Undergraduate / PEOPLE GO FISHING THEIR ENTIRE LIFE; A Community I Belong To- Supplement Essay [4]

Everyone belongs to many different communities and/or groups defined by (among other things) shared geography, religion, ethnicity, income, cuisine, interest, race, ideology, or intellectual heritage. Choose one of the communities to which you belong, and describe that community and your place within it. (Approximately 250 words)

"Jake, the buoy up on the bow is coming loose, I need you to get up there!"
For the first time I knew how it felt to fully realize the very real chance that I was about to die. It was not euphoric; my entire life did not pass before my eyes. No, I became unconscious, a machine if you will, just another part of the boat.

"Capn', that sail boat that was just behind us...its not there anymore"
As vociferous as twelve foot breaking waves can be when the wind is blowing thirty knots, one can still hear the coast guard on the radio, speaking of a sailboat that had went down.

"Do you think we should turn around and look for em?" but I knew the answer, we all did. When it comes to survival, one shouldn't turn around for a dead man when the broadside waves will push down a forty-two foot fishing boat like it's a feather.

It was as if the fear had eradicated any hesitation when my captain sent me up for the loose buoy merely minutes after watching the ocean swallow at least one man. My legs moved themselves; my hands grabbed the railing as if magnetized. A width of ten inches was all I had to get me up to the front of the boat as it jumped up and down, each wave acting like a giant firecracker being lit under the boat. "How many other fishermen have met their end like this", I wondered.

There is saying that people go fishing their entire lives, never realizing that it is not the fish they are after.

Undergraduate / World around me has constantly changed; Why I Wish to Transfer [3]

Thank you for taking the time to look at this. Any critique is greatly appreciated.

Who is to say where one life ends and another begins? Is it the rolling wave in the sea rising up until gravity sends it back to its creator, joining with the essence of the ocean so that it may once again rise above the essence that lacks existence? Perhaps it is that last frantic surge a wave makes upon sight of land, at last crashing upon its obstacles, the white froth ascending into the foreign air. In a way, I have lived many lives. My wave has risen and fallen through my 19 years, each time licking the air at different levels, each time journeying through the sea with different people and at different locations. The threads of my garments are not always the same, but they are always spun from the song of experience. From the peaks I've given condescending laughs of superiority only to find myself later in the valleys, crying in desperation at feeble attempts of levitation to bring back the rubble from the water of the bridges I had previously burned.

We can not truly know who we are at this present moment, only who we were and where this has led us up to this point in time. So who was I? I was the new kid senior year who had to live in the homeless shelter, the one kid in a wealthy area that knew the importance of the free lunch program; I was the son of a loving mother and father who tormented them after returning from sleep away camp not quite the same, knowing and feeling things an eleven year old should not know or feel; I was the kid who knew it all, inevitably falling on face; I was the white American who moved to Sibert, Haiti, finding within that portrait a more perfect painting of humanity than I had ever known to exist. All these and more have blended into the person that I am today.

Though the world around me has constantly changed, there has been one constant throughout my life: an insatiable thirst for knowledge. I can vividly recall a day at age thirteen when for an unknown reason I decided to buy Hegel's Phenomenology of the Mind. I went home, opened it up and could not understand a single word in it. Instead of being discouraged by this, however, a flame was lit within me: a passion and necessity to understand the ideas and works of great men. This was the nexus into my climb, a Sisyphus like ascent to climb upon these great minds-to stand upon their shoulders and see as they saw.

Though the pursuit of knowledge is the responsibility of the individual, a university can prove to be a tremendous facilitator of knowledge and thus result in exponential growth. At the present moment I find myself at a small liberal arts college, which I originally enrolled in due to the scholarship I received coupled with financial hardship. Unfortunately I have come to the realization that after this semester I will have nearly exhausted the challenges that I have faced here. I dream of changing humanity through my ideas, yet I know that for this to happen I must transfer.