WHY I WANT TO ATTEND COLLEGE
S C H O L A R S H I P A P P L I C AT I O N E S S AY • P U B L I C H I S TO RY & A R C H I VA L S T U D I E S
In the damp basement
of the county library in my Appalachian hometown,
there is a wall of water-damaged cardboard boxes labeled simply as “Mill Records.”
Inside those boxes are thousands of payroll ledgers, union grievances, and
handwritten letters documenting the lives of the textile workers who built, sustained,
and ultimately grieved the collapse of our local economy. When I volunteered to help
catalog these boxes last summer, I realized that without immediate professional
intervention, our working-class history would simply rot away. This stark realization
is fundamentally why I want to attend college: while I possess the passion to uncover
these stories, I need the rigorous institutional training to actually preserve them.
Many students view college primarily as a pathway to upward economic
mobility. While securing a stable career is certainly important to me, my primary
motivation for pursuing higher education is the acquisition of specialized
methodology. I am enrolling as a Public History major because I want to learn the
exacting science of archival preservation, digital curation, and historical cataloging. I
need access to university-grade digitization labs, temperature-controlled archives,
and professors who understand the theoretical framework of preserving
marginalized narratives.
My goal is to return to rural communities like my own as a qualified archivist,
equipped to transform decaying paper records into accessible digital databases that
future generations can learn from. However, transforming this ambition into reality
requires navigating a significant financial barrier. Coming from a low-income rural
