Undergraduate / Neighborhood with migrant majority/ Bowdoin Supp/ Intellectual engagement/Common Good [3]

Bowdoin students and alumni often cite world-class faculty and opportunities for intellectual engagement, the College's commitment to the Common Good, and the special quality of life on the coast of Maine as important aspects of the Bowdoin experience. Reflecting on your own interests and experiences, please comment on one of the following:

1. Intellectual engagement
2. The Common Good
3. Connection to place

I used to run to school: it is still fresh the feeling of disgust as I passed by the scantly clad young women loitering in the streets and the topless men sitting at "mahjong" tables. They all spoke unfamiliar dialects.

"Migrant workers" never had a positive connotation to me. Yet mother told me that they had stories to tell. The couple staying under the staircase woke up at four everyday to sell vegetables: they were saving money for a house back home; the single mother was happy to operate her small convenient shop here because her family did not want a divorced daughter home. Mother said that these people lived difficult lives because they had no better alternatives. I did not quite understand.

So mother encouraged me to play with their children. I am grateful that I heeded her advice. I learned that the big 12-year-old boy had never attended school since he came to Ningbo because he did not have residential status here. "Helping mother with the restaurant business is better." - His job was delivering food to construction sites everyday. What was so cool about life here? McDonald's. Pretty gardens. Occasional video games. His friends back in his hometown envied his lifestyle.

I grew up in a neighborhood where the migrant population was higher than the local population. There I learned never to judge people before I really know them; there I learned when many people live comfortably, many others lived an entirely different life; there I began to understand the life at the other end of the spectrum.

I hope one day I will help change the items on the boy's list.

Undergraduate / "Lao village" ; Williams App / "looking out through the window" [8]

Imagine looking through a window at any environment that is particularly significant to you. Reflect on the scene, paying close attention to the relation between what you are seeing and why it is meaningful to you. Please limit your statement to 300 words.

"Who has given them pens?"
Embarrassed, I raised my hand.

It was hard to let them down. In a world where refrigerator is a symbol of wealth, all those kids wanted from me were pens, which I had brought plenty.

The village kids were not allowed to enter the house. At night, they fought for space to get a glimpse of happenings inside the room through the window.

I was leaning at the window. The kids were experimenting with self-introduction using the words we taught them during the day; I was struggling to count from one to ten in Lao. We were all laughing hard. Then they started to point at the big goodie bag. They saw us taking out colorful pens, notebooks and stickers from it: to the children in the Lao village, it was a bagful of treasure.

I felt like Santa Claus: the kids looked at me in admiration as I shared some of my own pens amongst them.

"You should not have done it." Sophie, our teacher chaperon, said, "If we gave them once, they would hide the pens and come back for more."

Indeed they did. After I finished my pens, the kids had moved on to look for new playmates.
"The kids may think they can get things every time they ask for them. " Sophie was unusually serious, "That's not happening in life. Giving them pens this way is not going to help them."

Through the two-square-meter open window, the kids and I clapped hands and played simple games. We shared a simple and hard life. For the visitors from Singapore, it was ten days; for them, it might be for a lifetime. As a visitor who cannot be responsible for their future, doing no harm was far more important than satisfying a girl's vanity as a First World resident.

Undergraduate / Successful Advertiser; MIT ; Which department/ program at MIT appeal to you and Why? [11]

Although you may not yet know what you want to major in, which department or program at MIT appeals to you and why? (100 words or fewer)

I believe that to become a successful advertiser, I need to understand the markets - what changes are happening to people's lives and perspectives, what are the trends of government policies and why they are happening. Economics gives me a tool to better do so. I hope to gain insight on the application of economic theories through the Project Lab and Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP). I am thrilled to discover the diversity of research projects I can work on with leading specialists under UROP. Such invaluable experiences will help me appreciate economics better and serve me well as I venture in the advertising world.

a lot of thanks

and hope everybody good luck