Undergraduate / "striving to reach my goal is more important" - Pre-College program for Sophomores [7]

Hi Everyone,

First of all, I'd like to thank you all for this wonderful service. I live in India and I plan to attend a pre-college program in the US for Fall 2011. I'm thinking of taking a course in Business Management and Finance. I'm not very happy with the way I ended my essay. In fact, I'm not able to judge if is an essay worth submitting. Any honest review will be of great help. It looks like I'm bragging about my childhood a bit but that was the truth. I wanted to bring out how life for me was in my village (peaceful, serene, closer to nature) to living in the city(with corruption, pollution) and how my thinking changed as I grew older.

Please find the essay below.

The question asked is ----
Please upload your personal statement. The personal statement (250-500 words) should describe your academic preparation, personal interests, and motivation for participating in an intensive academic program.

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I had a wonderful childhood, what any child would dream to have. I had leopard cubs, otters, peacocks in our yard and acres of lush and greenery around me. My father is an environmentalist and a preservationist of wildlife and plants. We have a house in a village called XXX, India where my father resides preserving natural resources. He brought the cubs to our farm when the villagers had killed its mother for preying on their cattle. He lives 400 kms away from where we live - my mother, my little brother and I live in the city. My mother is a down to earth person with strong values and determination. She is a big source of inspiration to me who taught the importance of education, perseverance and honesty. It was a tough decision for her when she decided 10 years back to move to the city to provide my brother and myself, a better education. Living in the city, I missed my father a lot; especially on Saturday evenings when we spent time solving puzzles in math and logical analysis.

Life in the city is beautiful. I have few great friends, enjoy reading about freedom fighters and ancient history and love playing Cricket (a ball game) and track and field athletics. I was a scoring decent enough until 8th grade. Then I was introduced to Algebra and Geometry at school. I started developing a fear for math cause of my anxiety and hard time focusing. When I was in my 9th grade my father gifted me Shakuntala Devi puzzles book for my birthday. My father and I were competing to solve it that night; of course my father was giving away clues to help me win. But that was when I rediscovered my long lost love for puzzles. I also realized that these puzzles were stimulating my thinking and helped me perform better in class as well. I saw a drastic improvement in my grades at school which was a big boost to my confidence. I developed a new found interest in solving problems with percentages, Commercial Math (value added tax) and Graphs. I was determined in taking math and business management as a major in high school.

Thanks to globalization, I have people from the US and China in my school today from whom I learnt about US schools. This aroused a curiosity to learn more about it. I decided to take a summer program in the US which will give me a good idea about Business management. I was delirious with joy when I came across the courses offered at XXX: exactly the kind of programs I was looking for. I get all thrilled thinking about getting a world class education in a school attended by Nobel laureates and discourses given by renowned professors; and also the fact that its miles away from the best museums and the Financial district and the multi-cultural experience which will open up many avenues to learn new things.