Undergraduate / "What on this Earth about??" ; Common App: Failure [3]

Common App: Recount an incident or time when you experienced failure. How did it affect you, and what lessons did you learn? (250-600) Please help specifically with eliminating the unnecessary, answering the questions I left unanswered, and alleviating boringness!

Perusing the paint aisle, there are hundreds of variations of the color white. Very subtle differences comprise shades of latte cream, eggshell, or pearl. However, spring of my sophomore year introduced me to an alien shade: pass-to-the-principal's office white. My name was crawled in opaque black ink that seemed to cause the immaculate foreground to glow up into my face. I had literally never been in any sort of trouble before in my life, so this piece of paper felt heavy in my hand as a trudged to the office in a baffled fog. The edges of my vision were fuzzy, every member of the cognitive team on a mad search through their files to uncover a possible cause.

I sat down in the chair across from Mr. Minnitti's desk and he said carefully, "Miss Lignelli have you been working on some sort of project... something called a Gold Award?"

"Yes," I squeaked timidly.
"Well a woman called me today who was pretty upset about your project," he began, hoping I would pick up his train of thought. I did not disappoint.

"What on this Earth about??" I erupted in genuine confused outrage. I did not know it then, but this cloud of bafflement would cast its haze for the rest of the week. When I left the office, I had four voicemails.

My project focused on urban development. I wanted to designate a pathway through town that people could use to exercise. It would, in the long run, increase community involvement and stimulate local business by trafficking pedestrian flow as well as serve its literal purpose as an athletic track (for more information, please visit my website and locate the "Gold Award" tab). However, I was sentenced asked by city council to gain permission of residents who owned property along the projected trails. To accomplish this, I made a doorhanger with project information and my email address. The day after I hung the doorhangers, I received a pass to the office, an invitation to like the Facebook page "Stop Project Wellness", and phone calls from my superintendent, project adviser, Girl Scout Program Director, and a woman from the U.S. Postal Service. I had angered this one woman so much by the simple prospect of extra commotion near her home that she devoted the entirety of her day to unraveling my efforts. She acted as if I had proposed to open a Neo-Nazi meeting house in her basement. Her reaction caused a lot of my superiors to question whether or not I should even be permitted to continue. It was the first time I had ever not succeeded on the first try and I felt like someone had glued my feet to the bottom of a snowglobe and turned it over.

Looking back, I actually believe that the incident precipitated a better product. That week, I had to go to city council meetings and Girl Scout meetings and apologize for the trouble; convince everyone that the project was worth continuing. I had to really bunker down and ask myself, "Why are you doing this? Why is this important?" so that I could relay to those who were doubting me. It helped me to refocus, and finally winning back the support of funders and advisers gave me a jolt of energy that lasted me to the Award's conclusion. I can reminisce with laughter about my principal-office panic and the blind scrambling to nurse my work back to health. I have not since had the ground crumble underneath me the way it did that day, but for all the smaller battles I find myself up against, I charge them head-on, because I have witnessed the service a little failure can do.

Scholarship / Questbridge Biographical: Literature and My Childhood [7]

Prompt: We are interested in learning more about you and the context in which you have grown up, formed your aspirations and accomplished your academic successes. Please describe the factors and challenges that have most shaped your personal life and aspirations. How have these factors caused you to grow?

When you look closely at a perfectly polished, silkily- smooth cheery wood hand rail, you can see flecks of gold dancing. The chandelier, the powerful mass of shattered glass which weighs so prizedly on the plaster ceiling, sprinkles timid candlelight throughout the cavernous Paris Opera House. Rich cranberry drapes absorb the commotion of the outside world. They radiate with fiery energy, drawing the chemistry of the room inward. The stage is a blur of frantic people, sets, and props. Whirring and zipping so that they can find their places before La Carlotta can burn the stage with her piercing glare of disapproval.

A series of gentle thuds- car doors being slammed- alert my ear and I feel like I am resurfacing after being underwater. In reality, my eight-year-old self is sitting cross-legged in my childhood closet, reading with a flashlight while the clothes that are nice enough to hang up brush my blonde head. I listen to three resounding knocks on the front door and hear my parents whispering urgently before I plunge back into the realm of glamorous prima donnas.

La Carlotta arrives on set and everyone prepares to begin. Carlotta's voice blasts through the hall, much akin to the way a door shrieks on a rusty hinge.

BOOM, BOOM, BOOM. The knocks come so hard they arouse me from my literary hypnosis. I hear my infant brother start to cry in the next room. "THIS IS THE POLICE. OPE-"

Before he can finish, I hear the front door squeak a bit as it is swung open. I crack the door of the closet open just a sliver and am assaulted by blue and red lights flashing into my bedroom window. I immediately seal myself back up in my hideout, plug my ears, and focus on the words on the page. I settle back into the story, and can nearly see the sparkle in Christine's eye as the Vicomt turns his attention to her. As I read on, small, wet dots appear on the pages sporadically, but I pay them no attention. Periodically, a crash or a powerful voice coming from elsewhere in the house threatens to pluck me up from out of my happy trip to the Opera, but I just read on, until the whole house goes quiet.

Speed ahead nine years and my world is dramatically different. These days, my dad's heroin addiction hardly affects my daily life at all. However, when I was young, my reality tended to be scary and confusing, so I sought solace in books. I was curious about how life could be. Christine Daae was only one of many characters who helped me through tribulation, and even today, some of my closest friends live in the boundary between the front and back cover.

I believe that I am the person I am today because I developed a habit of reading. I exposed myself to so many different world views that I developed an unwavering determination to give myself a better life than I had currently been living. With the help of the strength of my grandparents and my mom's bravery, I grew to become someone who can respond to adversity; someone who truly loves to learn.

Scholarship / Did I smell bad? ; Questbridge/Significant experience, achievement, risk,ethical dilemma [6]

College Chores

I had just eaten the very first of 15 dinners with my homestay family. All the American students had agreed earlier to meet after dinner to vent about our first days. So, after my parents had finished the evening prayer, I said, "Baba, deba madrasa. Wakha?" This is kindergarten-level Arabic for, "Dad, now school. Okay?" He nodded, so I grabbed my water bottle and started off. Halfway up, both of my moms came chasing after me, yelling and waiving their aprons. They start to pull me back, pointing to the roof, where a small outhouse stood, and said, "Hammam?" I thought it was awfully strange that time to offer me a shower, but I politely declined, and by the end of the twenty minute walk, I had forgotten the whole thing.

When I got home later that night, one of my moms, Fatimah, asked me again, "Hammam?" I could not explain to her by charades that I had showered before I arrived that morning, so I politely smiled, set the hose down, and went back down to the house.

When I woke up the next morning, the first thing both of my moms greeted me with was, "Hammam?"
"Madrassa" I replied, already running late for my Arabic lesson.

When I got home from lessons that day, they inquired, "Hammam?" Mom #2, Ittou, even brought me a bathrobe. When I offered to help prepare dinner they asked, "Hammam?" Before dinner was served they pleaded, "Hammam??"

I began to grow offended. Did I smell bad? My family members certainly were not showering more than once a week. Why were they so concerned about me? Three days went by, and out of perhaps fifty showers offered to me I had accepted twice. I just could not discern why these women wanted me to shower so often. After a while, they enlisted my brother as well. Every time we bumped into each other, he would ask, "Cassie, hammam?"

Finally, I had my fill of the shower-barrage. I asked my EIL friends while we were smoothing cement on the school walls, "Guys, do your parents ask you to shower constantly?" A few of them started to laugh. "It's not funny!" I said, "Do I smell or something?" They only laughed harder.

"Cass," started my friend Talya, "they just want you to wash your hands! When you get home from school, before you eat, after doing any chores..." I could not help but join in their hysterical laughter. It is hard to fathom how much anxiety I brought on my mothers, seizing cous cous from a common dish with hands I had repeatedly refused to wash. When I returned that night, I immediately trudged straight upstairs and scrubbed my grimy hands. My moms finally let me help them with dinner that night. It was one small victory in the war against the language barrier.

However, this story is more than just funny dinner conversation. It serves as a reminder, especially through this exhilarating, stressful college application process, that even when I am vexed near my limit, with patience and a sense of humor a resolution can be earned. Because of this and similar adventures, I have a flexibility to absorb other cultures and ways of life with my heart and mind wide open, and I cannot wait to see how that propels me in college.

Scholarship / Gain insight and new perspective / What Inspires You?- Study Abroad Scholarship [2]

What person or persons in your life inspire you and how are you inspired?

Every now and again, I turn my head away from the glow of my computer screen, and my back will creak and groan as I sit up straight for the first time in hours. I will rub my eyes, glance up at the kitchen clock, and calculate the hours of sleep I will likely get... usually about 5, though sometimes 4 or even 3, and I think to myself, "Why am I doing this?"

Sometimes it is because I don't have a choice. It is something that will be graded. But other things are completely voluntary, like Relay for Life, Mock Trial, Interact, debates, and student government. It is in these late night musings, my exhausted, over-worked exasperation that I get a clear picture of what drives me, and it comes from a distant place in my life.

I come from a rocky childhood, which has taught me the futility of false judgment and prejudice.

My father is a habitual narcotic drug user. I grew up around a lot of violence and things I did not understand. When I was about eight years old, my mother had the means to leave and start a new life for my siblings and I, but by then, the community had tagged me, my mother, and my siblings, as white trash, good-for-nothing, and essentially, going nowhere.

As a young child, I didn't understand why people had made up their minds about me, based solely on the decisions made by my parents. I got straight A's and had the best strike-out record on the softball team, yet my friends' parents would still (barely) whisper to each other, "She'll never graduate," or, "She'll have a baby by the time she gets to high school." As I got older, and kept my grades at the top of my class, won class president, and kept opening more and more doors for myself, the talk stopped, but I never forgot all those people who judged me before they gave me a chance.

I realized that stereotypes and prejudice are such inaccurate tools people use against others, and they are a far too popular trend in our society. It is not fair, and it is not right to make up your mind about someone based on their appearance or where they come from. Every person, foreign or familiar, has their own traits to offer the world, but not everyone understands this, and for many, being judged holds them back.

So when I look up from my work at the end of a long, tiresome day, I remind myself that I have been given this experience for a reason. I am driven to put myself in leadership and speaking roles so that I can share what I have learned with others, so that prejudice can end. I am inspired everyday by the lessons I have learned. I have jobs to do and things to say, and I will not think of slowing down.

I hope that I will be one of the few who are given the opportunity to live abroad, so that I can gain insight and new perspective about the world. I hope that I can take the lessons I have learned to a new part of the world, and I hope the people I meet there will be able to change me as well, so that I can be inspired to do even more.

Scholarship / "Be the Change You Want to See" High School Travel Abroad Scholarship [2]

The prompt is: "There is a saying, 'Be the change you want to see in the world.' What is the change that you want to see?"

You don't have to read any headlines to find intolerance. Racism, hatred, and fear, are not running rampant in the world because of large groups like the KKK, rather it festers in communities, in homes, schools, and churches. The saying, "Be the change you wish to see in the world," has always struck a personal chord with me. Too often in my day-to-day life, I hear those dearest to me express fear for anyone different from them. My grandparents will not visit the gas station around the corner, because they can't understand the accent of the Indian man who manages it. My physics teacher professes almost everyday, "If you don't speak English, you don't deserve rights from Uncle Sam." I would venture to guess that anyone could reflect on the people in their lives and find countless examples of lack of understanding of another group of people, as well.

I have taken this mantra to heart in many ways, but I have yet, in my personal tribulations, to find an effective way to embody tolerance in a way that registers with others. In other aspects, it is easy to live Ghandi's words and make a difference. For example, I empathize with children who come from low-income families, so I volunteer for Toys-For-Tots. However, when it comes to delivering a message of understanding and unity, I haven't yet devised a way to communicate the message to my family and peers. Whenever someone gives me the chance, I try to be the voice of reason amidst their fear, but that usually just makes me appear argumentative, which certainly is not the goal. I have participated in interscholastic debates in which I've tried to profess the concept that all men are created equal, however, polls from the audiences show that that method, too, tends to fall flat.

On a much smaller scale, an American high school can be a metaphor for various religious groups and races and how they disagree and clash. As girls and boys grow into young men and women, they grow into themselves, and as a result, grow apart and grow to argue with one another. As these adolescent years pass, I can't help but wonder how different the lives of all my peers could be if we could all learn to respect one another. If the cheerleaders, for example, were not worried about whether or not the volleyball team is more popular than them, imagine all the good that could come of the refocused energy. The same is true on a global scale. If every person could find a way to accept those who are different form them, and the world came to peace, what greatness could the people of the world achieve?

I haven't yet found a way to prove to others what I have come to know: that tolerance and understanding are the only path to peace. However, maybe if I am given the opportunity to travel abroad, maybe if I am given the opportunity to represent my country in a foreign place, I will learn new things about not only other cultures, but also about myself. I hope that I can use this scholarship as a tool to show those around me that what seems different is more similar than they may have thought. I hope that with the chance to live abroad, I will be better equipped to be the change I want to see in the world.