"Journey to Become a Salad Lover" - QuestBridge Essay

Prompt: A range of academic interests, personal perspectives, and life experiences adds much to the educational mix. Given your background, please describe an experience that illustrates what you would bring to the diversity in a college community, or an encounter that demonstrated the importance of diversity to you.

Journey to Become a Salad Lover
Did someone say "meat?" I was never a fan of any kind of vegetables or fruits, except orange. I guess I can never become a Buddhist. In fact, the only times I had a fresh bowl of salad were when I had no other choice. I would put all the lettuce and broccoli aside searching for some slim slices of grilled chicken like men digging for diamonds. Living in America is like eating a salad bowl. Many people would like to eat lettuce, broccoli, tomato, and chicken all together; however, a few people, like me, would stick with chicken only, just like I would stick with my own racial group thinking nobody could understand me more than them.

When I first came to the U.S., I was a shy and nerdy 14-year-old kid according to other students who saw me carrying textbooks as I walked in the hallway with an old-fashion pair of glasses on. It was hard to make friends, but luckily I had a few Asian friends who I could hang out and sit with as a small group at lunch. I thought that surrounding myself with these people was the only way I could survive my 4 years of high school. In sophomore year, I started to change myself to become an out-going person by joining the school volunteer club. I'm still proud of myself for making that decision. Over the years, I've met and had a chance to help many people from different backgrounds facing obstacles in their lives. One of my best experiences was tutoring a class of freshmen who struggled with math.

On the first day of being a tutor, I was pretty impressed when I saw the lunch ladies passing out "free" pop-tarts and juice to the students as awards for attending "free" tutorial classes. Children in America are given many more opportunities than ones in Vietnam, where education is unaffordable to many families. My tutorial class had about 15 students from different races, and most of them had no idea what they were doing in math class. I started showing them how to solve some basic equations and understand the graphs. During the lesson, I told them my stories of how hard a student's life was back in my home country, showed how much we value education, as well as shared my tips to get a better grade in school. They seemed to be interested as I talked and started to ask me questions about my childhood as well as my culture. At some moment, I thought I was in the middle of a job interview. Then I asked them what they want to be in the future. Many of them had no clue; they wanted to have lots of money without doing any work. Well, overall, we at least had a pretty similar goal, but their ways to get there are way different from mine, and that is why I wanted to be in that class: to help them make the right choice and find another way to walk around obstacles of life. Being with these students made me realize that I actually enjoyed our conversations more than with friends who I have everything in common.

Through teaching, I did not only give others my knowledge but also got a chance to know what they are thinking, too. Learning from people with different backgrounds and experiences sharpens my knowledge and self-insight by allowing me to compare and contrast my life experiences with theirs. The diversity helps me move beyond myself to gain the perspectives of the world around me and more complete picture of myself in it. A college campus is an opening door to the entire world without paying for traveling. Like each individual man, salad ingredients do not change even when they are mixed together; however, with their own unique tastes and nutrients, together they make a delicious and healthy bowl of salad.

My questions: 1. Did I respond to the prompt correctly?
2. Did you enjoy reading it?
3. Is there any way I can improve my writing? ( how to make it sounds smoothly)
4. The words limit is 500, but there are 650 words in here. What unnecessary details should I delete?
5. I'm pretty sure about my grammar, but please point out if I have any mistakes.
Thank you very much.

- ... except maybe an orange...
- You can actually skip this part and use the 2nd paragraph as your opening statement. Don't waste your word count on wordy introductions.
- This is a good opening statement. You perfectly summed up your point of view about what your idea of a college community would be like.


- old fashioned pair of...
- Good way of serving up an implied answer to the prompt. It makes me want to read more about you.

- Onmy first day... than the ones in Vietnam... Overall ...
- Interesting way of sharing how you have skills that can help to improve racial relations within the campus community :-)


- What else can I say except, this is a flawless conclusion to an almost grammatically flawless essay :-)

In answer to your questions:
1. Yes, you answered the prompt very well. Make no mistake about it. This is a well written response essay.
2.I definitely enjoyed reading it and getting to know more about you in the process.
3. Note the comments I made after the quotes. That should help. But overall, it is a very smooth essay with an excellent use of transition words.

4. Note the strikeouts I made. That should help reduce the word count immensely. I would suggest though, that you review the content of your essay and try to discover for yourself which sentences or paragraphs you feel comfortable shortening or deleting. That way you can fix the flow of the essay right after the editing work.

5. Note the mistakes via strikeouts and the corrections I noted beneath the paragraph.

Thank you so much. It is really helpful to know what you and others might think when reading my essay. I always have problems with writing. It takes me so long to know what I'm going yo write about and makes me worry if it could reach the words limit. But when I start to write, I can't stop, and soon it's over the limit. :D I think I might keep the introduction as a hook, but I'll eliminate some words, examples, and a few descriptive information, though it might be a little bit more telling than showing.

If you can find a way to insert a comment in the introduction about how you seem to have an easy time adjusting to new communities and how, just like a salad, you manage to blend well with others and find a middle ground that you can all bond over, that should help you show rather than tell. Your introduction is good. But somehow the comment about meat does not blend with the rest of the essay. Meat is hard to pair, but you are more of a salad, able to blend with other people in order to deliver an interesting personality and new taste to the community. Do you think you can develop a paragraph along those lines? I think it will work great with the rest of the essay :-) Remember, it is just a suggestion, the option to use it is yours ;-)

Thanks for the suggestions. My purpose of bringing meat to the essay is to show the progress I have made from being a shy and unfriendly boy to an out-going and difference-accepting person.

Then I suggest that you make reference towards the end of your essay about the meat and salad reference you made in the beginning. While you did effectively mention the salad in the needed essence, you can still build it up. Refer to your growth as a person and your interacting with others in such a manner that depicts how you learned to accept salad as a part of a healthy meal (community) and how meat (you) can actually learn to blend well with the flavors that the salad gives out. That way you present an interesting comparison of your growth and development as a person and how it relates to your future college community life. I believe that would make an excellent closing statement for your paper :-)

i was hooked with your introduction and i enjoyed reading your essay. :)