Your responses to the following topics help us become acquainted with you in ways different from courses, grades, test scores, and other objective data. It will demonstrate your ability to organize thoughts and express yourself. We would like a personal statement that will help us get to know you better as a person and as a student. Your responses will demonstrate your ability to organize thoughts and express yourself. Please write an essay (approximately 250-500 words) on each of the two topics listed below.
Describe a person, real or fictitious, that is a historical figure or creative inspiration that has had an impact on you, and explain that impact.
I am concerned with the structure of my essay and if I need to adjust the transitions between paragraphs. I feel like I do. I feel like it does not flow. And suggestions are welcome! Thank you
Some individuals spend their entire lives struggling with their personal identity. Being born into three very rich yet opposing cultures, at an early age I quickly noticed I was succumbing to this innate desire for personal identification.
My struggle with self-identity began when I was nine years old. That was the year that my grandfather passed away. Instead of experiencing sorrow, regret instead took root in my heart. Regret overcame me because I had never been able to speak to my grandfather. My grandfather could only speak Farsi, while I only knew how to speak English. In my eyes, it was starting to seem as if I did not deserve to declare that I am Iranian. Gradually, I became increasingly insecure of my inability to speak my mother's native tongue either. How could I proudly claim to be Puerto Rican when I did not know more than a handful of Spanish phrases? These doubts continued to haunt me throughout my adolescence.
These doubts of my cultural validity fostered a search for my self-identity. As an Iranian-American, my ancestors are from the East, yet I am an embodiment of the West. With my father I practice Islam and with my mother Christianity. At school, I am immersed in a modernized culture and at home a traditionalist culture suspended in time. I encompass an infinite number of contradictions. This made me insecure. This insecurity pushed me forward in my hopes of self-discovery, but I had no one to whom I could compare myself.
Fortunately, two years ago Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi replaced my struggle with self-identity with his single philosophy of universal truth. "Only Breath", a poem of this Persian theologian, transcended seven hundred years to abruptly alter my life. In this poem, Rumi declares that to become whole in spirit, we must realize that we are more than the religion we practice, the political party we support, or any of the other affiliations, circumstances, and backgrounds that we embody. Through this affirmation, this Sufi poet saved me from my self-doubt, assuring me that I cannot be described as a Muslim or a Christian, a traditionalist or a modernist, an Iranian or Puerto Rican or American. Now, Rumi's philosophy has become my own. I am most simply and magnificently a human being that cannot be defined, and for this enlightenment it is to Rumi I am indebted.
