Application for a student visa for a Master’s degree

Dear Sir/Madam, My name is Sagar Shah, I’m a 30-year-old from Mumbai, India. I am applying for this student visa so that I can pursue an MA in filmmaking at the MetFilm School in Berlin, where I was accepted as a student earlier this year. But to me this is more than just an application — it’s more of a culmination of all the professional and academic work I have done for the last couple of decades. Some backstory: As a child I was always an avid reader, often devouring up to three books a week. The library card was my biggest expense, apart from the occasional tennis or swimming lesson. Fresh out of school, I decided that this wasn’t just a passing phase, and was informed by a guidance counsellor that I had an “aptitude for the arts”. This, for those not familiar with the pressure placed on young men in this country to become engineers, or doctors, was meant to be delivered as an insult. Instead, the advice was taken in good faith courtesy the naivety of my youth, and I went on to study the arts for the next five years. As I grappled with questions of philosophy, read about my country’s rich history, and took forward my childhood passion for reading, I graduated with a Bachelors in Arts from Jai Hind college in Mumbai, with English Literature as my major. I soon moved out of my home to New Delhi, to start a professional career as a journalist. It wasn’t the most glamorous of jobs, I was a sub-editor at a national newspaper, hired to edit and curate stories for the international and national pages of The Indian Express — a task that involved browsing through dozens of headlines in minutes. Upon reflection, I may not have retained every single one of those headlines — but the ones that I did gave me a grasp at how staggeringly large the world was. They introduced me to people living parallel lives — often on the other end of the globe — people with differing goals, ambitions, successes, misfortunes, and even bank balances. Granted, grammar-checking stories written by some of the best reporters in the country may not have been the most prestigious of journalism jobs. But it would be one that would send me on a journey of self discovery, and one that would eventually lead me to writing this statement of purpose. Anyway, as it turned out, a newspaper is no place for a starry-eyed 22-year-old eager to fit in with his peers. And so I moved back to Mumbai after two years, where I would join a new-age genre-blending online magazine, a startup that focussed on long form culture articles, a format that is sorely missing in Indian mainstream media.