5th December: The day that I will never forget.

What was the environment in which you were raised? Describe your family, home, neighborhood, or community, and explain how it has shaped you as a person.

An incident inspired me to help others

5th December: The day that I will never forget. It was the day I got selected for the inter-school athletics and I was on the top of the mountain. But at 10pm my mom got a call from my grandmother saying "come to the hospital as soon as you can" and she hung up. My mother was in shock and wanted to recall what just happened but without wasting any minute we left for the hospital. We saw our grandmother sitting in the waiting room, with her neighbors who had helped her to the hospital, she started crying as she spoke "dad just had a heart attack". My mom fell on the seat on hearing this. My grandfather was 85 then and just had a surgery 2 years ago. It was 2 in the morning when the doctor came out of the emergency room and told us "he is out of danger, he is a fighter", those words brought me more joy than anything that ever had. As we were in a joy our neighbor said "it is because of the good wishes your grandmother got by helping the poor". That was the first time I encountered the power of well wishes, her words were stitched to my brain.

Coming from a Sikh family I have always been taught to respect and care for others. I got most of my values from my grandmother as she visits the temple regularly at 5 in the morning. Not only does she visit the temple, she is also the kindest person I have ever come across in my life. She is always there to help the poor and underprivileged and its effect was clearly visible. This incidence inspired me to help others in my life. In the light of this idea I started volunteering at the NGO's. I not only taught the children basics of Computer Applications and English but also conducted computer graded test and gave them hands on experience. In all the assessments, one kid stood out. He scored perfect every time. Even in the classes he was the most attentive consistently. Wanting to help him further, I talked to the staff of the center about getting him admitted to a regular school. Since doing so was outside the mandate of the NGO, I persuaded them to let me take the responsibility of educating him and worked out the modalities.

I got him admitted into the school where my mother is a teacher under the government's Right to Education program where children from economically weaker section are taught for free. I used my savings and borrowed some money from my parents to buy him a school bag, uniform and books.

Today, he is in the seventh grade, doing well in his studies and dreaming of a meaningful life ahead. From him, I have learned that if a drug addict can change this much, so can almost anyone. Ways need to be found and efforts need to be made. Since the entire process has been personally fulfilling I am sure that I am going to be taking my opportunities for similar contributions, hopefully at a much larger scale, all through my life.

Amrit, this essay does not properly respond to the prompt provided. The focus of the essay is on a personal incident that happened to your family, then it moved on to discuss your grandmother, then finally, the community service that you do. Not once was the actual focus of the essay on you and how these events helped you develop into the person you are today. This cannot be used to specifically respond to any of the 5 common app prompt requirements because of the lack of focus of the essay.

So let me be clear about something. You will have to write a new essay. You have to pick one of the topics from the prompt. Either you describe your family (without the long unrelated story of your grandfather's heart attack), your grandmother and her influence upon you, or your community (but not how you help the community). If you opt to discuss the community, you have to talk about the community offers you opportunities to become a better person. Not how you help the community as a member of it. This essay is all about the positive influences in your life. So the stories have to revolve around how you were shaped by a specific person or place. You have to totally disregard everything that you originally wrote because the focus of this current essay is all wrong.

@Holt
thanks for the reply.
This is not for the commonapp.
The idea i was trying to develop through this essay was how my family shaped to be a better contributor in other people's lives.

this is what i am focussing on:
explain an incident that happened with my family and then explain how it helped me bring a certain quality in me and then an example regarding that quality.

Which part do you think if i reduce my focus will help me better my essay.

One thing that you should never do is try to pre-empt the content of your common app essays because doing so will result in misdirected discussions and unclear paragraph developments such as you have done here. I do not advice that any of my students develop essay prompts for themselves in an effort to save themselves time. If your university of interest does not have an open topic or supporting essay prompt, then your work will be useless and you will find yourself constantly trying to make this essay that you wrote for no reason, fit the prompt requirements of the actual prompts.

If you really desire to use this essay, which I doubt you will be able to use, then you should work on this in the manner of a personal statement. That is because the personal statement allows you to discuss the development of your interest in your particular major using events from your personal life. Now, if you can tell me what your major will be in college, we can probably pick out the topics for discussion which will be relevant to a generalized personal statement for a specific university.

Hi, i think you should elaborate more on your story that how your family inspired you to help people and how it actually make an impact in your life.