I'm an international student and I am seeking help with my grammar and wording for my Common application essay. Any other feedback will also be appreciated! (I need also to cut off 100 words to fit in the 500 word requirement) I need it to be done by tomorrow night. Here is the essay:
I am a slow walker.
It took me nearly four weeks to finally set my final draft for my personal statement to college; the other drafts I'd written incurred too much criticism for the essays' "lack of my own image". Yet, truth be told, the only image I saw myself with was a college applicant with a lot of writing work remaining two days before the January deadline for application. It was not because I was a procrastinator who played too much in the days before, but due to my short of some "keen perspective" or "intelligence" as others possessed. The other time when I sat in classroom to solve tricky math problems, for example, such speed race always found me far behind my classmates.
Walking on a slow pace in my life, I barely got any advantages to catch the worms early. From time to time, I wish I could possess the same ability to ace every quiz no matter hard or not, or do produce some eye-catching pieces of writing so that colleges would not hesitate to admit me.
Yet, with all sorts of best illusions, I was still who I was before.
Grandma called me to help her with garden maintain one late fall day. I thought it interesting so there I went. In her garden grew a wall of loofah vines. It's thrilling to see the previously tiny seedling had grown into vines spreading across the self-made bamboo stand. Among the edged leaves were a bunch of loofahs hanging down from the bottom of stems.
I picked up a scissor from grandma's hand and began to trim dead leaves off the vines. The yellowish dead leaves curled up within other fresh ones, making it time-consuming to be picked out and cut away. After approximately an hour's battle against those leaves, I found an interesting phenomenon that one half of the yellowish leaves concentrated in the lower part of vines, while the new growing loofahs stayed on the top.
Too fast to grow. I reflected on the knowledge I learned in biology class. Those fast growing leaves simply consumed much of their energy at their early stage of growth. The slower ones, on the contrary, climbed along the vines and reached the highest position slowly but persistently. They were the ones to enjoy the ample sunlight and bear fruits finally, after a seemingly long struggle with time.
Slow, yet persistent.
I sat down under the loofah vines, starting to reflect on how much I had been benefited from my former slow movements, just like those late born leaves.
I have kept practicing ping pong since third grade. Never attending a public tournament though, I purely enjoy the moments along with my favorite ping pong pat, the one I bought with all my pocket money at the age of 11.
Being a slow pacer does not hinder me from thinking intellectually. Once visiting a science fair, I watched a demonstration on lighthouse for times, trying to figure out the mechanism behind it.
I walk slowly, but I dream big. I would "not be a successful business man" as my father generation had foreseen, but I know someday I will become a great engineer, a great author, or even a great ping pong player instead, if only I am persistent.
I am a slow pacer for the past 18 years, but I will find a better word to define me.
