The prompt is
Rutgers requires that you provide a short essay that is your original work. Please reflect on what you consider to be an important personal experience related to your talents, interests, or commitments. Using this experience, please tell us what you learned about yourself. How will this experience prepare you for success at Rutgers?
It is also for Drexel, but their prompt is similar to Rutgers
A few years back my mom was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. At first my initial reaction was how could have this happen? My "healthy" mother was obviously not overweight nor did anybody in my family had this disease. Clearly I knew nothing about it. This became not only was this a struggle for her, but for me also.
Being a child of a immigrant parents who speak very little English, a majority of the time they rely and expect me to interpret and it really does get annoying sometimes. Since my mom had diabetes, I had to go to her doctor appointments to be the translator. For the first time, we both learned that diabetes is a disease when the body does not produce enough insulin and insulin is needed to burn the sugar in the body. The doctor went on to a lot of details, but what he told us the most important thing to do is keep a healthy diet. I sat there and thought to myself, I would have to be the one to teach her about this and how so much of a burden it would be. Then I realize it was a selfish thing to say because if I was in situation like this, my mom would definitely do everything she can to help me. Food was the number one priority through the process for my mom to feel better, so I went online to my favorite website, google and searched for nutrition based questions. As a fast food person with not the best diet either, this could also benefit me. Grocery shopping with my mom is exhausting. Most of the foods she wants to eat is out of the picture and we would always take so long to buy a few items. I explained to her there are certain, limited amount of carbohydrates, sugars, fats, and sodium intake she can have and it was a struggle to explain all this information because for one she had never read a nutrition label before and two this was all new to her. She was trying to understand and we put that to the test in the kitchen. For the record cooking is not my forte, but it does not hurt to learn. Simple things we did were instead of frying food, bake it, replace white flour with whole grains, add more vegetables, and so on. Surprisingly I did not burn down the kitchen and the food came out great. Everyday my mom and I would take little steps and it really did improve her health. This slowly became an interest of myn to learn more about nutrition and the body. Seeing how food can be medicine made me want to do the same for someone else and even make a difference.
I'm in high school starting to think about what am I going to do for the rest of my life and why not be a dietitian. A career in healing and helping people in improving a healthier lifestyle is pretty amazing. To start my journey in this path, I want to be
somewhere I can grasp and expand my knowledge further. To a place called _________University.
Jennifer, I think your essay will benefit better from the mention of your wish to become a dietician early on in the introductory paragraph. By presenting the major and then the reason for the hoice of major, you will develop a better and shorter discussion that will be more suited to the prompt Don't include any information about what diabetes is, what you learned about the diet, etc. because you will be talking down to the admissions officer. It comes across as a lecture instead of as a part of the application essay. Just mention that your mother had type one diabetes and you had to help her fix her diet in order to help her health. That is when you can launch into how the interest developed for you. Close it by saying that you learned how by keeping your mother healthy, you are also keeping yourself healthy because what is good for her, is also good for you :-)
