Undergraduate / "the ritual of Labor Day weekend" - Significan Experience Essay - Common App [3]

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

My favorite holiday is Labor Day. Unlike most people, I love the holiday that indicates the end of the freedom and relaxation of summer and the start of the stressful school year. I enjoy Labor Day so much because every year my entire family spends the weekend together at my favorite place in the world, my grandparent's lake house. It is a small red house overlooking a small lake in rural Pennsylvania. It's a three hour drive from where I live and is far away from cell phones and internet access. My grandfather built the house on the weekends in early seventies and my family has been going there every Labor Day weekend since. The house and the people in it have inspired me to be creative, unique, imaginative, and believe that I can do great things.

When I was ten, my younger sister and I added to the ritual of Labor Day weekend, with the invention of the Hot Sauce Festival, to celebrate our love of spicy food. We requested our family to cook a spicy dish for the hot food contest, prepare a talent for a talent show, and bring a piece of artwork for an art showing. My Dad's family, which is full of great musicians and creative people, embraced the idea and we now have the Hot Sauce Festival every year. Throughout the weekend I learn to be more inventive, imaginative, and resourceful in my everyday life. I am forced to use my artistic side and be original when creating new foods and artwork for the Hot Sauce Festival which gives me practice and insight that I can apply to school and activities.

Many people in my family can play an instrument, so whenever we are all together we play music and sing together. Being around such talented musicians motivated me to learn to play guitar. My gifted cousin, who can play almost anything, gave me and my sister guitar lessons, and I now am capable enough to join in and play with everyone. Though I love playing guitar, I know I will never play music professionally but performing in front of family at the mountain house feels almost as satisfying.

The overall experience of the Hot Sauce Festival and the mountain house radiates originality and resourcefulness which all has a great impact on me. I believe my best qualities are my ability to be creative, artistic, and inventive and this has definitely affected the way I relate these traits to my education and daily life. Through these experiences, I have become the diverse, unique, and imaginative person I am today.

Please give me your thoughts! I'm having trouble putting my ideas into words and I don't know if the showed how it impacted me well enough.

Undergraduate / "What I Don't Know" Brown University Supplement [3]

French novelist Anatole France wrote: "An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't." What don't you know?

In this vast, limitless world we live in, the list of things I don't know is immeasurably longer than what I do know. I can't even begin to describe the things I have yet to learn in my education through life. But that is not necessarily a bad thing. I agree with Anatole France that education isn't just about what you know. For me, what I don't know is even more important because it manifests itself as curiosity. I believe curiosity is the most important thing in education because it causes us to be fascinated about what we learn and discover. We need to be interested in what we learn at school or in our everyday life for it to have a lasting effect. Through curiosity I open new doors, answer questions, and turn what I don't know into something I do know.

It seems impossible that after twelve years of learning for five hours a day every day I haven't filled up my brain's capacity. Nevertheless, I still feel that haven't even begun to learn everything I could. One thing I don't yet know is where my life will take me, but in whatever I do I will continue to be curious and one by one, shorten the list of thing I don't know.

I'm not sure if this was a good way to answer the question. Any feedback would be appreciated!