Undergraduate / "DISCOVERING THE WORLD OUTSIDE OF THE ORANGE CURTAIN" -UC PROMPT 1 [6]

Prompt 1: Describe the world you come from - for example, your family, community or school - and tell us how your world has shaped your dreams and aspirations.

Growing up in Orange County does not guarantee luxury. I am a middle- class Sri Lankan girl from Lake Forest, California. I live a padded life in suburbia. I have a supportive mother who has taught me to reach for the stars and chase after my dreams. My cell phone and my Facebook page constitute half my time. I live the stereotypical Orange County life, but I am much more than what meets the eye. I push past the cultural homogeneousness that surrounds me, and I delve into the reality that lives outside of the Orange Curtain.

My interests in other cultures started at a very young age. Moving to America at the age of 4, I did not fully grasp the cultural differences between Sri Lanka and America. Only when I went back to Sri Lanka 7 years later did I realize how different I was from everyone else because I was raised with different customs. I grew to have a special respect for various cultures when I moved to Orange County. In elementary school, I attended a party at a Japanese friends house where the mom made traditional Japanese food for the guests to enjoy. Back then, this meant little to me, but looking back it was these small things that encouraged me to look beyond the typical Orange County existence. I met my first Sri Lankan friend in high school. She and I come from opposite sides of the island so it was interesting to see how her childhood differed from mine. Her area was more rural so everything from our mode of transportation to our traditional dinner was different. Even with being born on the same, tiny island our customs vary widely. One of my friends lived in Saudi Arabia until she was 13, and another friend lived in Colombia until he was 11. I love hearing their stories about the homeland and comparing their customs with those of Sri Lanka. My diverse group of friends have showed me how every culture is connected to each other in some small way.

My enthusiasm about world affairs was driven by my Contemporary World Issues class. During our Children's Rights unit we learned about the hardships that innocent children must face in third world nations. For example, the children in Uganda cannot roam around their town without the fear of being captured by the LRA, and mothers in Cambodia live in constant anxiety that their daughters will be kidnapped by child traffickers. It is unimaginable how scary the world is for these children. They have no control of or protection from the economic and political instability in their countries. Therefore I believe that Americans should

take initiative to help people, especially children, in developing countries.

The summer before senior year, a friend and I decided to start a UNICEF (United Nations Children's Fund) Club to advocate for impoverished children. As a leader I felt it was my job to step up and show our school what life outside of the Orange County bubble is like. Many students at El Toro High School do not know what it is like to go to bed on a empty stomach; therefore, we decided to throw a Hunger Banquet to show students what the real world is like. Upon entrance, guests were stratified randomly into high, middle, or low income groups. They were fed based on their income; so high income got the most food at a nice table, middle income got some food at a dirty table, and low income were ostracized and seated on cardboard boxes with some rice and beans for dinner. We got the audience emotionally hooked by showing a video on the terrible diseases children obtain from malnutrition and the lack of clean water and by the end of the night we raised over $450 to help unprivileged children.

The Hunger Banquet and my knowledge from Contemporary World Issues has taught me to be open minded and think about other cultures and societies and how they are different than what is inside the Orange Curtain. Life is so beautiful and many times I, along with many of my classmates, take that for granted. I feel lucky to live such a blessed life, but I can only be happy with myself if I try to help those less fortunate than myself. Helping can be as simple as advocating for the cause amongst your friends or throwing a school wide function to raise funds and awareness. Even the smallest thing helps so I fully intend on continuing my humanitarian work for years to come.

Prompt 2: Tell us about a personal quality, talent, accomplishment, contribution or experience that is important to you. What about this quality or accomplishment makes you proud and how does it relate to the person you are?

THIS IS MY FIRST DRAFT FOR PROMPT 2!!! SO I KNOW IT'S A BIT ROUGH AROUND THE EDGES, JUST LET ME KNOW WHAT YOU THINK I CAN IMPROVE ON.

This world is full of an overwhelming amount of negativity, so I am happy to say that my positive outlook on life has allowed me to view the good in everything. I always encourage people to look on the bright side and laugh when life gets tough. My philosophy is that life is unpredictable and unchangeable so there is no reason to dwell on things we cannot control. I am thankful for the gift of life, and I want to inspire people to appreciate the beauty surrounding us.

I greatly dislike when my friends are sad or angry, so I would be glad to risk my intellectuality by cracking a few jokes or singing a happy tune in order to make them happy. I know what it is like to feel down in the dumps, so I sympathize with people and am always ready to lend an ear for their problems. When my best friend and her boyfriend broke up after two years, I knew I had to do major damage control. I took her out to our favorite frozen yogurt place and we talked for almost three hours. She left the yogurt shop smiling. I love living my life to the fullest, and I fully encourage my peers to do the same. I am proud that I can always be so positive in tough situations, and that I am inclined to go out of my way to make other people smile.

PLEASE BE SPECIFIC WITH YOUR CRITIQUES!

Undergraduate / "Growing up was not a fairy tale." - PERSONAL STATEMENT [8]

The night my world fell apart started off with a simple phone call. One minute I was laughing at the television screen, the next I was sitting in a frantic hospital room watching a blur of doctors and nurses surrounding my barely alive father. He was admitted into the Emergency Room after being found hardly breathing in his car that was stalled out on the side of the road. I, naively, assumed his diabetes had something to do with his sudden illness. Little did I know that the doctors were treating my father for an overdose on methamphetamines.

Growing up we lived just above the poverty level, barely getting by with my parents minimum wage jobs. We moved around frequently, chasing low paying jobs with no room to move up. Stability was inexistent in our family until our brother was born. We used up all of our savings to buy a house in the suburbs of Orange County, hoping for a better life in a neighborhood that offered many opportunities to its residents. My parents started their own businesses, my siblings and I were comfortable in our new schools, and problems at home were starting to dissipate.

Just as things started coming together, everything abruptly fell apart. My family, along with the rest of the country, were deeply affected by the Great Recession of 2007. We lost everything; our home, our cars, our pets, and our businesses. Our family was barely holding onto each other to begin with, so the stress of having to start our lives over from scratch completely tore us apart. My older sister fully abandoned her family and her values. She made is perfectly clear that she wanted nothing to do with our family, so we obliged and walked away. The real problem was my dad; he was back to his old ways of abusing my mom, but this time he chose to make his children the victims too. As I lay in bed at night I could hear my drunk father cursing our family, throwing things against the wall, and slamming doors. The police were called numerous times to help the situation, but every night would be worse than the night before. For the next two years I locked my door at night and prayed to God to make things better.

I had just started high school when everything started to go wrong. As much as I tried to keep my life at home separate from my life at school, it was evident in my grades and behavior on campus that something was wrong. The year passed by and nothing got better so I knew I had to get out of that house, and the only way of doing so would be to go to college. Based on my performance thus far in high school I knew my prospects of getting into a good university were low. I put all of my faith in God and used his strength to get my life under control. I started taking initiative at school; I got myself into tougher classes and made it a point to get involved in sports and clubs. With the help of my teachers, counselors, and my mom I was able to start my path to success. Soon enough, I was committed to so many things that my problems at home seemed insignificant; I was finally happy with where I was in life.

Throughout my transformation the two people who always stood by me were my mom and my little brother. My mom was young but she was the rock in our family, she did whatever it took to keep us together. She gave up a lot for our family; her education, her businesses, and her desire to become a lawyer. The only thing my mom ever asked of me was to get a good education and become something great. Her story and strength was what inspired me to follow of dream of becoming a lawyer myself. I want to become a lawyer for two reasons; first, because it would allow me the opportunity to help people who cannot help themselves. Second, it would enable me to support my mom and brother financially so someday she can escape from my father and be happy again.

The phone call from the hospital sent a shock of terror through our hearts. My father had not been home in almost a week at that point, and we were genuinely afraid for his life. The sight at the hospital was depressing; he had tubes and wires all over his body and a ring of doctors and nurses around him. My grief did not last long, for when I heard that my father had been taking crystal methamphetamines for the past two years all I could feel was anger and hatred. His explanation for his drug problem was that he washed all of our money away while gambling and could not deal with the guilt; so he resorted to drugs to help dull his pain. While it explained his behavior, it did not excuse anything. To this day I believe that we lost everything we had because my father was using all the money to comfort his drug addiction. This revelation, surprisingly, made my life easier. I had a greater will to go to college, which simply made me work harder in school. I knew I deserved better than what I was going through, and I was the one who had to step up and change my life around.