Undergraduate /
MICA application: (Autobiographical Essay) [3]
This is my essay for this prompt: Write an autobiographical essay that tells us something about yourself that you feel is significant to your application and our perception of you. What would be your self-portrait?
Any peer review would be helpful! Thanks so much in advance.
:)
"You take with you what you leave behind." When I first heard this two-word paradox I didn't know what it meant, but it would become one of the most important lessons that I learned through my high school career. Through struggles and efforts to affect others, I had created a social niche for myself and developed the components that made me different from any other person.
The year of 1986: My parents came to America while my mother was still pregnant with me. Although they both had attended a special school for puppeteering and acting after high school, the school offered them no college degree. After finding some small financial luck in their careers, they brought their two daughters and I to America in hopes of a better social, political and educational system. But by the time I was of developing age I had slender fortune after having spent most of it on our house and my sister's college expenses, and had pushed me to become creative with my spare time.
My father the mime and actor, being a thrifty man, sold used clothes and more to Japanese resellers in his search to make a living in his new surroundings. In my travels with him to different thrift and consignment stores, I discovered tools of exploration and science from a young age. The list was mixed: K'nex, Lego's, Lincoln Logs, Capsela, Meccano, all forms of model construction toys where the only limit was the number of pieces you had and the number of thrift stores that had them. By spending weeks upon weeks in the middle of the room scattered with pieces, I learnt physics before I knew what it was. When there were not enough pieces in my sets (which was common), I took apart radios, remote controls, toy cars and everything else within my reach with no intention of putting them back together. My world was made of blocks and pieces where illustrators see lines, strokes, colors and graphic designers see objects, type, negative space. My visual space became meshed with my physical space irrevocably.
My mother the puppeteer, being a woman of learning and sociality, found me questioning society before I knew what society was. She taught me how to love and respect even when I could not see the love and respect in others. She said, "even the murderers, rapists and evil-doers have a reason for what they do -and most of the time it's not directly their fault. Hopelessness, social and physical conditions that those people are limited in, causes stress and people lose themselves." People are always inherently good; the lessons we share, our superego, our love is what keeps us from hurting each other. But if that balance of self is destroyed, through poor living conditions/situations, in effect, mental health is hurt and that person may lose their control. Through these lessons, she taught me to be thankful of the balance I had; I learned to love what was not immediately obvious of others; it granted me a power greater than Religion and by listening and sharing love with others, I found enlightenment.
Through my father, I learned to create and through my mother, I had a reason to create. Through friends, I found my audience and support; through adversaries and hardships I found creative and unique solutions to problems.
Looking back, I could have pursued a career in science, and perhaps I can still, but for two reasons. One was nature. There is an engulfing breeze about nature that left Science in the dust. And though I have studied Environmental Science at my school, there is a part of me that wants to allow nature to simply inspire -which was part of the reason I chose to study photography. I sought to capture that beauty, and to display the differences between society and nature.
The second reason was that I began to realize what science meant to much of today's society. It is used for good and evil, where if a company has enough power, it can choose to withhold information to the masses. For example the agricultural chemical company Monsanto genetically modifies seeds to yield unnatural amounts of output, and further monopolizes the agricultural market by producing seed specific chemicals, so that each seed has a specific chemical it needs to work with; Nothing more, nothing less. Instead of a path to knowledge, science suddenly becomes a tool against those who do not fully understand it. I sought more connection with people, and I found that art was just as powerful of a medium to express ideas and thoughts to the masses. For me, Art is something we can all feel, for it is about emotions, which we all have.
So I invested my time in photography, graphic design, furniture design through Gallery 37, a downtown program in Chicago that offers apprenticeships to willing teenagers. I invested my time, enthusiasm, and willingness to learn, and took back diverse ideas for design, composition, creative solutions, friends from every nook of the city, and precious memories.
Today I bring with me the same enthusiasm, ideas, motivation, and also the lessons I have learned through my life from investing time, sometimes money and faith into; I bring with me the encouragement and support for others that wants to be given; I bring with me my unique craftiness and ability to work with the things I have. This, so far, is how I have lived, and how I wish to pursue knowledge and creativity for the rest of my life.
_Hugh Sato
