'my promotion in the church' - UC prompt (personal quality, accomplishment,..)

Prompt #1

Tell us about a personal quality, talent, accomplishment, contribution or experience that is important to you. What about this quality or accomplishment makes you proud and how does it relate to the person you are?

Basically I am a very simple person and friendly, and I enjoy being well-rounded. I am active, confident, energetic, and optimistic person. I like to be involved in a wide variety of activities. In the college, I am usually volunteering myself to assist in various events as well as being a student ambassador on the orientation day. In the church, I am actively involved in various ministries, such as being a musician, a Sunday school teacher and a leader in certain projects. I like tidiness, accuracy and orderliness. Therefore I am also good at record keeping and organizing data/information.

When I was 6 years old, my mother already nurtured me with a lot of various lesson activities. I had taken a piano lesson, which was then followed by guitar, drum and ballet lessons later until I reached 13 years old. In linguistics, I took some lessons in English, Chinese and Japanese. During my spare time, I also learned some material arts skills, such as karate and tae kwon do.

As I am a highly self-motivated person, I like to set certain targets in my life. One of the most successful achievements is when I was participating in the "Chinese Story Telling" competition at Bina Bangsa School. The competition was open to every student, and I was only 12 years old. I studied really hard, and I managed to be the runner-up winner.

Another one is when I was studying at Anglo-Chinese School International. My grades were very outstanding, and I received an award "Highly Recommended Student". During the ceremony, I was called up and asked to testify the secret of my achievement in the stage. My parents were very proud of me and they decided to send me to USA for my degree.

Another successful achievement is my promotion in the church. I started to be involved in the church as an usher. I earnestly committed and faithfully served the congregation. In less than 2 months, my senior pastor called me and appreciated my work so much. He entrusted me with larger responsibility. I started to be assigned as one of the musicians, which later then I was called to be a Sunday school teacher. As I really committed to what have been given, there was not only the senior pastor who appreciated me, but the elders of the church also began to appraise my contribution. Lately, I was assigned to lead a team that needs to raise some funds for a summer camp. We were able to collect the funds exceeded the required amount.

With everything that I have ever achieved, I began to take them as my initial foundation for my future career. The values of commitment, sincerity and hard work are becoming my life principles. Target oriented is also the way that has shaped me to who I am today. I began showing a great enthusiasm to any responsibility. Although I have learned so much through my experiences, but I believe that they all are only the basic things. Learning is never stop when we are still alive.

I am not a native speaker, so I believe that I may have some grammar and structure mistakes. Please kindly help me to look over it. Thank you very much.

Hi


About this, everyone would "enjoy" being well-rounded.
About the way you write, I will not say it is bad, but for a college admissions essay, you don't have to list out what you did, what you know, how you are, etc. Don't give them a "plethora" of different skills. TELL them about one, or just a couple, and be sure to answer the prompt. You say how you are, with all those great qualities you have, but I think colleges are looking at how you can show them through an essay who you are by the way you acted/dealt with the situations/accomplishments you experienced by telling your readers about those/that experience.

From what you have here, possible themes are pursuit of excellence/ academic rigor/


However, try to focus more. If you really feel strongly about that church experience, talk about that. I can tell that you have a lot to talk about.

I like how you are so open about these qualities being basics, but again, try to take some events out. Choose, maybe one or two of those things listed in the prompt, and write/tell more about that.

~Cheers

Hi Jonathan, appreciate so much about your comments. I'll look into it :)

The effort you can give now to make this an excellent essay is to extract from it a clear, meaningful concept that can be like the "soul" of the essay. I often say the thesis statement is the soul of the essay. I am talking about the message that is interesting enough to write an essay about. Whenever you are assigned to write an essay, pretend that you were not given an assignment or prompt but instead were so inspired by an idea that you wanted to write about it. In this case, imagine that you are trying to express in an essay how fortunate you are to have been "nurtured" with a wide variety of activities. What was nurtured? Your confidence was nurtured, I think, and I also think your perspective was cultivated.

With all these activities, you must feel very confident, because you understand the nature of all these things -- language learning, martial arts, the church activity... you really have an impressive number of achievements. So, make a thesis sentence in that first paragraph and have it be a sentence about one big idea: "The confidence and perspective my mom gave me by working so hard to give me various experiences."

Make it so that a certain phrase is repeated near the beginning and also near the end so that it sticks in the reader's mind and she will know exactly how to answer if someone asks, "What was that essay about?"

:-)

Sorry just get back from my holiday..

Hi Kevin, thank you so much for your comments... I'll be revising it again.