Hello! This is my first thread, so I hope I'm doing this right. Below is my Personal Essay for the Common App, and I would really appreciate any feedback. I'ts pretty hard to write under 500 words!
I've always had a great fascination with history. Understanding my family's background has been a longstanding tradition, and I love to discuss old family lore with my mother on how her folks came from the old country. This habit naturally led to an interest in other social studies, and one of the reasons I love history is that it can lead to a more nuanced view of the present day and how it relates to current problems. I've always loved to hypothesize how my family would manage in a certain time period, and how I would live my life - I know of course that most of my daydreams end up with a very underprivileged life for me as a woman, but I still love to look at social histories and learn how the general populace lived, not just the facts and figures that matter to most people.
Knowing this, I can never bring myself to be nostalgic or yearning for a different era or the good old days - when in fact if I were to live earlier than the middle of the twentieth century I most likely would be considered a second class citizen and lack a voice, unless I were born in the upper class elite. I can appreciate such eras for aesthetic purposes - the dresses are truly gorgeous - but I cannot get behind actually, voluntarily living in, say, the eighteenth century. I can go with time travel tourism, but I refuse to give up my dearly beloved rights and privileges that have taken so many years to fight for. I want my right to suffrage, to work, to choose whether or not I want a family - and these rights are simply nonexistent for women in many parts of human history (with exceptions) that I would not want to give up these rights that symbolize my humanness so that I could waltz around in a wide pannier dress and have my hair piled sky-high.
Perhaps if I were male, I could understand the sentiment. But, as stated before, as a woman, I am utterly nonplussed at why anyone whose race or gender has a history of discrimination would want to travel backwards to a time where he or she would be considered subhuman. I think that perhaps a reason for this is because people are so woefully uneducated about history - reading about how sanitized history books are in America alone, I can only imagine how completely ignorant people can be in regards to the foundation of its founding, let alone different countries and time periods. Such illiteracy has great implications for the next generation of citizens who feed into a nonexistent mythical past - implanting falsehoods into impressionable people can lead to global repercussions, with miscommunications leading to war and crises that simply cannot occur in the modern age. History, as a link between the past and present, must be honest; If it isn't, what else will be?
I've always had a great fascination with history. Understanding my family's background has been a longstanding tradition, and I love to discuss old family lore with my mother on how her folks came from the old country. This habit naturally led to an interest in other social studies, and one of the reasons I love history is that it can lead to a more nuanced view of the present day and how it relates to current problems. I've always loved to hypothesize how my family would manage in a certain time period, and how I would live my life - I know of course that most of my daydreams end up with a very underprivileged life for me as a woman, but I still love to look at social histories and learn how the general populace lived, not just the facts and figures that matter to most people.
Knowing this, I can never bring myself to be nostalgic or yearning for a different era or the good old days - when in fact if I were to live earlier than the middle of the twentieth century I most likely would be considered a second class citizen and lack a voice, unless I were born in the upper class elite. I can appreciate such eras for aesthetic purposes - the dresses are truly gorgeous - but I cannot get behind actually, voluntarily living in, say, the eighteenth century. I can go with time travel tourism, but I refuse to give up my dearly beloved rights and privileges that have taken so many years to fight for. I want my right to suffrage, to work, to choose whether or not I want a family - and these rights are simply nonexistent for women in many parts of human history (with exceptions) that I would not want to give up these rights that symbolize my humanness so that I could waltz around in a wide pannier dress and have my hair piled sky-high.
Perhaps if I were male, I could understand the sentiment. But, as stated before, as a woman, I am utterly nonplussed at why anyone whose race or gender has a history of discrimination would want to travel backwards to a time where he or she would be considered subhuman. I think that perhaps a reason for this is because people are so woefully uneducated about history - reading about how sanitized history books are in America alone, I can only imagine how completely ignorant people can be in regards to the foundation of its founding, let alone different countries and time periods. Such illiteracy has great implications for the next generation of citizens who feed into a nonexistent mythical past - implanting falsehoods into impressionable people can lead to global repercussions, with miscommunications leading to war and crises that simply cannot occur in the modern age. History, as a link between the past and present, must be honest; If it isn't, what else will be?
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