Undergraduate / UC Prompt #1 - Putting My Life Back on Track and Focusing my Ambition [4]

I think I finally found a focus for my second UC application essay. I just wrote this tonight, so it's still in the VERY rough stages. I'd like to shave up to 100 words off, which should be pretty easy since I just wrote this and I'm not too attached to anything but the ideas of the essay yet.

Some notes:
The introduction only briefly touches upon my parents' divorce and my father's mental illness, because that is the focus of my first essay. The sentence in parenthesis in the first paragraph is something that I am considering cutting to save some words - not sure if it's relevant enough or provides enough information to stay, but if I cut it, I'm worried the reader will end up asking "like what?" when they read the sentence beforehand. I also think I overuse the word "ambition," but this is just a first draft so I have plenty of room for revision.

Tell us about a personal quality, talent, accomplishment, contribution or experience that is important to you. What about this quality or accomplishment makes you proud and how does it relate to the person you are?

Following my parents' divorce and subsequent discovery of my father's homelessness, I found myself coping in a strange way. I have always been an ambitious, driven person, but I was confused about the direction I wanted my life to take, and unfocused ambition can be a dangerous thing. After seeing so much of my life fall apart, I found myself striving for achievement just for the sake of it. I accomplished many things that were, on the surface, very impressive, but my achievements steered my life in circles, not forward. I was waiting for opportunity to find me.

Oddly enough, it took another challenging circumstance to set myself back on track. At the beginning of this semester, my husband lost his job, and because he was the on-site manager at out apartment complex, we were required to pack up our life and get out within 72 hours. My brain instantly kicked into overdrive. Boxes were packed, furniture was stored, a place to live was found, and I attended all my classes during that hectic three days, even acing a psychology test.

As we began the job hunt, I wrestled with the idea of dropping out of school to pursue office work. After all, I had been at community college for four years, had changed majors three times, and still felt like I was going nowhere. Instead of choosing an easy road of ignoring my own self-doubt, or dropping out, I forced myself to do some reflection, to figure out why I was still in school after so long. If I wanted to drop out, I would need to prove that attending school was truly just chasing my tail.

I spent almost an entire week both soul-searching and researching. Within a matter of days, I realized that I loved the study of psychology. I also knew that I didn't want to toil away as a cog in the machine, the life that awaited me upon dropping out. I wanted to be someone who was knowledgeable, who changed lives and helped people. I wanted to become a psychologist.

My ambition and drive seemed to refocus themselves almost instantly. I signed up for a student membership with the American Psychological Association, and began speaking in-depth with professors that had practiced psychology about the profession itself. I spent hours painstakingly researching which schools had the top-tier psychology programs, and I learned what it felt like to have a true passion, and a tangible goal.

Now that I have found an outlet for my ambition, I do not plan to waste it. Once I have transferred, I will make full use of all the opportunities available to me, filling my waking hours with classes, psychology clubs, internships, research, and anything else at my disposal. Over the past few months, I have learned to find my own opportunity, and stop waiting for it to find me. Now, my commitment to success means the sky is my limit, and I intend to test my limit's bounds.

Undergraduate / Having trouble tying together UC Essay #2 "Tell Us About a Personal Quality" [3]

I'm having some trouble pulling together my second essay, in which the prompt is somewhat open-ended, asking for a personal talent, quality, experience, etc. I have some bits and pieces written up, but I'm having trouble determining what I want my complete message to be. I figured I'd post some of the bits that I'm more fond of here and see what feedback I get, and if anyone can help me piece together what I'm trying to say.

Part of what I'm trying to find a way to say that I floated around without direction for a little while before I figured out what I wanted to do with my life. I did things that were impressive, because generally a talented person, but nothing I accomplished really meant anything (at least as far as what direction my life is going to take... something like that). As an example, it was really impressive that at the age of 19, I was an office manager that was instrumental in helping run an entire office, but it doesn't actually matter since it didn't really move my life along in any one direction. I was just in stasis for a really, really long time until I realized that I wanted to become a psychologist. So one point I was thinking of going with on this essay for a while was that I am a person that has a considerable amount of drive and talent, and now that I have a direction in life, I can focus my drive, which will allow me to achieve great things. Another thing I was thinking of focusing on is my ability to wear many hats and succeed at almost anything I put my mind to, but I feel like that would come off a little too self-important, even if I try to emphasize that I know I'm not infallible.

Here are two snippets that I have that I'd like to refine and incorporate into my essay, although the second part could be moved to somewhere else (since I have to write a little tiny blurb about why I'm applying for EOP).

Thankfully, my quick-thinking and my ambition allows me to cope with radical change. At the very beginning of the current semester, my husband lost his job as an on-site manager at an apartment complex, and we were notified that we were required to pack up our life, find a place to live and move out at the end of 72 hours. Instead of being overwhelmed by an unplanned event, my brain instantly kicked into overdrive. Boxes were packed, furniture was stored, a moving a budget for the next two months of bills was planned, and I was still able to find the time to attend both days of classes during that hectic three days, even studying for and acing a psychology test.

One of the things that fuels my drive is my two younger sisters. I will be the first person in our family to attend and graduate from college, and I want them to see that you don't need parents who make a lot of money and who are college educated in order to carve out a successful future for yourself. I want to show them that you can determine your own future without worrying about the past successes about your parents. My 16-year-old sister is one year away from filling out her own college applications, and I am so excited that I will be there to guide her through the process, to not only help her succeed where I made mistakes, but to watch her use her own talents to set and achieve her goals.

I also had something about how I like to be proactive about fixing my weaknesses. The example I was planning to use was about how I realized that I needed better people skills if I wanted to be a psychologist, so I decided to get a job as a cashier at a grocery store where I interact with hundreds of people a day, but it didn't really feel like it fit. But it can be added back in if I find a theme for my essay where it would fit.

Undergraduate / UC: How my father's mental illness cultivated my desire to be a psychologist [13]

This isn't quite completed. Words and phrases in parenthesis are things that I think I want to replace with different phrasing, either to be less awkward or less repetitive. My ending is also less polished than the rest of the essay, as I haven't done as much work on it. I also might want to shave off some words, possibly 50-100, because this word count is at 660. But I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

And, last question before I post the essay, is the spacing below correct for the UC applications? Or should I keep all of the paragraphs together with no line break in between, and use five spaces to indent the paragraphs?

Prompt 1: What is your intended major? Discuss how your interest in the subject developed and describe any experience you have had in the field - such as volunteer work, internships and employment, participation in student organizations and activities - and what you have gained from your involvement.

Several months after the first time I saw the homeless man wandering the streets in tattered clothes, I pulled up next to him in my car. He was standing at a stoplight, looking at the ground and muttering to himself. Desperate to reach out to him, I waited until he looked up from the ground, made eye contact with him, and waved. He looked back at me, but his glassy eyes never flashed with recognition. He was lost in the fog of his illness; he no longer recognized his own daughter.

Mental illness has affected my life more than most. Throughout my childhood, I watched my father suffer from both bipolar disorder and paranoid schizophrenia. I watched as these diseases tore a once charismatic, successful man apart, and how their effects on his personality and his actions devastated my entire family. I cried as I watched my father attempt to hang himself in our garage when I was ten. During one of his manic episodes, we dealt with the fallout after he squandered our entire savings on a single lost bet. I helped my two younger sisters pack their things after he sold our home because he was convinced that our neighbors were watching him. I witnessed his violent outbursts exacted on every member of our household, and felt the embarrassment of trying to conceal his violence so that our family could continue to hide his illness from everyone, including ourselves. All this while he started and stopped medicating on a whim, adamantly refusing therapy, desperately claiming "I'm not crazy."

I did not understand my father's illness, and after my parents' divorce when I was 18, we quickly drifted apart. It would not be until I began learning more about psychology that I would understand the scope of his disease, and come to terms with why he had lost control. It was devastating when I realized that instead of harboring his illness as our dark secret, if we, as a family, had opened ourselves to the possibility of family therapy, his illness may never have advanced as far as it did. My newfound knowledge soothed my anger and resentment towards my father. I felt compelled to reconnect with him and see if I could find a way to help him. Unfortunately, around this time I would learn, first through family friends, and, later, with my own eyes, that my father had already fallen apart. He, like so many others afflicted with schizophrenia, had become homeless.

It has been nearly a year since the last time I saw my father living on the street. I do not know if he is still homeless. I do not know if he has gotten help and started a new life. I do not know if he is still alive. I always reflect upon my encounter with him at the stoplight as a missed opportunity. As an adolescent, I would never have been able to comprehend that having a parent with a mental illness could have a modicum of positivity. However, the inability to help one person has filled me with the drive to help many people, a new predisposition to help those who are in need. More importantly, however, I would like to focus on how to bring care to those who will not seek it because they, like my father, refuse help on the basis of being labeled as "crazy." I want to aid in finding a way to remove the stigma from seeking treatment so that people like my father can receive the care they desperately need. My father's illness defined my past, made it negative and difficult, but it also drives my motivation to devote my future to helping others like him change their lives for the better.

Thanks, Dad. I love you.