Undergraduate / 'Enrichment through community' - Common App Diversity [4]

Topic: A range of academic interests, personal perspectives, and life experiences adds much to the educational mix. Given your personal background, describe an experience that illustrates what you would bring to the diversity in a college community, or an encounter that demonstrated the importance of diversity to you.

I'm not going to mince words. I'm not going to sell you a half-baked, contrived tale of how attending high school in three countries or winning outstanding delegate at the 2010 Cairo American College Model United Nations conference makes me a future ambassador. I'm not going to spin you a story about how working in a Nepali orphanage created the next great humanitarian. I'm certainly not naĂŻve enough to suggest that acting in high school plays or programming for my FIRST robotics team laid the foundation for a groundbreaking career in theatre or artificial intelligence. Because in the end, a bullet-point list of accomplishments and experiences is not going to enrich your campus, but the person that those experiences has made. The hallmark of a diverse campus is synergy, the way that people of wildly different backgrounds and life experiences can come together and harmonize their energies to produce something that nobody alone is capable of. For this to occur there must be a combination of enthusiasm, hard work, and talent, as well as a network of quality institutions to develop and nurture the latent potential in the student body.

I don't believe that I can summarize the importance of diversity in a single life experience or encounter without resorting to clichĂŠs and banalities than I already have. In living in the USA, India, and the UAE over the last three years, I have witnessed firsthand the enhancement and personal growth a diverse background creates. For example, my experience volunteering at the OCEAN Nepal orphanage in Kathmandu allowed me a greater understanding of the book Little Princes when it was assigned as required reading for my AP English class. When the author, Connor Grennan, came to my hometown to talk about the book, I asked a question about the fate of rescued orphans that not only improved my understanding of the book and the situation in Nepal, but also that of everyone at the presentation.

Attending the CACMUN conference in October 2010 in Cairo was another experience in which diverse experienced synergized to enrich my life and the lives of others. The varied backgrounds of delegates from schools in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa created an intellectually lively forum in which we discussed, deliberated, and debated the most pressing issues of the modern world, encountering perspectives and ideas to which we had not been previously exposed. The insight I gained at the conference about the issues facing Iran, Somalia, Sudan, and the Congo has helped me make more informed decisions about international issues and helped me have more informed, interesting discussions with others.

All of the above experiences have illustrated the importance of diversity to me. More importantly, they all have given me opportunities to enrich the lives of others, which is exactly the benefit of a diverse college campus and community. I hope that reading this essay has helped you see what diversity I could bring to your campus and assists you in making your decision.

Any tips? Any and all comments would be appreciated.