Common App: A range of academic interests, personal perspectives, and life experience
Hi guys, I haven't fixed the grammatical errors, please ignore them, I just want to know if the flow is well on the essay or if its too lengthy and if I would get the idea across to the admissions people. Thanks, any help is greatly appreciated.
Filling out college applications, I struggle whenever I had to choose my nationality. My finger naturally moves to select Malaysia, but my heart would scream, "Are you insane? What part of you is Malaysian?". My identity is too diverse, too scattered to be limited to one nationality. If I had to choose a cultural identity, put Malaysia, America, Taiwan, Korea, China, and England into a blender, and I'll settle with that.
But how did I wind up being such a mix up of identities? Aren't teenagers nowadays all about being unique and standing out amongst the crowd? Since I was born in a multicultural country and having the privilege to travel the world on vacations and now enrolling in an international school, I've come in contact with so many cultures that have come to define me. As a young boy I was a Malaysian, but as I grew into a teen I saw the world and decided that I wouldn't want to spend the rest of my life in my home country, entering into an international school I observed how people from different countries behaved, I picked up the fighting spirit of the Koreans, utilizing it on the soccer team, giving it 100% on the field, I picked up the American belief of freedom of speech, giving me, once a quiet and shy student, courage to stand up and express my opposing views in Bible class. Yet I always make sure I don't end up being obnoxious, as I still hold the Chinese Confucius beliefs of respecting teachers and elders dearly.
Being a part of a charity and compassion organization in school, I've come to learn the importance of diversity in everyday life. On a trip to an old folk's home, I clearly could see how people of different cultures treat the elderly. Our goal that day was to show love to the old folks and spend time to fulfill their emotional needs. So while my fellow Asian students and I were slightly hesitant in showering the elder people with love and were highly cautious and polite around them, the students brought up in Western countries were treating the elderly like their own grandparents hugging them and holding their hands telling them 'I love you'. Observing my Western counterparts behavior towards the elderly, it made me realize that I was acting too uptight and I wasn't showing enough love to the old folks. I think I wasn't the only one who came to this realization, because after a while, many of the Asian students started opening up towards the old folks, whereas the Western students started being more careful in displaying their physical affections especially towards the Muslim men. I think there was a moment of realization that everyone of us had to change the way we behaved according to our culture in order to provide the care that the elderly people needed. The Asian students had to break down the wall of respect they normally have when interacting with the elderly, while the more open students had to be careful not to cross the line where they might insult the religion and culture of the elderly.
After that experience, I realized that being able to witness diverse cultures gives us the chance to learn to adopt different cultural behaviors for different situations. In the future as communication and transportation advances, the separation between different cultures will disappear, and it means that people will be able to observe and maybe imitate the practices of different cultures. That's certainly my case as an international student, in the past four years of high school I've had this privilege to observe and adopt different practices from different people. I'm excited to meet new people from different backgrounds in college, and hopefully I might be able to pick up some new ideas and share some of my practices with them. At the end of the day, I guess that I'm an international citizen, unbounded by one country and diverse in many aspects.
Hey!! Your essay sounds cool!
There are some things I notice (I didn't touch to the grammar), I hope they will help:
-In your 1st paragraph, you could put a sentence to say that many cultures can define you because of your capacity to adapt and learn... or something like that in order to say where you are going with your essay in general.
-In paragraph 3, you schould review the organization to make it sounds less like your talking, and more like you're writing a formal essay. Otherwise, it's very confusing... :)
-At the end, don't write "I guess..." show your convictions and the fact that you are super-determined to learn more from the diversity of college because you think it's very important to you... or something like that (just to say that the fact you learned all this and that you will learn more is also a question of determination)
Good luck with everything!!!
