Describe the world you come from - for example, your family, community or school - and tell us how your world has shaped your dreams and aspirations.
One's dreams and aspirations are formed by thousands of arbitrary events; no matter how insignificant they might be. My father has played a tremendous part in shaping my dream of becoming a civil engineer.
"Have you decided what are you going to do?"
"Huh"
"When I was your age..."
These phrases were the beginning of a long conversation I had with my father, which ultimately shaped my dreams.
My father's story begins with the tragic 1976 Tang Shan earthquake. He was one of the few who had escaped the Tang Shan Hotel when it had collapsed. The building was designed to resist a quake of magnitude 8, but the fund for a proper construction went to the pockets of the greedy contractors and building inspectors. As a result, in a matter of seconds the earthquake measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale, destroyed over 90 per cent of the city's buildings and left 248,000 people dead and dying. Three years later my father went to college majoring in civil engineering, he had a noble dream to help stop such tragic, but reality proved it is impossible to achieve such dream in the corrupted Chinese system. He left China in 1996, seeking success in America, after many years of hard work as a construction worker; he opened his own General Contracting Company but its still much less than what he envisioned. Although my father has always taught me to do what I truly like, to get involve with my own interests and never held me back from pursuing my ambitions, but I know that he wanted me accomplish his dream.
Ever since, the time I spent with my father were largely devoted to construction jobsites. At first, I hated the sites, the smell of fresh cement, the sounds of nail guns, everything about the site made me uneasy. Slowly, the empty landscape turned into the home of a family, such transition was amazing to me. I became interested when my dad talked construction related topics, from the foundations of a large shopping mall to the number of nails needed to connect the wooden frames of a small house. One night, my father brought home a large role of blueprints, the enigmatic drawings fascinated me, but when my father begin to talk about the details, I felt startled since I didn't even have a basic understanding to the concepts. I read books on Physics and Mathematics purely to understand the complexity of the prints, when I was finally able to apply what I learned to the prints it was truly amazing in my eyes. From that point on, I knew that civil engineering is my dream.
My father has significantly influenced me to become who I am today. I might not possess such a noble dream as my father does, but it is that dream that contributed to my interests and developed it into my own goal of becoming a civil engineer, which I hold with high regards today.
please help me correct the grammar errors and give suggestions on the contents.
Does it address the prompt?
a thousand thanks ~
Good morning :)
Make sure you are using punctuation at the end of every sentence, including dialogue. Therefore, "Huh" should have some kind of ending punctuation inside the quotation marks.
"...stop such tragic, but..." Stop such tragic what? You are missing something here; never assume your readers will fill it in for you. Make sure you are always writing exactly what you mean.
Is "General Contracting Company" the actual name of his firm? If not, it's not a proper noun and shouldn't be capitalized.
Avoid contractions in formal academic writing; "didn't" should be "did not."
In regards to the content, I believe this is a very appropriate response to the prompt. You thoroughly discuss your father and how his experiences and influence have shaped you into who you are today and what you want to do with your life. The story is sequential with good flow and a nice conclusion. Good work!
Regards,
Gloria
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