking in a graduate program. I anticipate gaining clinical experience in community-building through fieldwork and internship opportunities. Moreover, after perusing a list of recent theses, client projects, and comprehensive projects, I realize that I will have the freedom to take on an independent scholarly research project or a practical problem in urban planning for my capstone requirement. I look forward to that challenge! Overall, the program’s flexible, interdisciplinary curriculum will allow me to flourish in a dynamic working environment. For these reasons, I believe the Department of Urban Planning at UCLA is well suited for my graduate studies.

My background in architecture and political science has made me particularly interested in researching issues of equality, justice, and security in the built environment. As an urban planning student, I aim to bridge my previous work in architectural design with my more recent study of politics in order to comprehend the interrelated social, political, economic, and cultural forces that shape the built environment. To this end, I propose to research the following subjects: 1) the process of ghettoization, particularly in the communities of East and South Central Los Angeles; 2) the impact of de facto and de jure segregation on residential housing patterns in Los Angeles; 3) the effectiveness of urban design strategies in revitalizing inner city communities; 4) the privatization and gentrification of downtown public space; 5) the history of Oscar Newman’s Defensible Space crime-prevention theory and the effectiveness of Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) methods in reducing crime in inner city communities; and 6) the development of Urban Realism, Richard Carson’s post-New Urbanist theory that calls for increased urban security design in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. I anticipate working with Professors Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, Evelyn Blumenberg, and Vinit Mukhija, whose research on privatization and security in inner city communities, spatial structures and economic inequality, and urban design and neighborhood revitalization, respectively, compliments my own interests.

In view of my research interests, my proposed areas of concentration are Community Development and the Built Environment with a specialization in Urban Design and Physical Planning, and Social Planning and Analysis with a specialization in Planning and Diverse Communities. I have reviewed the curriculum for these concentrations and I consider the courses highly compatible with my research interests. In particular, I plan to take courses such as Race, Gender, Culture and Cities, Privatization and Regulation of Public Finance, Seminar on Public Space, and the Joint Planning/Architecture Studio to develop my expertise in urban planning. Additionally, I will capitalize on the university’s vast resources by taking elective courses in law and architecture to round out my urban planning education. Through integrated training in research methods, policy analysis, and urban design, I expect to acquire the ability to affect practical social change in the built environment. After graduation, I want to work in the public and private sectors as an urban planner-designer employing my skills to improve the planning, design and management of the built environment for diverse populations.

I believe that I am well prepared for graduate study in urban planning. Firstly, as you have my transcripts, my records indicate that I graduated cum laude from East Los Angeles College and CSULA. My hard work earned me appointments to the Dean’s Honor List at both institutions and induction into the Golden Key International Honor Society in April 2001. My cumulative undergraduate GPA is a solid 3.66. I plan to continue my scholarly achievements as an urban planning student at UCLA’s School of Public Policy and Social Research. Secondly, I have a strong background in architecture and political science from which I can develop a successful urban planning education. At SCI-arc and East Los Angeles College, I took courses in architectural design, drawing and visual communication, computer-aided design, and architectural history. Additionally, I employed my skills as a junior designer for Barch Builder Architects, Alexis Navarro Design Studio, and the United States Department of Agriculture, Forest Service (see enclosed resume). In short, I possess well-developed design skills that are advantageous for work in urban planning. Furthermore, at CSULA my curriculum included courses in legal research, political theory, organization and management, foreign policy, and public policy analysis. These courses are relevant to and beneficial for my proposed urban planning studies. I specifically took the two policy courses during my final semester to prepare me for advanced urban planning research. In US Foreign Policy, I earned an “A” on my final paper assessing the impact of Israel’s water policies on Palestinians in the occupied territories (see enclosed work sample).

In summary, my early experience with inequality was an eye-opening ordeal that provided me a timely opportunity to reevaluate my personal and professional aspirations. I want to rid society of inequality and construct social change in the built environment. I am realistic, I know this goal will be difficult to achieve — nevertheless, I believe an urban planning education from UCLA will give me with the requisite knowledge and skills to accomplish my objectives. After attending the open house for the School of Public Policy and Social Research in October 2002 and speaking with current students and faculty, I know I have made the correct choice in pursuing a Master of Arts in Urban Planning at UCLA. I am eager to begin the graduate program that will enable me to make a decisive difference in society.