(ED Penn.)
Sitting down there in the stands with an "A" student addressing on stage, I couldn't help nodding-not because of how resonant I found her speech, but out of sleepiness as a result of boredom and last night's staying up late reading Milan Kundera. Here we were at the "2008 xxx English contest", and I was about to fell asleep when my English teacher padded me on the shoulder and whispered: "You could have overthrown every contestant presented if you had signed up..."--attached with a grumbling look.
My parents and teachers never stopped complaining about my "not working hard enough". Though I studied till 11PM everyday (not to mention my senior year) and achieved school reports "they can live with", they believed I could be a supergirl if I had continued spending my 11PM-1AM studying rather than reading The Catcher in the Rye etc. I know they complained for my good. To thrive under the test-oriented Chinese education, where a single College Entrance Exam has the say, a "pretty good" score is never enough. However, I just don't see a history lesson about the inevitability of the Chinese Republican's wielding power in any way more rewarding than a Woody Allen movie, and I believe that living passion is something beyond what a statistical chart can ever reveal.
For 4 years, I have loved a boy while he wasn't even aware of it. I wrote our names on the Manly beach on a gloomy Wednesday afternoon on my exchange trip to Sydney; I dropped an advanced interpretation lesson to revisit the nearby old building where we took TOEFL together (FYI: this never stopped me from becoming the youngest student in class to pass the interpretation test later that month); I sent him anonymous text-messages to say "Merry X-mas" "Happy new year!" "Happy 16/17/18 birthday!". My mom didn't even want to talk about him because to her, he's the very reason that barricaded me from fully concentrating on my study, and my friends considered my love crazy and blind. However it's a question that constantly lingers in my mind: What's the point of puberty if you haven't even loved irrationally and unreasonably? What's the point of being young without something crazy and typically adolescent, something you can later recall in your armchair at your 70s and smile and say "Yes I was young once."? Yes this love is difficult and blind, but it adorned every piece of my growing pain-something I would never gain by calculating the amount of NACL needed in an Acid-base neutralization test again and again.
To many students who spend every day doing tons of homework, it makes no sense spending 3weeks abroad to improve English, but eager for a world unknown, I went on 2 inter-school exchange trips, from which I learned more than just a decent accent. I encountered peers of different skin colors and cultural backgrounds; I went out for ice-creams with Korean-Australian girl students; A Hispanic boy kept writing me "I really like U!" notes on a German lesson; A group of Indian students taught me to sing "Hockey-Pokey" and I made Pavlovas with two twin sisters for cookery lessons. My overseas experience also includes making temporary tattoos for the church children on the "Family Fun Day", an encounter with a stammered old Australian tramp who tried to take my bag and begged me for "some penny for cigarettes" and so much more-something I would never experience by delving into the function limit problem.
Sometimes I was regarded as whimsical. Hearing the mowing machine roaring in the gardener's hands, I could be filled with an overwhelming desire to rush down the stairs and mow the lawn for our neighborhood, though I didn't even have any idea how to hold the machine. And I did. For 3 hours I mowed the lawns under the guidance of a yardman (this was supposed to be his job...ain't I meddlesome) and was surprised to find mowing not only an exhausting job but also a technical work. For instance, when it comes to ramps, you need to carefully hold the cropper at a certain angle so as to make sure you are efficiently removing the weeds instead of digging holes on the ground (that's exactly what I was doing in the first 30 minutes). That morning I came home muddy and exhausted: My bare legs scarred black and blue due to the constantly splashing mud, and my arms got so numb that getting hold of a Shampoo bottle became the art of weight lifting. But I whistled delightfully and was filled with joy-something I would never get from the Indirect Speech Imperative Sentence.
Yes, I didn't work hard enough in many ways. It has nothing to do with my aspiration to further my study in one of the world's best business schools--there are simply too much goodness of life that I'm unwilling to give up for another 0.2 points for my GPA: an irrational love affair that made me scream like a mad man on Christmas Eve; a 5-year-old Irish boy I knew on my exchange trip to Britain who would call "Judie Judie Zhu" through my room's lock hole therefore waking me up to watch Thunderbird with him; a spontaneous volunteer lawn mowing experience that brought wounds together with happiness; the couple's reunion at the end of A Very Long Engagement that never failed to make me weep; the passion that made me who I am, and now has made me gave my words that I'll swim all the way across the Pacific Ocean to Philadelphia once accepted. You can call me crazy, you can call me trickle, you can call me impulsive...actually, you better just call me Judie.
...resonant I found her speech to be , but...
...and I was about to fall asleep when my English teacher patted me on the shoulder and whispered: "You could have overthrown every contestant present if...
This is great, I really like the personality that shines forth through your writing. You seem like a prson with some excellent wisdom. I like this essay as a piece of good writing, but because you are using it for college admission I think it should be more organized.
Can you think of what the main theme is for this essay? It seems to be a theme of not giving up life's pleasures just to be a top academic achiever. What is it that you value -- life's moments of beauty? Maybe you can start by saying that in the first paragraph and then talk about it at the end. At the end, talk about classes and resources in college that will help you to be in a position to communicate this value to others.
Right now the essay seems to be able many things, but you can use the first and last paragraphs to give a sense that it is all about this value... appreciation of life.
