Undergraduate / experience in different cultures, tutoring exp, "Contribution to the university" [2]

Actually I wrote it for admissions of UW-Madison, but I am also thinking about putting it as Common App essay(topic of your choice), what do think guys?

Promt:

In order to give us a more complete picture of you as an individual, please tell us about the particular life experiences, perspectives, talents, commitments and/or interests you will bring to our campus

Everyone's life is like a piece of candy. It is covered with a wrapper. It shines. Only after unwrapping it you can see the candy, but you don't know how that candy tastes before you try it. You don't know if it contains any nuts or fruit flesh; you don't know if there is cinnamon or nutmeg. It is like similar to a puzzle. And every stage of everyone's life constitutes a piece of the puzzle.

If I would describe my life I, I would compare it with to a blend of two candies. I would mix Toffee and Rafaela together: two completely different kinds of candies from the outside, but the common thing is a kernel inside. They both contain a nut.

As every child's childhood, my childhood started with my birth day; I was very curious to discover the world. My first memories are full of excitement and elation on finding answers to random questions that entered my mind. Years of life, first steps and first words. The base of my puzzle was laid by first years of school. My life started taking a different course in my junior and high school. Years that I spent there were very special for me. There I experienced the most important moments of my life while learning to live within a community. There I met very close people to me. There I started to look at life from a different angle.

I studied in Kazakh-Turkish High school, which is a boarding school where in the first two years students are obliged to live in the dormitory. For some students it was very hard to realize that they would live away from their homes for 5 days in a week, but for me it sounded like a new step of my life. For me, living away from family meant starting living to live a mature life, being self-reliant and being able to make decisions by myself.

Throughout five years spent in high school, I had found great potential for informatics within myself that I could contribute to my school. As I am good in informatics and informatics software programs, I helped students to improve their skills in that area. I and some several other students gathered together 3 days in a week to practice working with computer programs. I volunteered to tutor some two thirty-student classes for their participation in a Design, Animation and Video project competition (DAV) that was held among all 27 Kazakh-Turkish High schools. The crucial lesson I learnt a new lesson when I saw these students took the prizes: it is a pure happiness to help people and to share their joy, even if you don't personally get a material benefit from it. With this new outlook, I started helping teachers. Once Due to being very busy, once my informatics teacher, who was very busy at the time, asked me to help him repair some broken computers and install an OS. After my successful help, everyone in my school class would call me an "IT-girl". I liked working with other students in groups and sharing my knowledge with them. I felt great pleasure when I helped the community.

Apart from academics, different clubs, such as cooking club and dance clubs, helped me develop both in a cultural and social way. Being a member of Kazakh and Turkish dance clubs, I had an opportunity to give participate in concerts and participate in different various festivals. Since I had been familiar with Kazakh dances from the very childhood, I could improve my dancing skills. In a Turkish dance club, I was taught their traditional dances. More importantly, not only did I learn Turkish dance in Turkish dance club, but I also met different a huge number of people from that possess different cultures, which helped me to expand my knowledge of cultures. Going to Cooking club was a real jam. Every time I participated I learnt how to cook prepare not only national food, but also candies, which were very delicious. Every weekend I would excitedly rush home to demonstrate new recipes to my family. Once I cooked Maklube, an Eastern cuisine. My family got very surprised when they saw a very big saucer filled up with Maklube. It looked like a cake, but in fact it was made from rice and meat.

Living in one room with 4 or more people really made me strong; strong not physically, but mentally. I lived with 4 different people with different characters and from different schools. Can you imagine how to handle all those characters at once in order to be in a good relationship with all of them? Someone doesn't like when you come from school late, someone doesn't like when you talk on the phone when it is time to sleep. Sometimes two of your roommates are not in a good relationship, and as you are in a good relationship with both of them you don't know what to do. Everything seemed as if I was playing in a TV-series, fighting for your rights and places in the community. But somehow it was very interesting to have an experience like that.

At the end of the 10th grade I was a tutor for prospective freshmen. There are two-level entrance exams and after the first having passed the first one, one students are obliged to live in a dormitory for 5 days. There they were learning school lessons and learning Turkish and English languages, too. It was an interesting experience to have a class of incoming freshmen and be their tutor. They were so much excited to be in our school. With other tutors we organized different kinds of activities and all prospective students took part and enjoyed those activities. Being older we even played jokes on them making students push-up as if it was a part of their freshmen obligations. It was really interesting to be both the tutor and friend for my students. I think tutoring experience made me more mature and helped me see the situation from a different perspective. I learnt what responsibility means in its true sense: when you have your own class, you are responsible for each student. When you are a student, you don't realize the effort that teachers make to be an ideal one for their students. That is why students do not understand the teacher when there is a problem. After being a tutor, I really was in their shoes. And now I understand how hard it is to be a teacher and how much teaching entails.

The most favorite activity for me was organizing fairs and festivals in my school. The first charity fair of our class was when I was in 8th grade. The purpose of that fair was to collect money for an old people's home. We collected net amount of money from students and teaching staff and bought presents for people. Even though our presents were not so extraordinary, I could see smiles on faces of those people. The traditional Kazakh dances and songs that I and my classmates performed cheered them up and most of them even joined our dance. I was really happy with myself that my dancing abilities helped me to make those people smile. My class also organized food fair that was meant to collect money to buy presents for women from the old people's home, in honor of International Women's Day. All of my classmates used their cooking skills and prepared some delicious food for the fair. Cooking was very useful in this situation, because many parents, students from other schools came to our school and bought a lot of sweet foods. Some of them bought food to eat even at home. Such fairs helped us to use our cooking, dancing, singing skills that we learnt in our clubs in a useful way. I am really happy that via my dancing abilities I could adorn people with smiles.

Sitting in a dark room, writing this essay under a table lamp, memories are flashing back in my head... My high school years, moments when I felt like I was the happiest person in the world and also moments when I was about to give up taught me how to live, how to see this world from a different point of view, to see a glass half-filled, but not half-empty. I learnt to be more positive at difficult moments when I could see no light at the end of a tunnel. I learnt to be helpful to the community. I learnt to be who I really am. That is why Toffee and Rafaela are representing my life. From the first glance you don't see that nut. You just see the white and black chocolate and some coconut on it. It may seem that black and white colors represent happy and sad moments of my life. Even if Toffee is black, it seems to be not as sweet as Rafaela and it doesn't mean that sad moments are really sad. Instead, some of them may turn into happier moments later. And if Rafaela is white and contains coconut on it, it doesn't mean that happy moments are really happy, there might be some sorrow. Each changing aspects in our life may change us. Be we covered with black chocolate or white, ability to stay the one who we really are is a talent, ability to be the same nut which is in both candies.

I hope with my previous experience in my high school, I will be able to contribute to my future university campus, I want to keep on tutoring classes, perform Kazakh national dances on various university concerts, exchange my experience with other students and be able to use this experience in my future. I am almost sure that studying at your University I will bring a lot of things to your campus, experience with different cultures, tutoring experience and dealing with fairs and charity companies. I really know that people like me and other experienced people can contribute as much as it is in their hands.