'the importance of education' - STANFORD- intellectually engaging experience.

Describe an intellectually engaging experience.
Limit=1800 characters

THANKS A LOT !!

Last year, I was called into the assistant principal's office. On my way there, my palms began to sweat, "am I in trouble?" I thought to myself. To my surprise, I was welcomed with a sunny smile, which greatly relieved my stress. The assistant principal wanted me to translate for a student who recently moved to the United States from Taiwan. I thought it would be easy, but the task turned out to be much more difficult than I had expected.

On top of translating for administrative purposes, I also had to translate class curriculums and assignments to him. I was very afraid at first because many terms in English do not have direct translations into Mandarin Chinese, so I had to link many seemingly unrelated Chinese words together in order to explain difficult topics like the Holocaust.

This experience was very intellectually engaging in that I was not only required to used my previous knowledge in the language of Chinese, but I also applied other knowledge I have learned in school to improve my explanations. For example, in order to explain the Holocaust, I had to teach him about World War II, Hitler, and Russia. Without learning all that before, I would not have been able to provide a sufficient explanation; I might just confuse him even more.

This experience made me realize the importance of education. By devoting effort in school, I will not only achieve personal academic success, but also be able to help those people in need. This encouraged me to focus during class and pay more attention to seemingly unimportant matters, because I know that they may someday come into great importance.

Well, I will begin with it is a good story and it is interesting to know that you are bilingual. However, you may want to extend it a bit more and also to use more sophisticated language; the language you use is pretty simple and you may want to sound more a intellectual student, because that's the point of the essay.

Well grammar doesn't seem to be a problem.

Hope this helped!
Read mine please: Bowdoin Supplemental essay-My life through music and sports.

Overall is pretty good, but if I were you, I'll change the sentence "Without learning all that before" into something like "Luckily, the knowledge that I learned before came into play. The previous knowledge about Holocaust helped me provide a sufficient explanation for the...." But in order to use this sentence you have to change the original sentence a bit to make it fit...

Aldo - thanks for the reply. i read your essay and left a comment, hope it helped!

David - thanks for your reply man, i changed the sentence :)

welcomed by


seemingly unrelated Chinese words
seemingly to whom?


separate it as a new sentence


I don't think that the last paragraph is relevant.. you have to end with a thought that gives an impression of intellectual engagement.. not what you learned from this experience..

Overall, in my personal opinion, this should be titled as a significant experience rather than what you find intellectually engaging.. You just mentioned briefly why it's engaging, and spent a whole paragraph in the end explaining why it's significant.. Talk about how it stimulated your mind, how it made you use parts of your brain you kept unused.. Make it an exciting experience, that mostly happened inside your mind.. ;)

Good Luck!!