Undergraduate / The day I met her will shine like a beacon in my memory forever [31]

Hi everyone,

This is on a pretty different tone. I'm not really answering the original prompt, I think I may just choose the option writing on a "topic of your choice."

What do you think? Is it more or less common than the first essay? Would I sound like a better person to the Admissions Officers in this essay or the first? I think those were the two main problems.

Also--I think my vocabulary/sentence structure is simpler in this essay. I'm making less of an effort to sound smart, and more of an effort to just say what I want to say. Does it take from the strength of the essay?

The day I met Dina Babbitt will shine like a beacon in my memory forever. She was a frail yet beautiful old woman whose inner strength radiated so strongly through her features that she seemed to cast a spell of hope on everyone in her presence. I sat in the front row of the theater, entranced as she spoke to my History teacher and his students about her experiences in the Holocaust. "Dina, you really are a hero," he said. By defying concentration camp leader Dr. Mengele, she had used art to bring joy into the lives of the young children and save her mother's life, in the process risking her own. Now she sat in front of hundreds of teenage students, recalling not her own story, but the stories of the individuals she had met at Auschwitz. "I don't want them to be forgotten, because they were the ones who represent this event." Tears ran freely down her face as she shared her deepest emotions with us. "I am not a hero," she waved my teacher off. "You would have done the same, anyone would have done the same."

How could someone have such unwavering faith in mankind when they had seen its darkest side? Though she did not tell us about it, I knew she had had to unwillingly assist Dr. Mengele in the gruesome experiments he had conducted. Once she was forced to paint a human heart as it was drawn out of a live body-Mengele was trying to prove that a Jewish heart was inferior to others. Yet Dina Babbitt sat before us and told us she knew that any human would have done the selfless deeds she had done. This woman changed my outlook on life forever, because she gave me the tool that made it possible to live through and make the most of each difficulty I would face in the future-faith in others.

When you are pushed into a new society and new surroundings, you have two choices. You can trust no one, with the philosophy that success is a solo act. Or you can take an enormous risk and trust everyone, thereby making yourself completely vulnerable. The second requires a great amount of courage, courage I did not always have. When I moved from Washington, D.C. to Geneva, Switzerland, I decided that the only way I could get through this major move was by accepting that I would not make friends. My school was filled with people from different cultural backgrounds, holding different values and views on life. I was scared to make the leap and open myself up to them, so that we could learn to accept each other. It made more sense to me to focus on what was familiar to me-schoolwork. In retrospect I am able to see how unhappy I was until the very end, when I gave in to my own internal needs and started placing a stronger emphasis on making friends. Paradoxically, at this point my grades soared, because I was living a balanced life and doing what Dina would have wanted-trusting others. Suddenly, when I was feeling down, I had people to support me. When they were upset, I could support them, and this helped and strengthened me.

Then I learned I would be leaving Switzerland, and moving to California. I was shocked, because I would have to leave behind what I had worked very hard to build. However, slowly excitement crept in, because I knew that endless experiences to take advantage of lay ahead of me, as well as new people to meet and learn from. My school in California was much more academically demanding, and for a while I was so swept up with schoolwork and extra-curriculars that I forgot the lesson I had learned the hard way in Geneva, the lesson Dina would soon teach me. When I finally had the chance to take a breath and remember, I began once more to cross the cultural bridge between myself and my peers. It does not get any easier to make friends; you just get better at taking advantage of the courage in you to make the move. I talked to people about my own insecurities with moving so much, trusted them unquestioningly. In turn I found people coming to me with their own troubles and trusting me. These strong relationships proved once again to be the missing element in my life that allowed me to succeed on all fronts, including my challenging schoolwork.

There was another surprise in store for me. My mother told me her job would be posting her in India-my home country, which I had left at the age of four. I said goodbye to my friends again-this time on an entirely different adventure. India was a developing country, with less obvious beauty and prosper to offer. I had visited it in previous summers, but it was still a stranger to me. I was a foreigner in my own country. However, I did what I knew I had to-I reached out to others. Slowly I was able to reconcile with this country, I began to see it as an intrinsic part of me. I was not so different from these people, even though my background was. *I'm going to add more stuff here after I've actually lived here for a while and started school and stuff :)*

If I was asked what the greatest problem society faces today is, I would answer straight away that it is humans not trusting and respecting each other. Life is miserable when we cannot trust others and see them as our equals, because unknowingly we are mistrusting and disrespecting ourselves. Humans are all the same; Dina believed everyone in the audience would have done what she had done at Auschwitz. From her I learned that if I was able to see the good in others, I was actually seeing the good in myself. This is the empowering philosophy that a wonderful and strong woman taught me when she saw that I was equally wonderful and strong.

Undergraduate / My Heritage - in my own country I feel the most foreign. Common App. Essay [10]

Hi guys,

This is the essay I plan to use for the Common App. I would really appreciate your honest feedback. I will be applying to pretty difficult colleges (early decision to Columbia) so that is the kind of level of writing I'm aiming for. Thank you so much!

The prompt: Evaluate a significant experience, achievement, risk you have taken, or ethical dilemma you have faced and its impact on you.

It is a paradox that in my own country I feel the most foreign. I have spent much of my life outside of India, and moving from country to country has caused me to struggle for an identity. I was four when I moved from my place of birth, and spent the next thirteen years living abroad on the East and West coasts of the United States, as well as Switzerland and France. After the first stretch of eight or so years in the United States, my family began visiting India every couple of summers. The country had become a stranger to me, and each time we visited something deep inside of me would be exposed again. I was uncomfortable in India, unused to the heat, the filth, the traffic, the poor children tapping on car windows, the stares. I was reluctant to accept this place as an intrinsic part of me and my identity because I had seen so much else of the world-developed countries, with more obvious beauty and prosper to offer. I could only see what India lacked. The people's stares bothered me the most, because their worlds were so much smaller than mine, and their ideas so much simpler, yet they could see right through me and knew who I was better than I myself did.

India soon became a measure of my growth because each summer that I returned, I saw the country through wiser eyes. Being on the move so much had made me more open, more accepting. Then I learned that I would be spending my final year of high school here. I grappled with this idea, because as excited as I was for new adventures, I was not sure I was ready for this one. It was like returning home to a family whom you had left years ago. You wondered whether they would accept you back with open arms, but more than that, you wondered if you would accept them. Would things be as you remembered them; would it feel like home? Regardless, I returned home to the 'family' I had left.

At its core, this country is made up of millions of youth, struggling to make their mark on the world. I see them on the streets everyday on my way to school. It is not they who are any different from me, but their circumstances. Their delicate sugar-spun dreams, cradled and protected during ignorant childhood, have been slowly crushed by the calloused, sun-browned hand of a parent as they grow and learn about life and its infinite and unequal rules. I am luckier because I can afford to protect and nurture my dreams, build a cage around them, until they are strong enough to be set free. The only thing which I have that these children do not is money, yet it is powerful enough to guarantee a future.

Again, I am not any different from these youth, because growth has been pushed on both of us. In their case it is through their poverty and need to scrape by a living in any way possible. The impoverished are forced into jobs the minute they can walk, the minimum working age completely forgotten. It is as though there is no word in the Hindi language for 'child labor.' From looking into their eyes you can see that these children have become adults at far too early an age. In my case, bumping back and forth from different continents and countries, assimilating and then leaving societies, has caused me to learn the lessons of life much faster than most. The only thing I could count on to remain constant was me, and so I harbored an intimate relationship with myself. I soaked in endless culture and knowledge, and qualities materialized in me so that I could keep going. Optimism, confidence, acceptance of self and others, respect of self and others, empathy, self-sufficiency-I am thankful for what these countries have taught me.

And although I see myself as a worldly person, I cannot deny my heritage. It looks at me in the mirror each morning; it is the color of my skin, the shape of my eyes, the blood that runs in my veins. I used to look at Indians and judge them as parochial, and it is because of this ignorant, single-faceted judgement that I sometimes wished I looked different. I did not want to be judged by others in the same way I myself judged. The evil I tried to protect myself from was in me, too. It was an ugly irony.

I cannot change the world, but I can change myself. This is what slowly happened as I grew-I learned that the best things in life are not always the most obvious, which was the case for my home country. My final move back to India was the most difficult; it was personal and I had to reveal the vulnerability in me that I had hidden for so long to be able to survive elsewhere in the world, a vulnerability that sprang from the uncertainty of my identity.

I have a clear memory of a trip to an Indian restaurant in the first month of our move here. It was a difficult time for me, but my spirits lifted instantly upon walking through the door. Brightly clothed families bustled around, their faces full of life, and children of all ages chattered animatedly with each other while pointing at sweets behind the sparkling glass displays. I felt the smile growing slowly on my face, because I was proud. This was a rising country that did not need to climb onto the back of other, more developed countries to become something it was not. It used its own unique strengths to progress. I felt at home, and I started accepting the part of me that had always been there and was fighting to come out. Its persistence won. This was my country.