Undergraduate / 'a local or global issue - blueberries' - PITZER suppliment [2]

Please review/critique

mPitzer College's educational foundation is built upon four core values: social responsibility, intercultural understanding, interdisciplinary learning, and student autonomy. Our students utilize these values to create solutions to our world's current and future challenges, both big and small. Keeping our core values in mind, please answer one of the following prompts (Maximum of 4000 characters).

1. Incorporating one or more of our values, propose a solution to a local or global issue you deem important.

Food. Often times overlooked by problems such energy and water, food is the cornerstone of every society that has ever existed. In the modern world, with an exponentially expanding global population, food is a bigger problem than ever. The more people there are, the more food we need. But the more food that we mass produce, the more environmental damage we cause. Genetic modification, pesticides, and other modern farming practices may produce extreme amounts of food, but the side effects of such practices spell disaster in the future. Put simply, how my generation chooses to feed itself will be one of the biggest issues that we will have to face. This summer, I believe I found at least a partial solution to this monumental problem.

Industrial, non-organic agriculture will be the death of this country. Yes, industrial farming techniques raise crop yields in the short term, but the long term damage of these very same techniques makes organic farming the better way to farm over the long term. Industrial agriculture's damage to the environment is immense, and hits a variety of places. Fertilizer breakdown and runoff poisons the air we breathe and the water we drink. Pesticide and herbicide use creates super-pests and super-weeds that are more resistant to efforts to kill them. Non-organic fertilizer use can put various metals and other unwanted products in soil, damaging the very plants that the fertilizer is helping to grow. Our current food production practices aren't just damaging to the environment, they are unsustainable over the next century. A switch to a more sustainable form of agriculture is essential to the continual health and well being not just of the country, but of the world.

I spent two weeks of my summer working on a blueberry farm. But this wasn't just a blueberry farm; it was an organic blueberry farm. This meant that it used no pesticides, herbicides, inorganic fertilizer, or petroleum based products. The farm was small, so we few interns had to learn to handle a multitude of tasks, from picking to pruning and sorting and selling. But despite being difficult, hot, and repetitive, the work was rewarding. It was fascinating to learn about an alternate source of agriculture that, despite being labor intensive, was sustainable without having to dump chemicals on the plants year after year. And on top of doing my small part to save the world, the experiences were novel. I have never before been to a Whole Foods delivery center at five in the morning, or watched a farmers market from start to finish from the seller's point of view. I hadn't sorted blueberries for three hours straight. I certainly had never sat in the passenger seat as my 4'11 aunt, a NYC woman who drives all of twice a year and had to sit on a large pile of phone books so that she could see over the wheel, try to pilot an oversized ford van with a back full of blueberries to market, every so often drifting off onto the shoulder before a violent jerk of the wheel got us back on track. Sitting in the hot sun of a mid-day Massachusetts farmers market, people kept making the same remarks with every purchase. "They're healthier", "these berries are bigger and bluer than any I've ever seen", "They just taste like a blueberry should". It feels good to hear these things, to know that laborious work of the past few days hadn't been wasted. But most importantly, it feels good to know that you're doing your part.

Undergraduate / 'Students and alumni I talked to in person' - Colorado College [5]

Any feedback would be appreciated. Feel free to critique any weaknesses or flaws that you see.

Colorado College Supplement Essay #1
How did you learn about Colorado College and why do you wish to attend?

I found Colorado College purely by accident. Living in Bethesda, MD, I knew little about small liberal arts schools hidden in the Rockies. My college search, up to that point, had focused solely on schools on the east coast. The January of my sophomore year, I took a trip to Colorado to stay with cousins who attend CU-Boulder. My parents saw the trip as a chance to teach me that hard work in high school paid off in the form of my choice of college. I saw the trip as a lot of fun. My parents warned me that I may not return to Colorado for a while, so I should check out any other colleges in the area that piqued my interest. I scoured various lists and college books, and only one school fit my criteria. Colorado College caught my eye because it was a) a small liberal arts school, b) located in a decently sized metropolitan area, c) academically rigorous, and d) had a DIII soccer program. I decided I'd check it out.

My first day in Colorado I planned on sleeping in after a late night arrival at my aunt's house in Denver, but she had other ideas. I was up bright and early at 7:30, not because I am a morning person, but because my aunt had arranged an early brunch with an old friend of hers, a Colorado college alumni and ex-CC professor. I had planned on visiting the school later that day, and this meeting was meant as an early introduction to Colorado College. I do not remember his name, but I do remember the enthusiasm and excitement that flowed out the alumni. He spoke of the dynamic and community that surrounded the school, how he had applied to Colorado College and only Colorado College, and how the block plan allowed for an intellectual experience unparalleled at any other college. I was enthralled. It may just have been that he was a persuasive speaker, but whenever anyone speaks with his level of passion and excitement, you know that the love is genuine, that the speaker truly believes in the message he is delivering. As I listened to him speak, I realized that this is the type of school that I want to attend, a school that is so beloved by its students that even after graduating, the student wants to return to work there, and even after teaching and retiring, the no-longer-student is willing to get up on a cold February morning to meet a prospective student and complete stranger and talk about a school he went to 30 years ago. That type of devotion is special, very few things in the world can inspire that intense of a reaction in someone. The enthusiasm that the ex-professor displayed for his alma mater was my first clue that Colorado College was something special.

I subsequently visited the Colorado College campus, took the tour, and enjoyed every minute of it. The day was cold (it was January after all) but clear and bright. The cold blue skies perfectly captured the snow powdered peaks of the mountains that seemed follow us, acting as our unofficial tour guide as our troupe slowly weaved our way around campus.

The more I researched Colorado College, the more it seemed to be THE college for me. Students and alumni I talked to in person and online were unanimous in their overwhelming positivity towards CC. CC isn't just an academically rigorous liberal arts college, it's a college where people seem to be truly happy with their lives. I am about to choose where I will spend the next four years of my life, and my options are infinite. I can choose to attend a school of any size, location, demographic, ranking (nearly), and format. As I sort through the vast array of possibilities available to me next year, I have certain criteria that helps narrow the scope of my search. I may look for the small schools over the larger ones, or schools in Colorado over schools in Kansas, but I only have one true qualification. Wherever I spend the next four years of my life, I want to be happy. A degree from the #1 ranked college in the country, or the world for that matter, would be worthless if I spent the years it took to get it in misery. Yes, I want to attend Colorado College because of its small size, its unique academic rigor, its breath-takingly stunning campus, and it's laid back student community, but these are each smaller parts of the bigger picture. I want to spend the next four years of my life at Colorado College because I know that I will be happy and that I will succeed.