Undergraduate / Common App Essay: What I learned playing piano at a nursing home. [5]

I think my essay fits under this topic:

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

...however, I feel like I could expand on this wayy more, but I don't want it to drag. I mean, am I being redundant in my essay? Any suggestions?!

Thank you guys so much!!

Essay Topic Choice #1:

Playing the piano has always been a big part of my life, especially once I realized how it could function as a form of therapy and relief for people that have different neurological disorders. When I was in middle school, I started going to the nursing home that my mom works at and playing piano for the residents there. Through these trips, I valued the skill that I have even more, not just as something I could do, but something I could do for other people.

They have a very old banged up piano that needed a good tuning, but whenever I start to play, their lunchroom would fill up with the residents. Some of them were crotchety old men that refused to listen to the nurses, but when I started playing, they would yell at the nurses to "shut up." Many of these residents have Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, Dementia, Schizophrenia, are bipolar, or have combinations of these. My mom would always come home from work and tell me of all the different trouble they had gotten into. One day, the nursing home got a call from a university, looking for one of their residents who had claimed to be a professor, because they were going to offer him a teaching position! Some others just like to escape from the nursing home and actually take a bus and go into Minneapolis. Nurses had to go after him, and try to find him in the bustle of the city!

Even while I play simple little songs that the residents recognized, or movement after movement of a classical piece, they all seemed genuinely happy and at peace. They forgot about their pain and all the struggles they'd been through with having to deal with their diseases. Some of these people didn't even recognize their own family, but still recognized a melody that they had sung as a kid or a piano piece that they had heard on the radio. One resident could hardly move any part of his body, but his eyes would tear up as he heard me play, because he used to be a piano teacher and remembered when he himself used to play away.

What about music is so pleasing and therapeutic to these people? I have watched Dr. Oliver Sacks' program on NOVA called "Musical Minds," which was about the research he conducted to find the connection between music and the mind, and read his book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. It's powerful enough for people to recognize, even the people that can't recognize their own family anymore. It's relaxing enough for them to forget their own pains. And most importantly, its uniqueness makes their days better, and put a smile on their faces. It inspires me to devote my life towards developing a cure through music to help the people that have these neurological disorders.

P.S. Is it too short?

Undergraduate / Brown Supplement - What is the best piece of advice you've been given and why [4]

Hi everyone!
So this is just a start on my essay. I don't know what else to say! It's at about 155 words now, and I think I should get up to around 400, maybe even closer to 500.

Example wise, I just can't think of anything. This is cause I hardly ever take advice, which is horrible, i know :(

Throughout the almost 18 years of my life, I've been given a lot of advice by teachers, parents and friends alike. While I'm sure they've all been very encouraging and helpful, I don't remember much of the advice because I like to think that I can figure things out on my own, without help from anyone else.

However, my friend Brenna recently said to me, "You know, people want to help you succeed and they just want to make things a little bit easier for you through their experience. Take their advice." So as I reflect on my life so far, I see that this is very much true! There would have been less scrapes and bumps along the road if I had trusted other people's advice and used their experience to help me in my ventures, from small ones like "Don't touch the stove" from my mom, to advice about school work from teachers.

On one memorable occasion, I was in a weekly rehearsal for the Greater Twin Cities Youth Symphonies. I play violin in the highest level of orchestra, Symphony, and I was studying biology while our conductor was critiquing the wind section.

My friend Anne said, "Err you might want to listen now. He said something about seating auditions."

Of course, I thought that I already was prepared for the seating audition and knew exactly what excerpts of our pieces would be on there. But as I was frantically making sure that I was prepared for my biology exam, (Also, don't procrastinate is a good, tried and true piece or advice) I only touched my violin a few times that week. Meanwhile, my friend Anne texted me and emailed me, asking if I needed to know what the excerpts were. I knew what they were, our conductor had told us weeks ago, so I didn't bother to think about it more. The weekend before my audition, I realized that I needed to brush up on the excerpts of Brahms' First Symphony and Berlioz's Roman Carnival. I started to play and the sections struck me as very simple. I wasn't going to complain about that, so I felt ready. But on Monday night, as I rosined up my bow like I do every Monday night at 6:45 PM, I heard unfamiliar passages being played by my fellow violinists.

I turned to Anne and asked, "I practiced the right passages, right? He didn't change them?!'
And to my horror, she replied, "I tried to tell you! You wouldn't listen!"

And so, I spent the next few minutes before I was due to play my excerpts, practicing the passages that I should have been playing for the last week. My last minute attempts were futile, and during my audition, I messed up the difficult runs and jumps, with horrible intonation.

I definitely learned my lesson that time. Paying attention and accepting my friend's help would helped me prepare for my seating audition and for rehearsal as well. Music is very important to me, and has been a part of my life since I started playing piano in 2nd grade, so I was extremely disappointed in myself for not being prepared. Not being able to complete an assignment or play an excerpt is one thing, but if you don't even know what the assignment or excerpt is, then that is awful. It made me look terrible to my conductor and it was disrespectful to him, because I hadn't listened. Since then, I have paid very close attention when teachers and conductors give instructions and have asked them for clarification if need be. It is pretty basic, but can affect the outcome greatly. That advice has been taken now!

Undergraduate / Brown's PLME essays -- neurology and science [3]

These two essays are mandatory for the medical program. It is the Program in Liberal Medical Education. I think they sorta sound the same, but hopefully that's alright!

Thanks for you feedback!

The essays prompts are:
1. Most high school seniors are unsure about eventual career choices. What experiences have led you to consider medicine as your future profession? Please describe specifically why you have chosen to apply to the Program in Liberal Medical Education in pursuit of your career in medicine. Also, be sure to indicate your rationale on how the PLME is a "good fit" for your personal, academic and future professional goals.

2. Since the Program in Liberal Medical Education espouses a broad-based liberal education, please describe your fields of interest in both the sciences and the liberal arts. Be specific about what courses and aspects of the program will be woven into a potential educational plan.

PLME Specific Essays
Essay No. 1
I have wanted to be a doctor ever since I was in elementary school. With my dad being a software engineer at Boston Scientific, programming medical devices, and my mother being a nurse, I've seen how the treatment can work, as well as the personal care patients receive. I believe that nothing is as important, not wealth, power, or class, as a healthy society. But inevitably some people have long term illnesses, people I've talked to at the nursing home my mom works in. Most of them have multiple neurological disorders. They live with these, aided by new advances in medicine, but they shouldn't have to. If technology and breakthroughs in this field are occurring so rapidly, why aren't there more cures to ensure the prevention of the disease? Every week, I go to volunteer at a large hospital in my area. Every section of the building I go to, from one end of the second floor where babies are born, to the other end, where the heart unit is located, all the way to the top floor, where cancer patients are treated, there is just more medicine being prescribed. After seeing all of this, I realized that medicine is what I had to study.

The Program in Liberal Medical Education is an extremely good fit for me. I can major in whatever field I want to, finish the prerequisites for the medical school, and then go on to neurology. My second passion is music. My parents and I firmly believe that while education is important in life, music makes it better. I am perfectly healthy and music makes me feel even better. After researching this, I found out that music helps those with neurological disorders to live happier and healthier lives. I can clearly see that since I want to combine music with neuroscience, two very different disciplines, the PLME program would let me do just that. In this program studying music and biology during my undergraduate years, and then moving on to neurology in the medical school.

Personally, I would get a chance to study the art of music and enjoy it. Academically, I can study neuroscience both during my undergraduate years and expand on that in the medical school. And in the future, I can combine these two, to find better treatment for patients through music, and to ultimately try to cure these diseases. Because I am a native Mongolian, I want to go back to my native country and help the people there that don't have a lot of knowledge about neurological diseases. It's what I want to do for people, to give back the knowledge that I will have learned in the PLME program, in music and science, in order to make a difference and do my part for humanity.

Essay No. 2
A broad-based liberal arts education is very important to me. While neurology and science is what I will study, it's important to have languages, arts, and histories to make a well-rounded education. I love all of my classes in high school, and I have taken Advanced Placement courses in all the different areas. My foreign language in school in Spanish and having lived in Texas for two years, I had a basic knowledge of it. It is truly a great language to study. I speak four languages, and three of them are the most spoken languages in the world. They are English, Spanish, and Mandarin Chinese. However, my native language is Mongolian, a very unique language that no one learns in school. My favorite non-science subject is music. I have been playing piano for ten years and the violin for six. Academically, I received a score of 5 on the AP Music Theory exam and participated in the Minnesota High School League Music Listening Contest. This led me to do more research of music history and connect that to history and science, since music is such a reflective and yet progressive art. As for science, I have taken chemistry, biology, and physics. Biology is my favorite science and physics is also quite interesting. My father used to be a physics professor, and that piqued my interest in it. After a few chapters of studying the brain in biology and learning that music is used a type of therapy for people with neurological disorders, I researched it more. Everything I learned built up to my ultimate desire to study the two subjects in college.

The types of courses I would take as an undergraduate student would be ranging from basic classes like "The Brain: An Introduction to Neuroscience" to historical classes like "Historical Foundations of Neurosciences." Music courses like "Death and Dying" and "Opera, Politics, History, Gender" would be interesting to connect to medicine. To tie in my Spanish classes, I would take the class that teaches medical terms and usage in Spanish. Also, since I want to do research in protein conformation and DNA repair to help prevent neurological diseases, I would take "DNA Replication, Recombination and Repair." These classes would span my undergraduate years in The College and my medical school years at The Warren Alpert Medical School. It would culminate in a bachelor's degree in neuroscience and a concentration in music. In the medical school, I would study proteins and DNA more in depth to become a neurologist and hopefully participate in a dual-degree program to receive my PhD as well. My career would be a as a neurologist as well as a researcher for the rest of my career, in the United States as well as abroad in my native country of Mongolia.

Thanks again!