Planning school

It's kind of pathetic, but I'm actually thinking about going back to school -- in the planning program at VCU. The point would be to be better qualified and to not lose focus on the work I really want to do, and to make some kind of tangible connection to Richmond. Anyway, my "statement of purpose":

I’ve been interested in what makes a good place to live since I was old enough to think about anything at all. I grew up on the outskirts of a steel town in western Pennsylvania, and I was always bothered by how hard it was to reconcile the natural beauty of the area with its industrial ugliness. In the years before the Clean Air Act started to show some effect, I can remember having to wash the soot off the outside of our house. I remember piles of slag on the side of the road. I am a coal-miner’s granddaughter, and my grade-school classmates were mostly the children of steelworkers, so I understood that industry, however ugly, was necessary to our well-being. This was especially apparent as the 1970s wore on and the steel industry went deeper into decline.
When I was 13, my family moved to the suburbs of St. Louis. Before the move, I looked forward to going somewhere clean and new. It didn’t take long for me to realize, though, that the very worst of Midwestern sprawl was a worse place to live than a small rust-belt town in decline.
My aversion to both of those types of places eventually led me to New Orleans, where I lived for almost a decade and used to think I would live for the rest of my life. New Orleans was a fascinating puzzle. On the one hand it was vibrant and unique, a place where everyone seemed devoted to living well, a place with its own culture centered on street life, and seemingly invulnerable to American mass consumer culture—where the Rue de la Course coffee house was crowded past midnight every night, and where all three Starbucks struggled for customers. On the other hand, as the world saw in the great post-Katrina airing of the city’s dirty laundry, New Orleans was a hopelessly dysfunctional disaster even before the disaster. It was (and is) crippled by corruption, ineptitude, racial hostility, crime, hopelessly ineffective public education, and a shortage of economic opportunity for everyone from high school dropouts to college-educated would-be young professionals. On top of that, it’s located right in the middle of an ongoing environmental disaster and depends for its existence on a complicated but perhaps not well-thought-out system of environmental engineering.
My friends and I spent a lot of time talking about how one might improve New Orleans and fix its most pressing problems without destroying its essence, and debating whether such a thing was even possible. After Katrina, these questions became more urgent. Since the hurricane, it’s been disheartening to see the city squander its chance at a new start. I hope I am mistaken in my pessimism, but to me it seems the city’s problems are rapidly compounding while its better qualities erode.
I began my first semester at Tulane Law School one week before Katrina. After the storm, I came back to New Orleans and Tulane. During law school, I focused on environmental law. I found that I was particularly interested in land use, where environmental issues intersected community and economic concerns. I became more focused on questions of what makes a city or town a good place to live.
If I were a better person, perhaps I would have stayed in New Orleans to fight to make it a better place. However, I’m sorry to say I have lost faith in New Orleans’ future. Instead, I spent a great deal of time thinking about the kind of city I wanted to live in. I looked around a bit, and last year I was delighted to discover Richmond. I moved here after graduation, took the Virginia bar exam this summer, and have a temporary job at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.
I am applying to VCU’s MURP program for two reasons. The first is that the kind of work I want to do requires a strong background in planning, but my planning education has been a bit random and hit-or-miss. I think I would have a better chance of finding the work I want if I had formal education in planning. The second reason is that I recognize that I have no obvious connection or reason to be in Richmond, which in some ways is an insular small southern city, similar to New Orleans. I think some employers might be scratching their heads as they contemplate my application. An education at VCU would provide me with a more tangible connection to this city. I envision myself working in city government, probably as a city attorney, although there are other settings where I could find the kind of work I am interested in—a federal agency such as HUD, in state government, with a nonprofit or in specialized private practice.