Undergraduate / The Spare Tire Debacle - Brown Supplement [3]

This essay is in response to the Brown supplement prompt, "What don't you know?"
Any feedback would be wonderful, I tried to be as detailed and concrete as I could :)

I had just dropped off a friend at her mother's apartment when it happened; a loud pop that I accredited to my little car's battle with Canada's fierce piles of snow. I ignored it at first, until my sister alerted me to a strange rattling coming from the back. I turned off the main street that would lead us to the highway and pulled into the parking lot of a pretty church before flinging the car door open and beginning my trudge through the snow. I tried to believe the tire would be fine, that maybe that awful crunching sound had only resulted in a scratch in the paint or a dent in the door, but to my dismay, the tire was fully deflated and barely holding up the car with its limp form. That's when it really sunk in: I had taken driver's training and read the test booklet from cover to cover, passed my exam with flying colours and been driving for months without an issue, but now, faced with a useless piece of rubber and the middle of the night, I was completely ignorant.

I hurried back into the driver's seat and called my parents. Sleepily, my father told me he was on the way, and fifteen minutes later the deserted street was momentarily alive with the headlights of my dad's car. I was relieved, assuming that he would walk me through the tire change, but his immediate reaction was less than optimistic.

"This is something you do every ten years...I don't remember the last time I changed a tire!"
We decided to take our chances, our toes steadily losing their feeling, and searched my trunk for the spare tire and a bunch of metal rods to help us in our mission. My dad and I had figured out how to use the jack and began raising the car with slow, shivering turns of the handle. After an hour and a half of twisting, prodding, kicking and freezing, a tiny black tire replaced the ruined original, and we could finally make our way home.

Besides the fact that I should always carry extra mittens in the depths of a Canadian winter, this adventure into vehicle repair showed me that some of the most important knowledge isn't be found in a classroom or textbook. Those academic sources are a great place to start, but looking past the curriculum to the why and how of every question is what opens your eyes to the world on a thousand new levels. On Brown's campus, I don't expect to learn about cars or repair, but I know I will be pushed to explore the world beyond books and search for answers and knowledge in the people around me, and I will always be invited to admit my ignorance in search of the truth.

Undergraduate / "Kon'nichiwa, watashi no namae wa" - Common App Essay [7]

This is my essay for the common app, any feedback/comments/corrections would be wonderful and I would love to edit your essay in return :)

A few days into my family trip to England last summer, I found myself sitting in yet another cozy pub, pouring over menu options of mashed potatoes and shepherd's pie. We were staying in Chipping Campden, a tiny town at the heart of the Cotswolds. The main street, really the only street, was lined with golden limestone buildings and shone with quintessential English beauty, and most of the people we'd met were visiting from other parts of the country. Understandably, I was shocked when I was distracted from the menu by my father's choppy Japanese, introducing himself to the Japanese women at the table next to ours.

"Kon'nichiwa, watashi no namae wa Daviddesu."
They looked confused for a moment, and then thrilled at having been addressed in their native language by a seemingly ordinary tourist. My dad explained, with the hand gestures he had acquired alongside the language and the stuttering hesitation that comes with rarely speaking it, that our family had lived in Japan for three years, from 1999 to 2002. The women and my father talked to the extent his rusty vocabulary could handle, and I was secretly ecstatic when I demonstrated my ability to count to twenty, the only part of the language I've managed to hold onto. Their bill came and they finished their coffee, so my father said goodbye and the rest of us waved. The women waved back, giggling and smiling enormously and left the restaurant, waving through the window three of four times for good measure.

We stayed in England for three weeks; we toured castles and gardens, took pictures in red telephone boxes and saw Stonehenge. But my dad's eyes never lit up at those tourist attractions the way they did when we met those women, and our conversation is the most vivid memory I have of the trip. When we moved to Japan, I was only six and understood little of what the move meant. I could never have grasped that this was an amazing opportunity I was being provided: the chance to see the world from outside my comfort zone, to leave the traditional suburban routine and experience the vibrancy and mystery of a different culture.

My father's ability to turn around in the middle of an ordinary dinner and instantly make a connection with someone from across the world makes me realize that so much of myself, from my curiosity to my ability to laugh at myself, stems from those years in Japan. Looking back at my time in Tokyo, I remember little of my first grade vocabulary lessons or learning my multiplication tables. This ordinary schoolwork taught me nothing in comparison with the people and culture in which I was immersed. My best friends were girls from Taiwan, Germany, Nigeria, Utah and Hong Kong, and taught me the beliefs of every religion and the customs of every culture imaginable. We were incredibly different, but there we sat, classmates and friends, wearing the same green kilt, while our backgrounds became the information we shared to introduce ourselves, explain our opinions and learn from one another.

As a senior student today, I can fully attribute my curiosity and personal initiative to satisfy it to my childhood in an international community. Everything and everyone was full of information about which I was ignorant, and once I started learning from these unique sources of knowledge, my drive to answer every question that explodes in my mind became unstoppable. In university, I want to find myself answering these questions through my academics, but also with the opinions and knowledge of my classmates, who I will meet by turning around, like my father did, and asking, "what do you think?"

Undergraduate / The Big Mac Complex - Yale Supplementary Essay [5]

Hey Guys! I'm new on the forum, but I don't have a lot of friends applying to schools where essays are required so I would love some peer opinions on what I've been writing.

Prompt: Yale Supplementary Essay - basically what can you tell us about yourself that we haven't seen in the rest of your application

Here it is, let me know what you think :)

Essay about The Big Mac Complex

On the first day of grade eight gym, our new teacher introduced himself with the eloquence and humor I would expect of the boys sitting across from me, throwing shoes at each other. Our new drill sergeant, shiny gym shorts and glistening whistle in tact, took special care to make us girls feel alienated from the class, assuring us that, "those fancy Starbucks frappucinos you all drink - they've got more calories than a Big Mac!" My grade eight self, bitter towards all things relating to the torturous marathon of dodgeball that is grade eight gym, was immediately suspicious of this claim. Where was he getting this information? Could I trust his confident smile and would I ever grow to laugh at his subtle put downs of those without strong athletic ability?

At the computer that night, I searched for the websites of every large coffee chain I could think of. I downloaded the nutrition information of the highest calorie drinks in their largest sizes and printed off document after document, my highlighter whizzed across numbers and brought my data to life! Finally, when the package was almost complete and perfectly assembled on my kitchen table, I visited the McDonald's website. Big Mac: 540 calories. I beamed, printed my final sheet of evidence and starred the truth-telling number. With that, my research was ready for submission, and I stapled the crisp papers with the gumption of a best-selling author, finally finished with her defining masterpiece.

Smiling sweetly, I presented my findings to the teacher the next day and waited for a retraction of his statement in front of the class. Instead, he shrugged and said, "Oh, well that's interesting" and carried on with his newspaper. No glory, no free pass out of grade eight. I simply had to put my shoes on and start running laps, just like everyone else.

As a seventeen year old, my bitterness towards athletics and pretentious need to be right have subsided; I now see the overreaction of a little girl whose need to do the right thing, to tell the truth, overwhelmed her and her respectful acceptance of authority. That being said, I'm forever grateful to that girl for standing up and not taking everything at face value. She showed me, as a student going through high school and approaching university, that searching and figuring out the answer for yourself will always be more rewarding and informative than simply absorbing facts spewed by textbooks and teachers. Those academic sources are a great place to start, but looking past the curriculum to the why and how of everything I learn is what I do best, it's my addiction. On campus in the fall, I want to find out the calorie content of everything my teachers say, every fact my textbooks present, and search to answer those questions I find myself asking about the stars, government, philosophy. That's the thing that I'll never change: from twelve to eighty-eight, I will always want to find the truth.