Msa Personal Statement

I am writing to express my interest in applying to the Ph.D. program in the School of Public Administration at the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO). I am currently completing a Masters of Public Administration (MPA) at UNO with a concentration in Healthcare Administration, and I am on schedule to complete my Capstone project August 2016. I am tremendously interested in the commitment to the advancement of knowledge. I am confident my experience in higher education and experience in academic research, would allow me to contribute to the successful completion….

Two years ago, I was writing my letter of intent for my application to the MPA program revealing my failures, and most significantly, that I lost my passion and didn’t know where

My past academic training and years of experience working as a research assistant prepared me to be an effective researcher and instructor. I have been exposed to theories and research methods from multiple disciplines to prepare for complex social policy evaluations in the area of health promotion. For example, my past academic training in Applied Social Research, where the focus is on theories of social change and issues related to social inequalities, and Physical Education and Recreation, where the focus was on theories of individual behavior change and public health promotion. In both fields, I was interested in program evaluation but felt I was on the outside of both disciplines – in social science, program evaluation was not seen as an honorable enterprise of a sociologist (my professors followed a post-modernist viewpoint of the world) and in health promotion, the focus is on becoming a practitioner, applying theories of individual behavior change. While practitioners believe their programs are worth trying because they believe they have learned how to change people, the evaluator, makes these theories explicit to put them to the test. This alternative method also permits the discovery of new theories of social change in the programs created by experts operating on their own implicit theories. I believe that program evaluation provides the

Greta Cummings. Various research projects looked at the impact of specific leadership practices on outcomes for the health system, the healthcare workforce and for patients. As a member of the research team, we specifically looked at transformational leadership and emotional intelligence in healthcare delivery and quality of care, and in the management of organizational change. I was directly involved in the entire research experience, from methodology to data collection and interpretation. Resulting from this body of research, Cummings developed a Resonant Leadership Scale (RLS) to measure emotional intelligence in a healthcare setting: the development of the tool focused on validity and reliability, as well as straightforward administration in relation to time and cost. This opportunity enabled me to gain knowledge of developing research that impacted decision-making and improvement of healthcare practices. In addition, collaboration with other researchers, team