Undergraduate / Stanford Letter to Roommate "Teamplayer" [8]

I appreciate all your comments:) Let me know what you think of this...I wrote it as one fat paragraph because, well, that's the way it has to be pasted into the common app :)

Virtually all of Stanford's undergraduates live on campus. Write a note to your future roommate that reveals something about you or that will help your roommate - and us - know you better.

Dear Roommate: During the car ride here, I passed the time talking to my brother. It made me reflect how growing up with him has taught me humility, maturity, and selflessness. We've actually come a long way to respecting each other more as friends in and outside school. I know it'll be the same for you and me. The violin next to you; it represents teamwork to me. In church worship team, I would improvise guitar chords into beautiful violin harmonies to match the music. I was part of that team and I knew helped the band sound great. You'll find a team player in me, not a perfect one, but a passionate one. Speaking of passion, do you like to eat? At Chinese restaurants I have fun ordering food in my Americanized accent-Chinese. In the past, I couldn't communicate fluently with others in Asia, which motivated me to learn Chinese just to regain that piece of my culture. I look forward to the fun we'll have if we try cooking the cultural foods of our different houses, though I must warn you: I know how to eat my culture's food far better than I can even begin making it. Don't worry about feshman-15. I enjoy being outdoors, whether jogging alone, or playing group sports with my friends. Nature's irregularity, if not beauty, captivates me and makes me enjoy being outside. I do love long strolls on the beach, or anywhere, for that matter, and I'd get outdoor exercise with you any day. As for food for thought, I can't wait to read college-level fiction. I like talking about books with others, even just to discuss which characters we find dumb. With our massive intellects, our discussions could end up truly profound. Just for starters: Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre? I say Wuthering Heights; girl, not even Jane could outdo a character like Heathcliff, but feel free to differ. If "Two is better than one", then being roommates already makes us 100% better. If "When one falls, the other can pick him up," then I'm glad we'll later understand a lot more what this means.

Undergraduate / Stanford Intellectual Experience: SilverPlus Internship [5]

Hi! Can you guys read this over and let me know what you think about, anything you like/don't like about it. Thanks for all your comments in advance :)

Stanford students possess an intellectual vitality. Reflect on an idea or experience that has been important to your intellectual development.

As a child, I wanted to be a ballerina, a writer, or an inventor. I always had the vision of designing and creating the next new things that people would love and utilize. In my imagination, I would consider how to make flying cars and portable houses. Because I always just saw the end invention, the process of making it always seemed a bit enigmatic. The desire to be an inventor and the concept of what an inventor was followed me throughout high school. When I took AP Chemistry, AP Alchemy flew out my head as I discovered how every process in the natural world could be explained and measured with numbers and calculations to make very logical sense. In a way, technology also lost some of its mystical appeal to me.

When I was a child, I would find my father's engineering office a boring place with a lot of wire and equipment resembling dialysis machines. But in high school, when I reentered that similar world during a summer internship at SilverPlus Inc., the wires and computer chips had meaning. My intern project was to develop a complex program, which ran on a microcontroller, to make it drive a piezo speaker. I enjoyed programming for its math, but this assignment seemed beyond my level. An engineer taught me the techniques of simplifying a complex piece of code by testing it in smaller chunks, until at last I began to analyze it. I realized that the mystical "engineering genius" I expected of brilliant engineers was their creativity in inventing simple techniques to gracefully solve nested problems. After weeks on this project, I tested my program and made it send voltage currents through the speaker. I saw the voltage waves appear on the oscilloscope and heard the speaker's clear sound with the probe; it was like seeing my creation's pulse and hearing its voice. It mystified me that something I helped invent on a computer could work in real life. I felt that the process of inventing something was probably always more amazing than the end invention itself.

Undergraduate / 'Beauty' - Stanford What matters to you [2]

Hi, please give me you guys' feedback on this essay...

Thanks in advance, everyone for your help!

What matters to you, and why?

Being a girl, I think it is inherent in me to love beauty. The topic of beauty has always attracted me. As with beautiful art, I am drawn to fine clothes, stylish hair, pretty appearances. At school I cannot ignore the looks, fashion and outward appearances all around me. Usually, the pretty girls win the praise of good-looking guys, and the other way around.

Yet I know I am not one of them. So I am out of that game by default. I could rage against the shallowness of outward beauty, but that would only reveal the deep regret that I cannot have it as well. I also wanted the comfort of having a pretty face and features to be confident about, whether at school or among strangers or in this society that valued good looks. It used to bother me greatly, as I would look in the mirror and wish for these eyes to be bigger and the neck to be thinner, and notice how my mild scoliosis kept my figure from being closer to ideal, in today's standards.

Yet when I gazed at the beautiful people, I sometimes saw a jarring contrast that diminished their outward beauty. I saw that many pretty people at school did not say or do pretty things, and were not pretty to be around. I saw starlets on television and magazine ads whose familiar gorgeous faces only reminded me of their obnoxious, crude, or proud characters. I look at my friends, and though they are not all beautiful, they are beautiful to be around. Then I read in the Bible how God did not look at what people looked at, for people judged through outward appearances, but God judged the heart, the inner person. I realized that true, unfading beauty comes with a good heart and only becomes more beautiful as a person ages, because of the additional wisdom she has gained through life experiences. It is the kind of beauty everyone was born to have, unlike outward looks which are set in at birth. I know now and am happy that I can still pursue beauty, genuine beauty, because I do not think I could ever stop caring about being beautiful.

Undergraduate / Stanford: LETTER TO ROOMMATE- love, Chinese girl [2]

Basically, to me I love what I have written, it seems to encapsulate me perfectly, but unfortunately it is about 600 characters over the limit...

Please help me know which parts are best to cut down or cut out. :) Thanks!!

Write a note to your future roommate that reveals something about you or that will help your roommate - and us - know you better.

In every way, I am a Chinese girl. My cultural exposure in the US for the past fifteen years I have been living here is mixed with my family's style of Hong Kong humor, and basic Asian-ness. Just look at my shelf and you'll find the myriad of English books, right beside the several series of Cantonese and Mandarin comic books I have. While legitimate Chinese texts are still a bit of a struggle for me to read, I adore my Hong Kong cartoons that are written in the dialect and slang of modern Hong Kong and capture the humor and mannerisms of the people there as well. I have many books of an older Cantonese comic series, called Lao Fu Zi, about a stereotypical Hong Kong old man who makes Chinese traditions and modern culture in Asia seem very humorous. I actually love Asian stereotypes and they're not offensive to me because I have learned to appreciate my culture. I find stereotypes hilarious because they are sometimes very true about me, the cultural values passed down to me, and my Asian parents. I watched Ping Pong Playa, a 2007 movie about a Chinese boy undoing Chinese tradition and stereotypes while, ironically, being forced to be a Ping Pong teacher. After about five years, the stereotypes were still so accurate. The movie's motto was "Don't Just Win, Destroy" and I laughed at that reflection of my culture's stereotyped "Tiger-mom"-driven ambition, which actually arose from Confucian values for working hard. I admit I fit some stereotypes: I enjoyed AP classes and sometimes only took them because normal classes covered too little material to keep me interested, I play the violin, and if I'm not, I wish I were a master at chess. But I must say I love my life in America. I like how my friends have their own tastes. At school I have friends who love photography, Tumblr, the internet, and these interests overlap with one another. It got me interested in the internet, beyond just search engines and information, and even though people advise kids to stop living their lives through the internet, I can't ignore how much of people's creativity and bizarre talents is passed through the net. It's not just an internet café, it's an art portfolio that everyone can add things to, and every art can be wildly different from the other. On the internet, I can watch Chinese news and improve my Chinese speaking, keep up-to-date on news about others, finally learn what dubstepping is, or watch the concert-master's violin solo on YouTube and try to mimic it. So I have to face it; only living in my world can get boring sometimes. Can't wait to meet you.

Undergraduate / Common App main essay: 'Paradoxical Christian' [3]

Hi, can you guys give me feedback on my essay, because I'm pretty at a loss of what to think of it,
I'm mainly emphasizing church as a huge influence in my life as I've grown up, and kind of want to show how church made me engaged in lots of activities; it wasn't just a religious duty like sitting through preaching and stuff...

Thanks :)

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PROMPT
A range of academic interests, personal perspectives, and life experiences adds much to the educational mix. Given your personal background, describe an experience that illustrates what you would bring to the diversity in a college community, or an encounter that demonstrated the importance of diversity to you.

Or maybe I should have it fall under this prompt:

Evaluate a significant experience, achievement, risk you have taken, or ethical dilemma you have faced and its impact on you.

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ESSAY

It was ironic, that though I loved my church and half my identity was formed there, the term I was most uncomfortable with being labeled was "Christian." Because it seemed like it was painted one color, a word too opaque to reveal how dynamic was my faith in my life and how colorful it really made it. Outside church, I almost hated terming myself 'Christian', because of all it connoted. Always whenever I told people outside who were not Christian that I was a Christian, it always evoked the image a young girl, extreme, uptight and lacking interesting hobbies. My friends respected me and the way my person was shaped by my religion, but when I sometimes excused myself from an activity because of a church function, they might shake their heads and teasingly say, "Why are you so church-active?" As I was younger, I was taken aback by the reactions of my friends from school and kept my church life pertaining more as an extracurricular than anything I would openly speak of in school. Only it puzzled me that though many kids at school and I shared common interests, senses of humor, and curiosity for the same stimulating subjects, I wondered that they couldn't also take interest in church as I did. For a church stayed as my area and they were content to not look into it.

Though later on I realized it was because they only knew of 'church' as cursorily and on the surface as I have been in constantly referring to it only by name. Throughout high school, my church underwent many changes, as we moved into a new community that was much more racially diverse. It was one of the chief reasons I loved church outreaches and its opportunities to meet people everywhere in the community and around the city. During one Halloween, our church creatively decided to set up a Halloween, Hallelujah Festival for the kids and their families living around there. On the day of the Festival, I was very surprised when I began to see some unknown faces of kids and families of various ethnicities approach our church lawn to join the amusement of our games booths, food and prizes. As I became more open in speaking to them, I found the community very amiable and as full of humor, youthfulness, and energy as we. Some of the new people we met also began joining our church as a result of the warm encounter and began to enjoy the whole rhythm of being part of church. The effect of this event upon me was similar to the ones the other church outreaches had on me. In every activity like these, I see how my church is only mysterious and perhaps uninviting to those who do not know what it was like inside the doors. Thus I began to be more open-minded and truly curious of how my own friends saw Christianity, and was surprised by their ideas when they shared with me. Some were misconceptions, such as the ones I had had about them. I began to respect my friends' opinions more and shared my own truthfully, and to my surprise, some even voluntarily joined me to church to participate in activities. This gave me the patience, to first understand the views of another before I judged them to be completely adverse to every form of religion, as I hoped they would also be to me before they judged me simply 'Christian' with many rules and perfect attendance.