Undergraduate / Study Abroad/Gain Exposure of new culture; CU Boulder/ Diversity [9]

This is my essay, and it is currently 447 words (max 500). Do you think the transition from the first paragraph to the second paragraph is to abrupt or is the flow ok? Also, here is the prompt:

Studying Abroad and Life Goals

Although I was wearing light-weight, black flip-flops, my feet felt as though they were cemented to bricks as I trudged up the crowded hallway to my last class of the day - Hispanic American Literature Honors. To say I felt anxiety towards the class was an understatement; as a half-Caucasian and half-Japanese student, I had no idea what to expect or if I would even succeed in a class full of content unfamiliar to me. I quickly made my way to my seat, and overheard two students conversing in Spanish, than switching to English and then back to Spanish. The majority of the students in the classroom were Hispanic, but to my surprise African-American, and Caucasian students also enrolled in the class; our teacher was Persian. That day the assignment was to describe an object in terms of one's personality. Although I had completed a similar exercise in a previous class, the written descriptions of the other students were nothing like I had expected. One of the students compared a tea cup to his soul; the tea cup had the capacity to hold hot tea and milk in place, just as the soul held memories and God together inside of one's mind. The interpretations of each student were different than I expected, because each student had a unique cultural background. Over the course of the year, my anxiety disappeared after listening to and collaborating with such a diverse group of people. Through my coursework, I realized that culture plays an enormous role in creating solutions for social problems, but more importantly I realized the importance of embracing every person's cultural identity, and even though certain groups may seem like total opposites, people have more in common than one would originally think.

My life goal is to continue the work of the work of Jeffrey Sachs (economist and adviser to Secretary General Ban Ki Moon) to help lift the "bottom billion," in sub-Saharan Africa out of poverty, by investing helping less economically developed countries to build infrastructure tailored to the needs and culture of the people residing in the country. I hope to take challenging and thought provoking classes at the University of Colorado related to geography, language, history, politics and culture in order to gain the knowledge I will need to pursuit my dreams. Even more, I look forward to having professors and peers who will expose me to new ideas in order to understand the world in a way that differs from what I know now. However, my most desired goal for college is to study abroad, and gain a new understanding of a culture completely different than my own, and incorporate new customs into my lifestyle.