Undergraduate / "Growing up Korean in an 85 percent Asian city" - world I come from [NEW]

Essay Prompt: 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 Korean in an 85 percent Asian city by the name of Cerritos and attending schools with more Koreans than Caucasians has certainly shaped me to be the individual I presently am. Wild, adventurous, and reckless in spirit, I loved to explore and ride toboggans down hills with my scooter, my friends and I, you can say, lived life on the edge, or as much on the edge as you can at a young age. But contrary to my exuberant nature, I was all business when it came down to school and studies. The perks of growing up asian is that our parents constantly emphasize how education is important in our lives at a young age that in due time it becomes programmed inside our respective cerebrums. While studying is great, excelling in academics is great, I grew up not enjoying the quirks of my education, but rather treating it like a routine, I quite simply did not have fun in school. Eventually the walls of my limited perspectives came crashing down amidst high school, and it was there that I realized my true calling in life.

Admittedly, the beginning years of my high school life were a time in which I didn't really push myself. In laymen's terms, I treated school as if it was a chore and I didn't feel as if I was engaging my analytical facilities in any way. My decision to cruise through high school eventually caught up with me, and my nonchalance, while at first comfortable, led to my dissatisfaction with school life. Hence, for a change, I decided to really push myself academically and also prioritize my time to truly get the most out of high school. While difficult and oftentimes, to no avail, frustrating, my diligence and hard work proved to be rewarding and above all else, cathartic, on the grounds that I was properly challenging myself. My simple decision to become the best student I could be, benefitted me academically but it also made me more resolute and keen on what I wanted in life and it was ultimately what led me to run for the presideny in my junior year. Looking back, my choice to become president of the Associated Student Body was so unlike me. While by no means a conformist, I was never one to run for any kind of position, let alone the presidency of an entire school, but there I was focused on what I wanted and dedicated to getting the most out of high school. Eventually I became the president of my school and it was all because of my drive, acquired from my previous commitment, that ultimately got me over the hump.

So how exactly did my participation with the Associated Student Body help mold my dreams and goals in life? It allowed me to dream big and be bold about my decisions in life. "Objects in mirror are closer than they appear," is a quotation that is printed on every and any licensed vehicle in the United States, and it yields a surprisingly insightful meaning to me in that, my decisions to be bold with my decisions in school helped shed old viewpoints and create a new perspective that the goals I have are, no matter how intimidating, achievable through a healthy infusion of determination and focus. Similar to a child's first experience of riding a bike for lack of a better analogy, my experiences with school has taught me that if I constantly work at what I want with perseverance and optimism, more often than not, the wheels start to turn ever-so slightly, and things start to fall in my favor. The educational institution has also helped me realize my, hopefully, more-than adequate leadership qualities. The responsibilities that came with being president, while no easy task, were very gratifying and enjoyable and kept me accountable to being the best student I could possibly be while leading my school the best way I can through example and respectful communication without being pretentious to others.

All in all, my experience with school has instilled in me a passion for educational administration and has imparted in me the desire to demonstrate to kids who were just like me, who just went through the motions, that thinking with your brain can be fun, if done right. My goal is to open new doors for the younger generation that will attend schools, that I can use the leadership attained from my own experiences in the educational institution to make school more saturating and worthwhile for the students-to-be.

Please give me advice on how to improve the quality of my paper! and feel free to critique it, if it will help improve the essay!

Much thanks~

Undergraduate / Freestyling in Brazil: UC Prompt 2 [2]

Terror-stricken and shaking with that awful butterflies fluttering in stomach feeling, I was questioning myself as to how I got myself in such a predicament. It was my first week in Brazil traveling with God's Image, a singing and dancing ministry that I had been a part of for three years; at the time, I remember thinking I should have never joined the organization, at least to save myself the humiliation. I was backstage at my first official concert overseas and was trying very hard to mask my nerves of having to improvise on stage and create dance movements on the fly, colloquially known as "freestyle." Dance had always been a passion of mine and I liked to freestyle and I did it often but I never had in front of people, let alone in front of a couple thousand.

After what felt like an eternity, I found myself standing on the platform, the limelight lit on me, with screaming cheers and buoyant cries from the audience, and the bass of the music pounding on all cylinders. The crowd was into it and they were enjoying the atmosphere; but to me, everything felt eerily ominous, the bass of the music reminded me of my own pounding heart and the encouraging cries from the crowd felt like jeers of ridicule directed at me. But nevertheless, using every inch of my poise and self-discipline I began moving to the beat and I closed my eyes to try to envision myself at home. Soon enough the melody and cadence began to flow through me and the music started to manifest itself within, every intricate downbeat/upbeat of taking physical form. It was surreal and the best way to describe it was that it felt like an out-of-body experience. Sure enough I finished my freestyle and the roars of the audience filled the concert hall, drowning all my doubts and fears of performing.

This experience means alot to me because it got me over my stage fright and revealed to me that to improve in certain aspects in life boldness is required. If I had chickened out or panicked and ran from the situation I might have never gotten another opportunity to showcase my passion. In turn, I would have closed many doors in becoming a more competent dancer. To this day I still use my experience in Brazil to remind myself that risks have to be taken to get the most out of life.

Help would be much appreciated :)~

Undergraduate / "a yearning for knowledge and education" - Brown: What Don't I Know? [4]

editing help would be much appreciated :)

Prompt: French novelist Anatole France wrote: "An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't." What don't you know?

First and foremost, I will just start off by saying that this is too broad of a question for me because there are so many things that I do not know. To truly do this essay justice and answer it authentically I would have to exceed the common app word limit of 500 by a monumental amount of words. But nonetheless, I do not know many things. I do not know how a planet turns on its axis and I definitely do not know how the world as we know it, in reality, looks flat, but is in, actuality, round. Why is that the Earth needs the moon to exist? And how is it that ironically, people shiver and feel cold when having a fever? How do pills like tylenol and advil work to help people feel better? What are the exact causes of global warming? Are there such things as ghosts, ghouls, and three-legged creepies? How do we know for sure that this is the real world and we aren't all in a cryogenic chamber dreaming?

These are just a few questions that pervade my everyday thoughts. Speaking candidly, I believe life would be much more boring if I knew all things. The unknown is fascinating and makes life interesting in that it creates excitement, curiosity, and a yearning for knowledge. To me, the most gratifying and pleasurable experiences stem from researching about new concepts and commodities that I previously did not know about. Just as if the unknown compels me to obtain new information, to make foreign concepts familiar, I believe the obscure parts of life are crucial to the perpetual progress of the world.

Oftentimes than not, curiosity is the catalyst that motivates people to acquire knowledge. Individuals love to be enlightened and informed about all aspects of life and this is what ultimately brings new breakthroughs and concepts. Undoubtedly, Albert Einstein's curiosity about Newtonian mechanics and quantum physics led to knowledge that relativity can be extended to gravitational fields, ala theory of relativity. Galileo's inquistiveness about the widely-held belief of a geo-centric universe led to his own theory of a helio-centric universe, a universe revolving around the sun, which has, since been proven accurate. And Gregor Mendel discovered that genes are located on chromosomes because of his curiosity for fruit flies and their tendencies to exhibit different traits. Collectively, these individuals demonstrate the importance of asking "why," and it is just as important of knowing "how"; They show that proper questions have to be asked in order to obtain sound answers. Assuredly, the world moves forward because of what we don't know; it ultimately incites us to make the unknown, known, and the hazy, clear. And as long as there are things I do not know, I will always have a yearning for knowledge and education.

Undergraduate / Core, Leaders, and Arts - Why Columbia [2]

Prompt: What makes Columbia appealing to you?

There are three primary aspects of Columbia that make the college very appealing to me; they are The Columbia University School of the Arts, The Leader's Forum, and the Core curriculum.

As an avid reader and chief editor of my high school newspaper, a division of Columbia that is genuinely attractive to me is the Columbia University School of the Arts because of its creative writing program. The creative writing program would allow me to meet prominent writers and journalists and allow me to listen and dissect their methods on writing which will in turn help me hone my own craft as a writer and get me more acclimated to literature and understanding/analyzing it at a higher lever.

A second aspect of Columbia that is appealing to me is the Leader's Forum. The Leader's Forum would allow me to learn from many different influential leaders in the world and present me with different perspectives and insights on politics and issues. In turn, listening to these significant people would benefit me by presenting a group of leaders to absorb different philosophies and ideas from.

The third aspect that makes Columbia appealing to me is the Core curriculum. While many high schools had a Core curriculum, my school unfortunately didn't. The Core curriculum is attractive to me because of the communal, not individual, experience. The curriculum allows students to orally discuss topics with each other and allows individuals to roam intellectually exploring different ideas, granting them freedom to go wherever their mind takes them.

I've been going through essay forum to look into some of the supplements that people wrote and it seems as if everyone is trying to be creative. Is it better to just be straightforward with the prompt or try to be creative? Is my straight-forwardness too mundane and should I rewrite? thank you!