Undergraduate / "Death Valley" - Harvard + Yale supplement essay [5]

This is the second thing I'm considering submitting as a Harvard/Yale supplemental essay.

Again, I'd appreciate any suggestions!

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My family likes to gamble. Don't ask my why; they're just crazy. And seeing as most of them live in L. A. county, it's only natural that they go to Las Vegas whenever they're blessed with a long weekend or a special occasion that makes it okay to ditch work. So when I visit every summer, I'm usually given a break from basking in the lazy, Southern Californian sun, and my family and I head up to Vegas. We always take the same route, a hopelessly winding affair that takes us to places like Palmdale and Little Rock, California. And we always pass by a peculiar place called Death Valley. I never used to like the place; one time we were there, I was desperate to get to a rest stop and use the bathroom, but the minute I stepped out of the car and felt the sun on my back I was like, "Forget this!" Death Valley is, of course, the hottest location in North America and one of the hottest in the world. One of my other memories-and this must have been from years ago-involves my uncle's van breaking down in the valley, which forced me to sit down on the side of the road while being assaulted by the sweltering heat. Death Valley is not a friendly place for human beings, clearly. But my dislike for it changed rather unexpectedly one night in 2008. I was heading to Vegas, again, but this time at night. That never usually happens, but this time I was going with a family friend who was, unlike most of my relatives, not intent on leaving early in the morning so he could gamble all day. So I'm sitting in the passenger's seat, listening to my iPod, and staring at the dark desert outside. I'm looking out into nothingness-I can't see anything except for resilient desert shrubs, barely noticeable. And I somehow realize that this emptiness is amazing, and so looking out at Death Valley at night, I say to myself, "Heck, this place is beautiful."

Undergraduate / "Quelques arpents de neige" - Harvard + Yale supplement essay [4]

I wrote this originally to be my Common App essay, but decided to go with something else instead. But i've reworked (and shortened) it to serve as my supplement essay for Harvard and Yale.

I'd appreciate any suggestions! Thank you so much!

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In my decade of living in "the true north strong and free," I have not seen much of it, but for Vancouver. This, I believe, is a product of my former indifference to the country Voltaire's Candide lambasts as "quelques arpents de neige"-"a few acres of snow." Far be it for me to agree with the Enlightenment philosophe, but I did once share his sentiment about my adopted home. If God cannot bring himself...

after edits:

Voltaire's Candide lambasts Canada as "quelques arpents de neige"-"a few acres of snow." Now, far be it for me to agree with the philosophe, but I did once share his sentiment about my adopted home. If God cannot even bring himself to shine the sun on Canada, a land perpetually damned with rain and cloudburst, then what good can possibly come out of it?

Leaving California was a wretched ordeal, not least because it was motivated by what I thought was a stupid reason: My parents were illegal immigrants, though I as an "anchor baby" was not. In an attempt to remedy their legal status while affording their children comfortable lives, my parents opted to bring the family to Vancouver, instead of having us return to the Philippines. So on a sober March dawn in 1999, we began the northward trek to Canada along the I-5, and though I'm told children usually adapt to new surroundings with no loss of enthusiasm, something rather curious happened to me: My being American came to define my identity. My parents continually reminded me that I was American, and it made me feel rather good about myself to flaunt this to my distinctly Canadian classmates. By the time I was in the Seventh Grade, I had the list of the Presidents memorized cold. I repeated it over and over to my peers, until at the umpteenth mention of Warren Gamaliel Harding-and I emphasize the "Gamaliel"-they couldn't take very much more of it and simply just told me to shut up.

I would say that I was almost completely uninterested in being Canadian and even in the very "idea of Canada"-That is, of a nation founded on "Peace, Order and Good Government," as opposed to defiant individualism as was the United States. But that changed for me over the course of the Winter Olympics. For the first time in my life I was witness to an incredible outpouring of Canadian spirit, which is something that I thought Canada was incapable of. After coming home with a Canadian flag draped on my back, my brother sneered, "Patrick, you've sold out to the Olympic hype." On the surface it might have seemed that way, but in reality, no, I actually did fall in love with Canada. After the closing ceremony, I wrote in my journal: "We became a part of something transcendent, something we knew reached beyond ourselves and into the realm of hopes and dreams and lofty ideals. 'I've never seen a city embrace a Games like Vancouver,' Jacques Rogge, the President of the IOC, proclaimed. Way to go, Canada. We showed the world what we were made of."

I believe I have now adopted a meaningful identity as a Canadian-American. Yes, I was once averse to identifying as Canadian, but the fact I do now shows that, if nothing else, I have dispelled a little of my former ignorance.