"A Ladder" - My name is Alina and the age doesn't matter. Welcome to my world

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.

The essay is too long but I can't bring myself to cut it harshly. I would appriciate a critisizing look as ever. Thank you!

A Ladder

"My name is Alina. I'm eleven. I live with my Mom, my Dad and a dog Silva. I like roller-blading. " - I presented myself to the fifth grade English class. By that point in my education teachers in school saw "a potential", "a good material" in me. However, when I met Galina Dmitrievna, my new ESL teacher, it seemed as if she hated me from the start. She would give harder assignments to me and then grade them by the same criteria as others. One day I stayed behind after class and asked her why it wasn't enough for her to just give me good grades for good work. "You need to work to your own standards. One day there will be no teacher to give assignments. You must gain initiative."-was the only answer I got. Challenge was accepted.

[...]

Alina, I know that you are capable of editing the punctuation mistakes in this essay on your own so I won't point it out for you. Just review the essay and you will see where your obvious mistakes are, then correct it :-) As for cutting out certain parts of this essay, I will be making suggestions as to where that can be done. If yo ulet me know what the word count is, I might be able to better cut down the paragraphs for you.

My main advice for now though, is to cut out the redundancy of saying "My name is Alina...' There is no sense in constantly reintroducing yourself in an essay. Since you are telling us about your age ladder as these events happened to you, simply say, When I was..." or "I was...". You could even say "At the age of...". or even "By the time I was..." There are more variations to introducing yourself than you think that don't require the same, long character count phrase that eats into your word count.



- leisure activity .


- We were beaten ...
- Stop saying IDt, nobody understands that acronym except you. Simply say, "team", that is a word everyone understands and applies to all teams in general. You only need to mention ID once.


- You need to rephrase this paragraph. You specifically mentioned that you were allowed to join even though you were no longer a first time participant. So reflect that in the essay. The reason this paragraph got lost is because of your insistence at constantly introducing yourself at the start of every new paragraph. That is what is causing this essay so many problems. I will not reword this part. Do it yourself and I will let you know if it works :-) I am trying to develop your creativity in word paraphrasing.

You need to stop rehashing information such as the decathlon team and your participation in "Civilization" because you have already mentioned those activities and explained these to death in other essay prompts. So the admissions officer has other sources for information about those things. He will not take kindly to the constant mention of those two activities in your essay because it shows that you definitely do not have any other talent or accomplishments in life. Which will definitely limit your abilities as a student. So talk about something else. Something non-academic that you can present to them. Do not fall back on the death of your landlord either. Every essay needs to present some new information or facet of your personality in order to be effective as a part of the collective common app essays.

This is the essay to the University of California which doesn't use the common app system. Thus, it wouldn't recieve but this essay and another one, that I will post later. I feel that it is an important piece of information without which my application would be incomplete. The other thing is: I wanted to make a special emphesis on how my self-identification has changed. Therefore, I wanted to share the moments when I introduced myself at different ages. Maybe you could advice how to keep the idea and make clearer for the reader what I ment.

As to the word count, the two essays (this and another one) are supposed to add up to 1000. So I guess I would want to get each under 450.

A Ladder

[...] Challenge was accepted.

From then on, I started reading and researching a lot beyond the material of the textbooks. The words sprung into my mind and surprisingly held there, English phrasal verbs, idioms helped me color my speech and enrich imagination. Every topic touched upon in class had to be carefully investigated at home by a team of scientists "Alina". This brought the satisfaction I never came across before. When I was leaving middle school, Galina Dmitrievna gave me a gift card with the words that became my personal motto for a long time: "Your teachers open the doors but you have to enter yourself."

"My name is Alina. I'm fifteen. I speak three foreign languages: English, Japanese and French. At leisure, I fence." - I ended up the "let's get acquainted" circle of a newly formed Intellectual Decathlon team (ID). True to its name, it helped me retrieve my own ID-entity as a learner. I didn't like being on teams, supposing people use them to put the responsibility for their work on others. The goal was to win the Brain Battle. Day after day, the team fumed over books and maps, discussed findings and shared perspectives. With time, studying became my new favorite leisure. To my honor, I was named a coordinator of our group.

In the end, we were beaten by a team that was stronger and more experienced than we were. Everything seemed over then. I had to return to my normal schedule. However, after sharing the pleasantness of hungry curiosity while studying with my teammates, it was a task impossible to manage. I texted my teammates and just like that our team was back together, working on projects and studying as before. Dostoyevsky wrote:"The failure makes everything meaningless." Ironically, it worked in reverse for me.

"My name is Alina. I'm seventeen. I enjoy learning. Collaborating with people who have some input to give to the world brings true pleasure to me. I take inspiration in challenges. To me..." "Thank you, that's enough" - the woman handed me a signed paper. "You grade are good enough so the interview is but formality. Welcome to the program." The summer of 2014, I took part again in a "Civilization" that allows high school students interested in Economics to create their own business models and to make them work in practice.

Over the course of a month, we coordinated what our businesses offered, at what price and on which markets. It wasn't hard to notice that as long as chiefs of enterprises were united by some common economic goal (profit/ enlargement of controlled markets share/ survival in crisis), they behaved themselves. In other words, people work together best when united by the same desire.

"Today, there's nothing that I truly regret in my life. With foreign languages as a tool, I hope to offer a way to achieve peace and stability. My greatest aspiration at this point is to work in International Business, to strengthen with my own hands the link between nations, races and religions, between people of different backgrounds. Maybe in a long run that will help the global community finally recognize the collaboration between every country to be more profitable and sensible than any confrontation. My name is Alina and the age doesn't matter. Welcome to my world"

682 words

Alina, see if the changes I am suggesting works for you. This is still a work in progress so I will need you to work in the changes into the newest version before I can work on reducing the word count for you. I apologize in advance for coming on strong with regards to your constantly introducing yourself in the essay. You need to understand why you don't need to keep doing that throughout the paper. Refer to my notes and suggestions below.


- By the age of 15, I was speaking English, Japanese, and French. I also began to enjoy the sport of fencing. Most importantly, it was at this age that I joined the Intellectual Decathalon Team (ID). By joining the team, I began to develop my own identity as a learner, since I did not enjoy physical team sports. Through intellectual competitions like Brain Battle, I began to enjoy studying as a leisure activity.

- You don't need to mention that the team lost the competition. Just that you joined the team. You have a limited word count and your only intention at this point is to introduce an overview of your identity. Take note of the way I revised the paragraph to reflect your age experience without having to constantly reintroduce yourself. Like I said before, you need to only introduce yourself once. If you insist on repeating that line over and over, you will have a difficult time bringing your word count down. Trust me about this. You don't need to constantly introduce yourself. I don't know how many times i have to repeat and emphasize that. YOU DO NOT NEED TO KEEP RE-INTRODUCING YOURSELF.


- When I turned 17, I began to enjoy the world of collaborative learning. That is one of the reasons why I excelled so well in the "Civilization" program for students interested in Economics. We worked together in teams and created real, functional business models that we were allowed to practice in a controlled setting.