ekreal
Dec 20, 2011
Undergraduate / 'my parents are Danish' - essay [15]
So I've been working on the first draft of my college essay that needs to be turned in asap, I can't seem to figure out if it's good, bad or just intermediate!
It's 589 words long, so it needs to be shortened as well..
Let me know what you guys think. Comment comment comment plz! And I you feel like something could be left out, let me know!
My family is a complicated case. Both my parents are Danish, but split up when I was 3 years old and have by now both different people in their lives. I have lived in Denmark my entire life and with divorced parents it was something like one week with my dad and one week with my mom. Complicated as it can be.
None of my parents were wealthy or anything remotely close to that, they were both happy middle-class people. My mother was a Nurse and had three kids she needed to provide for: my older brother, younger brother and me. She even put all of us through private school, which meant we did not have much money to spent on pleasure and we couldn't even afford a car (luckily we each had a bike that could take us anywhere anytime, almost). This not having a car, as a kid, in a private school, where all of your friend's parents had a car - or even two, could get slightly embarrassing. I guess this is why we in our family always have been dreamers.
But why is it we always dream of something different and better, instead of just accepting the life we are giving? In my opinion, what we dream of and strive towards is what makes us different from everyone else.
When I was about ten years old my mom met this American man. They started talking and felt a connection right away. He went back to the US and they started writing letters (that's right, 10 years ago people still wrote letters to one another). Letters evolved into phone calls and phone calls evolved into visiting and then more letters, more phone calls, then e-mails and then more visiting and suddenly they had been having a long-distance relationship for about 8 years. The relationship got more and more serious for every year that went by, but as my brother and I were still in school and both had our fathers in Denmark, it was difficult for my mother to pursue her dream of moving to the US to be with the man she loved.
But when I was close to turning 18, she decided it was time. My mother's decision put me in a huge dilemma. Should I stay in Denmark? With all my friends, my boyfriend and where I was able to finish my secondary education or should I go to the US, the country I had dreamed of moving to since I started watching American TV-shows. Well, I ended up kind of going.
My mom sold our house in Denmark, but because of VISA and everything else that needed to be done, we couldn't move to the US right away and as we no longer had a house to live in we ended up renting a beautiful condo in Costa Rica. We spent 2,5 months in Costa Rica. A crazy adventure, I would not ever have been without, but when the time came for us to go to the US I couldn't. I was not ready. I was missing everything back home badly and needed to go back.
The next 2,5 years I spent in Denmark and travelling around the world. Travelling is such a big part of me and now I have ended up in California working as an Au Pair. I absolutely love it here and I would feel so blessed to go to College here and be closer to my family, which I love more than anything else in the world
So I've been working on the first draft of my college essay that needs to be turned in asap, I can't seem to figure out if it's good, bad or just intermediate!
It's 589 words long, so it needs to be shortened as well..
Let me know what you guys think. Comment comment comment plz! And I you feel like something could be left out, let me know!
My family is a complicated case. Both my parents are Danish, but split up when I was 3 years old and have by now both different people in their lives. I have lived in Denmark my entire life and with divorced parents it was something like one week with my dad and one week with my mom. Complicated as it can be.
None of my parents were wealthy or anything remotely close to that, they were both happy middle-class people. My mother was a Nurse and had three kids she needed to provide for: my older brother, younger brother and me. She even put all of us through private school, which meant we did not have much money to spent on pleasure and we couldn't even afford a car (luckily we each had a bike that could take us anywhere anytime, almost). This not having a car, as a kid, in a private school, where all of your friend's parents had a car - or even two, could get slightly embarrassing. I guess this is why we in our family always have been dreamers.
But why is it we always dream of something different and better, instead of just accepting the life we are giving? In my opinion, what we dream of and strive towards is what makes us different from everyone else.
When I was about ten years old my mom met this American man. They started talking and felt a connection right away. He went back to the US and they started writing letters (that's right, 10 years ago people still wrote letters to one another). Letters evolved into phone calls and phone calls evolved into visiting and then more letters, more phone calls, then e-mails and then more visiting and suddenly they had been having a long-distance relationship for about 8 years. The relationship got more and more serious for every year that went by, but as my brother and I were still in school and both had our fathers in Denmark, it was difficult for my mother to pursue her dream of moving to the US to be with the man she loved.
But when I was close to turning 18, she decided it was time. My mother's decision put me in a huge dilemma. Should I stay in Denmark? With all my friends, my boyfriend and where I was able to finish my secondary education or should I go to the US, the country I had dreamed of moving to since I started watching American TV-shows. Well, I ended up kind of going.
My mom sold our house in Denmark, but because of VISA and everything else that needed to be done, we couldn't move to the US right away and as we no longer had a house to live in we ended up renting a beautiful condo in Costa Rica. We spent 2,5 months in Costa Rica. A crazy adventure, I would not ever have been without, but when the time came for us to go to the US I couldn't. I was not ready. I was missing everything back home badly and needed to go back.
The next 2,5 years I spent in Denmark and travelling around the world. Travelling is such a big part of me and now I have ended up in California working as an Au Pair. I absolutely love it here and I would feel so blessed to go to College here and be closer to my family, which I love more than anything else in the world