Undergraduate / "Talk about an experience traveling or Living Abroad" - feedback [2]

Wanted some feedback. Good Essay? What is superfluous and what I should add. Thanks.

Ulpan - Not Just A Language School

It was not my choice to move to Israel. When I first heard about my subsequent move four years ago, a feeling of anticipation brewed in me. As the date got closer, my feelings slowly turned to apprehension, and finally, pure desolation. At the airport, I was on the brink of tears. On the plane, I could hardly contain myself, and kept pondering about my seemingly bleak future in Israel. It all seemed grossly surreal: Me living in Israel? I just couldn't grasp the idea of it.

The first couple of months in Israel were the most painful, yet in retrospect, the most important. My level of proficiency in Hebrew was well below the level of native Israelis. Therefore, I was sent to an "Ulpan," or an; "Intensive Hebrew School." Imagine an innocent, American boy, looking two years younger than his age, waking up at the brink of dawn every morning, taking two public buses all by himself to go all the way to the slums of Tel Aviv, where the "Ulpan" was located. When we all gathered at the "Ulpan" on the first of September, I suddenly had an epiphany regarding the people I was going to spend the next few months with. To my right, were five Sudanese refugees from Darfur, all looking frightened and skeptical as to what was to come next. To my left I saw approximately nine other kids, some older than me, and all from different backgrounds. All of us were wondering how we got into this predicament - but we were all there to do one thing: learn Hebrew.

In the beginning, I pitied myself, mostly for the fact that I was taken out of my comfortable, Connecticut suburban life, taken out of my position as head of the debate team and class president, and taken out of my country, my home, and away from my friends, into a threatening jungle of unknown people and cultures. Altogether, we were a class of 17 students, ages 12-17, studying together in an incessantly air-conditioned room, amidst the blistering Tel Aviv heat. We each had a different native tongue, which made the study of Hebrew even more challenging. Somehow, we managed.

I was angry; angry at my parents, angry at the "Ulpan", and angry at the world. I felt that great injustice was done to me. But all that slowly changed, when I started to spent more time listening to the stories of my fellow classmates.

Hassan was 15 when I met him. His parents were murdered in the ongoing genocide in Darfur. He arrived to Israel with his sister, and was residing in a refugee shelter in the slums. He came to Israel with no expectations, other than his innate human rights to be kept, a liberty he did not have in his homeland. Hassan came in through the classroom door smiling every day, in regular fashion. Hearing his story, and seeing how he overcame all of his hardships, while never losing his smile, was truly a humbling experience. It gave me a new perspective as to how fortunate I was. My situation was heaven compared to his, but I was the one making all the fuss.

I eventually went on to finish the Ulpan after about three months, and finally was integrated into a normal school in a nicer neighborhood, but that experience is still with me. People often ask me whether I prefer living in America or in Israel. That is irrelevant, because I have lived in different places during different parts of my life. Comparing them would be like apples and oranges. The right question is; whether I regret moving or not. My answer: I wouldn't have had it any other way.

Writing Feedback / Essay about Scientific Wonderment- feedback [3]

I haven't yet decided if this will be my common app essay or an essay for a supplement, but I wanted some feedback just for now. thanks for reading!

Topic of Your Choice

Scientific Wonderment

Standing at a shore, I notice the fluid movement of the rushing waves crashing along the shore. Each wave is composed of masses of atoms, far away from each other, yet forming white waves in unison. Far long before there were eyes on our earth to see, different atoms where following the same rhythmic movement, performing on their humble stage before a dead planet. Deep in the sea, all molecules follow the same pattern until new ones are formed, more complex and intricate in their design. Their multiplication begins and thus begins a new dance. Growing in size and intricacy, forming new bodies of mass with DNA and proteins, life is formed. Out of the sleepy, oceanic womb where life was conceived, onto dry land, and following the elegant rules of natural selection. Until finally, I stand before the shore, thinking about the grandiose creation of life when essentially I am nothing but atoms with consciousness, matter with curiosity. This, is scientific wonderment.

Aristotle perceived physical laws to be governed by logic. He thought that a heavier object would fall quicker to the ground than a lighter object, which we know today is not true due to Galileo and Newton. In fact, as we delve into the extreme conditions of nature, logic is nowhere to be seen. When talking about subatomic scales, particles act completely bizarre to our everyday standards, if you were to visit a bar at the Planck Constant's length (smaller than a proton), visitors would simply walk through and into walls, and your subatomic cocktail would disappear before you would get the chance to sip it down. In quantum theory, a particle doesn't have a certain past or "history" in fact, its past is all of the available histories. Quantum theory postulates that on subatomic scales, knowing the history or future of an atom is not in practice impossible but in principle impossible. Instead, we can calculate the probability that a particle will follow a certain path. The repercussions of such a theory are immense, and surely chilling to many philosophers. To think that the laws of nature are governed by chance was frightening to imagine during the rise of quantum theory in the 1930s. As the late, great physicist Richard Feynman said: "If you think you understand quantum theory, than you don't understand quantum theory."

The true beauty of science is its uncanny, yet inevitable correlation to mathematics. Mathematics is a human invention striving to culminate our rational thought into numbers. Our natural numbers ( 0-9) were chosen thousands of years ago by ancient cultures. The wonderment emerges when looking back at history, we can see several times that a mathematician worked on a piece of theoretical math and only years later did it fit precisely with a then, unexplainable physical phenomenon. The mathematician Fourier developed his Fourier Series and years later, we use the Fourier series to explain the recurring wave phenomenon found in physics and even the way our ear translates different pitches into smooth sound. How is it that we humans developed a completely subjective and theoretical piece of mathematics, and later we find that it fits perfectly with the laws of nature governed by forces of cosmological proportions unknown to us humble beings. This bond between the two fields of study is phenomenal as it is mysterious.

As a naturalist, one who admires the intricacy and beauty of the laws of nature, I feel compelled to learn more about the complexity of nature out of admiration for its incessant rules. The laws of nature go far beyond the boundaries of human imagination and ability, and studying science, is a humbling experience in itself. We humans are mere sculptors, chiseling slowly but surely into the marble that hides the true face of nature, until we form our own sculpture of the way we perceive nature to be, but not necessarily how it really is.