UBC prompt community involvement in a global/diverse society "exposure to unique situations"

We live in a global and diverse society.

Explain how your community involvement prepares you for the future in this complex world. (1500 characters)

Exposure is the best teacher, so when I got involved with Learning Buddies Network, a tutoring program catered primarily for at-risk youth, I knew precisely what kind of child I'd be tutoring. My first reading buddy, Dylan, was a second-generation immigrant with divorced parents. Between juggling learning English, working, and sharing custody, his mom seemed to be spread too thin to support his development fully. As a result, he did not know the entire alphabet despite being in the first grade. Throughout his learning journey, I learned invaluable things about myself. As a teacher's assistant for a ninth-grade social studies class, I was frequently shocked by their poor language skills. Through tutoring Dylan, I learned to empathize. Although Dylan couldn't speak English perfectly, he was one of the hardest-working children I'd ever had the pleasure of tutoring. Instead of characterizing those with weaker English skills as lazy, I'd learned to empathize more with their diverse situations. Furthermore, I'd learned to communicate more effectively through a language barrier, as I had to regularly correspond with Dylan's mother about his progress. In future, I believe my experience with their unique situation will equip me with the tools to properly communicate with and accommodate the diverse cast of people I will meet.

The way this essay is set up, it appears that you allowed Dylan and his mother to slack off without properly learning the English language just because of their being immigrants and having a problematic family situation. Rather than making excuses for the mother and son in this essay, you should be showing how you helped them overcome the language barrier and Dylan's educational shortcoming. The idea is to show how you handled a unique negative situation and turned it into a positive. All I read in this essay were excuses for the shortcomings of both persons, without you actually doing something to help them better themselves, which would have been the point of the response. How would you handle the same situation as a college student? Will you just keep making excuses for the diverse community you belong to rather than helping the diverse community develop and improve through your help? Empathy cannot be used as an excuse for inaction. Your inaction and excuses are what made the response irrelevant to the actual information requirements of the prompt. Perhaps you just forgot to mention what actions you took, so mention those in the revised version.