Mcnair Post Baccalaureate Achievement Program: Personal Statement

My main professional objective is to become a research professor so that I can accomplish two goals: to conduct research in my topic of interest and to teach and mentor the next generation of students. Research became an integral part of my life over the course of one summer when I took part in the McNair Post Baccalaureate Achievement Program. This program lasted approximately two months, but that short amount of time drastically changed everything I had planned for my future. After the program, I changed my undergraduate major, I altered the extracurricular activities I was involved in, and my career goals shifted drastically from the plan I had in place. As a first generation college student, my perspective of possible career options did

The topic that I am interested in and would like to dedicate my graduate study to is moral cognition and decision making, the formation of moral codes, and morality as it affects criminality. I would like to investigate which forces have the greatest impact in the formation of one's moral codes from how a population as a whole views morality to an individual’s personal experiences alter their own understanding. I would like to compare moral codes across cultures to determine if morality is immutable among all human beings or if culture shapes our morality. For example, there are many documented differences between collectivist and individualist societies and their understanding of various issues. Would it not be reasonable to assume that these cultures differ in the area of morality as well? The topic that I have the most interest in researching though, concerns how the moral codes of criminals and non-criminal individuals differ to ascertain if morality is truly different between these two populations. Previous criminal justice research has established that the common criminal agrees that committing a crime is morally wrong. How, then, do they go against their moral code and commit a crime? I would like to investigate the differences between the moral codes of criminal offenders and non-offenders and investigate how a criminal offender would navigate the cognitive dissonance that emerges from perpetrating crimes that ultimately go against their moral