My central dream is to become a licensed counselor and to live my professional life to promoting the mental health of my community, particularly the well-being of members of Asian societies. XXU’s Master’s Program in Mental Health Counseling is my first choice for graduate school because of the diversity of XXU and New York City—not just Asians, but Asians in a fully international urban context. XXU is the perfect location for thoroughly examining the unique challenges faced by Asian immigrants to America.

I look forward to spending my professional life engaged in research in this area, mainly designing prevention and treatment programs for depression and anxiety tailored to immigrants from Asian cultures. I will be completing my undergraduate studies in Applied Psychology at XXU. This is coming May 2016, and I could not be more in love with my location in life, city, university, and faculty. I want to stay right where I am to continue to the next professional level as a graduate student.

As a Chinese woman and an international student, I have witnessed several of my Asian friends and acquaintances suffering from what appears to me to be depression and anxiety; one fellow Chinese student in particular who I have gotten close to and who suffers from anxiety and depression refuses to follow my advice and seek professional help because she does not want to be considered a weak person and “lose face.” Another reason I have my heart set on attending your prestigious Master’s Program in Applied Psychology at XXU is the opportunities for fieldwork with Asian populations, especially the underserved. I have a particular passion for the homeless, helping them, protecting them, and serving as an advocate for their interests. Since September 2015, I have been serving as an intern with NYC’s Immigrant Health and Disparities Service, where I have been conducting my independent project in hopes of finding ways to promote follow-up survey rates and client adherence. In short, I am fully engaged with getting people to come to our food bank on a regular and less sporadic basis so that we can play a more significant role in providing nutritious food to those most in need. I have reviewed many journal articles and reached out to many patients, social workers, and people from other clinics to find answers. I eat my meals frequently with homeless people. It is fun to speak Chinese with some of them, helping me to understand their circumstances and challenges better, although my Cantonese is not nearly as good as my mother tongue, Mandarin.

I also very much appreciate the way your program at XXU is famous for placing a very high value on cultural context and efforts to make psychology as culturally specific and appropriate as possible. I have especially enjoyed our bi-weekly peer-group reflections on our fieldwork, sharing our experiences under the supervision of a licensed counselor such as Dr. XXXX, who is especially near and dear to me. Furthermore, my research interests have more in common with your faculty than any other. XXXX's research on the impact of immigration and race on Asian and Asian Americans and her ongoing projects with urban Chinese American and Korean American adolescents and young immigrant adults in New York City, for example. XXXX examines cultural influences on the therapeutic setting, and Lisa Suzuki's research is focused on the development of our understanding of issues in multicultural assessment. I also very much appreciate Dr. XXXX's concern for homeless people with disabilities and Dr. XXXX's research on interventions for military veterans. I have met disabled Asian veterans who are homeless here in NYC. Nowadays, I have my radar up looking for them in particular.

As I see it, the stigma attached to seeking help among Asian sufferers of depression and anxiety is especially pronounced as a direct result of cultural values. I hope to mitigate the adverse effects of this stereotypical thinking by helping to build more open and culturally sensitive community organizations that support our Asian populations tailored to their unique needs and the issues that most affect them. I see a long life ahead of me, working tirelessly to promote multicultural understandings and incorporating them into our analyses of clinical and social psychological phenomena and therapeutic programs. I want to learn, study, and grow concerning the many ways cultural context impacts clinical rapport and therapeutic efficacy.

I hope to work towards a more inclusive description of depression in the specific context of Asian cultures and address body language issues, along with relationship and trust building. As an intern at the Immigrant Health and Cancer Disparities Service, I have found myself interacting with increasing frequency with native speakers of Spanish, so I am now studying this language as well, especially since I find that speaking some Spanish helps me to establish rapport and build trust and confidence with those homeless people for whom this is their first language, an enormous chunk of NYC’s underserved. I thank you for considering my application.