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"Sensorineural deafness" - Common application


zdmw911 9 / 32  
Dec 16, 2010   #1
A range of academic interests, personal perspectives, and life experiences adds much to the educational mix. Given your personal background, describe an experience that illustrates what you would bring to the diversity in a college community, or an encounter that demonstrated the importance of diversity to you.

I sit back on my chair, put on my headphones and let M. Ward's Transistor Radio album play. The record evokes patchy imagery of a sun-dappled, sepia-toned suburb of a place far away, a place, as M. Ward likes to say, "where time cannot be told". The Hong Kong skyline out my bedroom window appears to slow down and I find myself blankly gazing at a bright advertising billboard on a hotel several miles away. His record manages to soothe my mind until I get about thirty-five seconds into the song Fuel for Fire; the instruments die away until all I hear a raspy voice so delicate that a drop of rain would shatter it. My entire being is mollified.

"I've travelled all kinds of places
The song is always the same
Got lonesome fuel for fire"

Thump, thump, thump. My trance-like state is cut short by a conspicuous thumping in my left ear that overshadows M. Ward's pacifying voice, thanks to the acoustic guitar.

I suffer from single-sided deafness (SSD), also known as monaural hearing or unilateral hearing loss. The type of deafness I suffer from is sensorineural deafness, where the auditory nerve is damaged and cannot transmit nerve impulses from the cochlea to the temporal lobe in the brain. Unlike conductive deafness, the effect of sensorineural deafness cannot be easily alleviated by mere hearing aids. Surgery, specifically a cochlear implant, can help, but has always been inherently risky and expensive. Both SSD and sensorineural deafness are often overlooked in favor of full or conductive deafness.

Unless I listen to older records from before the early 60s, awkward gaps in music and irritating thumps which arise from my left ear only hearing lower frequency sounds are inevitable. Since a young age, I have always loved music. I was introduced to the piano when I was 8 and began teaching myself the guitar 2 years ago. Music has provided me with a way of connecting with other people, putting my opinion forward, and developing my view of the world. My nemesis is the stereo headphone. As of now, there are few earphones designed for sufferers of single-sided deafness. Though there are some earphones for this purpose, many are not carefully researched; they typically merge the left and right channel of music into a single ear bud, but can further exacerbate the deafness in the affected ear. If I were to use these types of earphone, my left ear, which still retains tiny sensitivity in the bass range (<1000 Hz), would further deteriorate as the brain gradually shuts off the left ear due to lack of use. A much safer design would be to have two ear buds, each bud with both channels merged together and equal in volume.

For sufferers of sensorineural deafness, there is a light at the end of the tunnel; advances in stem cell research look promising for sufferers of sensorineural deafness. The cochlea in all animals turns sound waves from the environment into electrical impulses that the brain can interpret. A critical component is stereocilia; stereocilia are hair cells that line the cochlea and are responsible for the conversion of sound waves into electrical impulses. With the help of stem cells, new stereocilia can be synthesized and implanted into the cochlea of the ear, restoring the cochlea's ability to convert sound waves into electrical impulses.

Just the thought of being able to hear articulate sounds in my left ear incites immense determination within me; for the first time, I may be able to listen through M. Ward's Fuel for Fire in total tranquility. M. Ward's lonely voice will be reunited with its long-lost friend on the other side of the headphone, the acoustic guitar, to form a harmonious concoction that appeases the senses. The only thing an SSD sufferer could possibly miss is tranquil sleep; with the hearing ear to the pillow, the whole world lapses into silence!

I am confident that the path to finding a cure for sensorineural deafness is within reach and this is a cause I ardently promote. The study of human physiology and the biological sciences at university will provide me with the vast knowledge needed for truly understanding the condition and its possible cures. Improving earphone design and stereocilia stem cell research are just some of the things I can do to help both the sufferers of single-sided deafness and sensorineural deafness. The door is already open; I just need to walk through it.
corgilover 2 / 8  
Dec 16, 2010   #2
I really enjoyed reading how you described your experience of your sensorineural deafness, but i dont think you really answered the second part of the question. Instead, you talk about what you wanna do in university, not how you will bring diversity.

Hope this helps! Good luck!

Please help me read mine.
OP zdmw911 9 / 32  
Dec 17, 2010   #3
Thanks. I will make some changes.
amitbhasin 2 / 7  
Dec 18, 2010   #4
So I liked that this essay makes you really unique. You will definitely stand out. However I don't think you used your SSD condition to its fullest potential. I almost feel like the majority of the essay was informing what the disease was and how to cure it. Rather than doing that, I think you should devote your essay to discussing what the disorder means to you. For example, perhaps you aspire to find the cure to Sensorineural Deafness? Something like that will definitely make it passionate! Instead of just saying your an advocate of finding a remedy to SSD I think you should talk about what you will do to cure it yourself. Maybe you want to go to college and study biological sciences to help you better understand SSD so that you will later become a scientist searching for it's cure? Idk if that helps but I think if you add more of that, your essay will be AMAZING :)

Also, I would recommend that you maintain a consistent tense in the first paragraph. It switches from past to present. In my opinion, keeping the entire thing in present would make the opening telling and effective.

In the first sentence of the second paragraph take out the semi-colon and make it a comma.

And lastly, maybe you should somehow connect the first part of your essay about M. Ward's song to the rest of the essay? Somehow bring it up at the end. That might make a great ending to top off your essay!

Hope that was helpful!
OP zdmw911 9 / 32  
Dec 18, 2010   #5
^Thanks a lot amitbhasin!

I have added a few paragraphs and edited the structure of the essay.
EF_Kevin 8 / 13,321 129  
Dec 27, 2010   #7
After a lot of deliberation, I suggest using the Floyd essay, but revise that ending so that it emphasizes your unique plan... your unique interests and goals, complete with deadlines you set for yourself.

This essay, in this thread, has a long intro that gets it off to a slow start. The reader thinks you are procrastinating. As part of a novel this would be perfect, but here, I think it... well... I don't know, it is great, for sure, but the other essay is probably better. :-)
OP zdmw911 9 / 32  
Dec 31, 2010   #8
Thanks so much Kevin, but I've already sent off my applications :(. Fortunately, I used the Pink Floyd essay as a supplement for the university I really want to attend, so the admissions office got both this essay and the PF essay. Hopefully that will complete the picture.


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