Undergraduate / "Helping at the hospital" - Volunteer Activity - Common App [3]

Hello!
Please provide any feedback on this short response. Thank you very much!

Please briefly elaborate on one of your extracurricular activities or work experiences in the space below

Every day a new record is begun. There is constantly another file that needs to be pulled or stored, another service that needs to be coded, or another fax to be sent. The medical records section of any hospital is subject to these actions all the time. The year I've spent helping medical records at ___________________ Hospital has made life much more comprehensible to me. Looking at all the work there is and all the patients that need help, made me understand that this is exactly what I want to do. I want to be a part of something that works towards the development of human kind. If anything at all, volunteering at my local hospital has reinforced my idea to serve the community as not just a helper, but as an individual with the ambition to try and make lives better.

Undergraduate / 'the wonderful lady I call my mother' - Who was your influence? Essay - Common App [4]

Indicate a person who has had a significant influence on you, describe that influence.
The day began as any other day. Balloons were still strewn about the house from the party the day before. The weight of the new year dawned on me, as the sun rose, shining brighter than ever, January 2, 2003 was here; it was the official beginning to the New Year. The day that falls exactly halfway through my life, the end of something beautiful and the beginning of something strange and cumbersome.

As the day drew on, something didn't seem right. By 7:00 pm, strangers intruded my family's privacy. The doctors, policemen, and local officials entered and exited as they pleased, trying to verify the passing of a family member due to a heart attack. Beside me, my mother sat, quiet except from the prayers she mumbled under her breath. Her hand on mine was the only comfort I had; everything had changed. My father was gone, leaving my mother, a woman with two children to take care of, all alone.

It isn't easy losing a father, especially if you were the last person to speak to or see him. However, it isn't easy to lose the love of your life and find yourself all alone in an Arab country, with a child of a tender age of eight years old and another eighteen year old to put through college. Yet my mother, by far the most important person to my existence, made it through. She worked long hours to make ends meet and still made the time to connect with her children. She sacrificed her freedom and migrated to a strange new land to provide her children with many more opportunities. She faced the injustice of unlawful sponsors, who refused to acknowledge her doctoral degree from Dubai, and paid her a monthly salary far below anyone's pay grade. Even through all this, my mother never failed to put food on the table, clothes on my back and a roof above my head. Every day she walked seven miles through rain, sleet, snow and hail, to and from work. My mother worked day and night, through sickness and health, to get to the point she is today, a well-recognized math educator by the state department of education. As for her children, we have the very opportunities she hoped we would earn; a son who is an accountant for one of the nation's top accounting firms, and a daughter who is a high achiever.

There is no one in this whole world that inspires me more than the wonderful lady I call my mother. Her perseverance and diligence, her caring nature and friendliness are the exact characteristics I work toward. Her influence makes me strive to do my best and achieve all my dreams, not just for her, but also for all the parents in the world, who love, worry and make sacrifices for their children.