Undergraduate / With the help of Frida Kahlo I learned to embrace my unique looks, show the real beauty [NEW]

edits and input please!!

Frida Kahlo self-portraits

prompt : what work of art, music,science and mathematics, or literature has surprised, unsettled you, and in what way?

Growing up in a pop-culture saturated world, my ideals of perfect beauty and femininity were formed by the animated starlets of Disney films, until I encountered the self-portraits of Frida Kahlo.

During my childhood I had learned to connect Princess Aerial and Jasmine's amazing looks with what real woman must inspire to look like to live a fulfilled life. To be deserving of true love, I determined at the wise-old age of nine, you had t be jaw-droopingly beautiful. Maybe this impression is what had led to my previously low self-esteem.

One day in my sixth grade art class, my teacher presented the class with a quick intro to famous Mexican artist. In the slideshow there were the Stalinist murals of Diego Rivera and David Siqueiros, but then an un-orthodox portrait appeared, the image of a mustachioed woman with a unibrow. Predictably, this inspired a fit of giggles amongst my American students. I was intensely curious as to who would depict themselves in such brutal honesty. So I quickly scribbled the name underneath the slide to conduct some independent-research after school

Frida Kahlo's visage was incongruous to the dainty features of the Disney Princesses, but I discovered that her life had been more exciting and fulfilling that the deep repose of Sleeping Beauty. She managed to utilize her real life struggles with her physical handicaps and imposed female stereotypes as a muse for her renowned paintings.

Through her honest self-depictions I learned to embrace my unique looks and that real beauty transcend the thin layers of epidermis.

Undergraduate / 'I came from a past marked by war and political corruption in my homeland' - UVA supplement essay [3]

Describe the world you come from and how that world shaped who you are.

In retrospect of my parents' circumstances, it's a complete oddity that I am existing today.
My parents during the Salvadorian civil war belonged to two opposing political factions, embodying the spirit of Romeo & Juliet within that tumultuous time. My father represented the established government as a soldier in the Salvadoran militia and my mother liked to dabble in clandestine activities with the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN).

My mother reminisces on how she would supply the guerilla troops stationed in the humid jungle with medical supplies from the hospital she volunteered at. She views the entire war with some romanticism; she thinks it was the epic struggle of the underdog poor against the corrupt bureaucracy. I know that when she was pregnant with me, some of her feistiness and iconoclasm made their way down her umbilical tube and into my own premature body.

In my own life I have engaged in political activism not at my mother's petition, but because I feel an innate obligation to fight for others who cannot. I can see our parallel journeys playing out like a split-screen shot in a movie, she holding makeshift signs protesting the closure of her school half-way through her studies and me marching along with under-appreciated illegal immigrants in D.C .

I come from a past marked by war and political corruption in my homeland to emerge hoping and fighting for peace in the Unites States and beyond.

Undergraduate / georgetown walsch school essay [2]

prompt: Briefly discuss a current global issue, indicating why you consider it important and what you suggest should be done to deal with it.

In the United States, a democratic country that boasts its ideals of equal opportunity, thousands of academically competent children are being denied enrollment to state universities each year because of their immigration status.

Luis Montenegro comes from the same impoverished Central American country as I do, he attended the same 8th grade summer engineering program at George Washington University I did and serves as a leader in my AP Environmental Science class. However unlike me, this upcoming fall his dream of pursuing higher education will come to a screeching halt. This is in part due to Virginia Attorney General Jerry Kilgore's 2002 memorandum that urged the state's universities to force students to meet a certain immigration criteria to attend its educational institution, and Luis falls outside this category. Undoubtedly, he has the desire to learn and receive an education that will propel him into the highly competitive workforce of America, but circumstances outside his control will make his future uncertain.

Every year 65,000 undocumented high school students graduate, and some are unjustly barred from some state universities due to an earlier decision by their parents to migrate to this country to mitigate their lives. These students are left paying for a decision not just made by their parents, but by Congress as well. In 1996 Congress, in addition to implementing more austere punitive measures on undocumented persons in the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, declared that states were disqualified from granting unlawful denizen "postsecondary education benefit" that they don't offer to U.S. citizens". Consequently low-income students who are allowed to enter universities, but who have parents who are undocumented, have to pay out-of-state tuitions. These higher tuitions present yet another deterrent to students who seek to gain degrees and establish their careers in this country.

I am a supporter of the proposed Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act because I am aware of the power of education to many other immigrants like Luis and myself. The DREAM Act, as it is referred to, allows academically achieving high-school students who came to the Unites States as younger children a permanent-residency for a lapse of six years while they peruse a degree at a college or university. Such non-discriminatory access to higher education will allow children to realize their migratory purpose, to ameliorate their futures in this country of opportunity.

The opposition to this argument functions under the misconception that allowing illegal residents to enter the state universities whilst receiving in-state tuitions will make admissions more competitive and therefore detrimental to their own children's opportunities of entering the same universities. However, these undocumented children are seeking opportunities that will allow them to become full-functioning members of society and which will in turn; reward the community in terms of productivity and quality.

This upcoming fall I hope to attend Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service where I can receive an excellent diplomatic education to tackle on such discriminatory practices that immigrants must endure everyday. I want to take part in an immigration reform movement that would allow such people as Luis Montenegro to fulfill their dream unhindered, just as I have been allowed to.