'Cultural Explorer' - common app essay; describe an experience

Prompt:
A range of academic interests, personal perspectives, and life experiences adds much to the educational mix. Given your personal background, 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.

Essay:

Cultural Explorer

While growing up I was raised by both of my parent in a house close to this catholic school, Pope John XXIII. I went to school there from kindergarten to 8th grade. Here we were taught about how God loves us and because of which we should love everyone. We would go to church and have religion class and though I wasn't religious I was instilled with great values about how to treat others. Our school was very small we had 3 African Americans, 5 Asians, and 2 Latinos in our class of 30 students. Pope John really didn't have that must diversity in the classroom race wise, but maybe that was a good thing because we never gave it a second thought to treat anyone differently based on their skin color or even how smart they were.

Though it seems that everyone got along because God loves us thus meaning we love everybody; it really wasn't like that everyone formed cliques based on similar ideas and if you didn't agree with them then you could hang out with them or their friends. I was a nerdy little kid. I liked to play games and didn't mind sports, but I wasn't a sporty girl. My only friend was a boy, Patrick, who I had been friends with since kindergarten and he had guy friends, but i didn't want to hang out with the guys all the time. The girls were mean and though I made friends with a few of them, they would never really want to hang out with me unless our parents had set up a play date.

After struggling social, I decided that I was going to focus on my school work and extra curriculars. I joined Pope John's Science Olympiad team, getting to state all 3 years and earning many medals. Not being to hang out with people all the time gave me a lot of time to myself so I was on the computer a lot playing games and exploring the internet. I found myself interested with just not was going on in tv shows and games, but also what was happening on with the world around me. I would watch tv shows from other countries and listen to their music.

Seeing what was going on in other countries gave me perspective on things. Being an American you grow up with this feeling of patriotism that American is the best country ever, but really we aren't. I'm not saying another country is, but we as Americans never really look at the big picture of how it affects other we only look at things as how to improve our name.

I like to think that looking at cultures in other countries helps me become a better person in understanding problems and people. Though this probably doesn't make me help bring as much diversity as you want me to bring to your school; it should prove to you that I'm a person that looks at a solving problems differently than others. I'm not top of my class nor do I have the best grades, but when it comes to the real world you need people who think differently then other to move it forward.

This sounded a bit awkward when I read it over. Maybe you can rephrase it to "Here, were were...and because of that we should love everyone"

I'm not sure if "that" is grammatically correct, but if it is then you should change it.

This also sounded a little awkward as well:


Maybe you can say: "While I wasn't religous, Church instilled great values of kindness and respect in me" or something like that

In your writing you use "we" a lot. Some of them should be changed to "I" instead. Also when you were describing your school, you should change small to diverseness. There should also be no numbers in your writing. Instead of 8th grade, write eight grade. Instead of 3, write three.

Omit this, because this is already assumed from you statement before:


Then you can join the two sentenced together


should be be changed to "After struggling socially"


Maybe you can change "just not" to "not only"

Insert some more commas in your writing, but dont go crazy. For example this part,


would sound much smoother with a comma after America.

I hope this helped and I wish you luck. I know how stressful these times can be