RU is a vibrant community - Be critical of the essay

RU is a vibrant community of people with a wie variety of backgruonds and experiences. how would you benefit from and contribute to such and environment. consider variable such as your talents, traveled, leadership activityes, volunteer, cultural experiences.

I went to Old Bridge Public Schools from first grade to eighth grade. There I met people from all sorts of races and creeds. We used to joke and say how our bus resembled the United Nations because we had kids from Russia, Brazil, Puerto Rico, Croatia, The Philippines, and much more. I used to go to many family parties with these kids. My friend Sami from Ethiopia had invited me to go to his aunt's Ethiopian wedding. It was so vastly different from any other wedding I had gone to. This wedding started at a motel with the music pumping, and ended the same way, rather than a with a mass and priest. My friend Tejank invited me over to his house for his birthday. It was a little awkward being the only one there who wasn't Indian, but I made friends there rather quickly. At the party, I was exposed to various Indian foods, the Indian language, and the clothes that they wore, all very different from the traditional American culture. My neighbors are straight from Poland. I hang out at their house all the time and I've even picked up a few words like "nye" which means no, and "tok" which means yes. Going to school everyday, I was used to this diversity. Now that I reminisce, most of my friends actually weren't white. I thought every place in America was like this, with people from all over the world. When I started looking at high schools, I never expected that they would be at all different from my middle school, which had a good number of just about every single race. When I finally got to Highschool, I was dumbfounded. Just about every single kid was white, with the exception of maybe like five out of around 850 students. The past four years, the only diversity I saw was the diversity of my friends outside of school. At Rutgers, I would finally be around the diverse groups of kids I grew up with. I would meet more "Stefanos", "Tejanks", and "Samis", and I believe I would truly benefit from this.

I would bring diversity to Rutgers because I have traveled to places and seen things that not many others in the U.S. have seen. For instances, I have seen the poverty and starvation of Africa. A few years back, I was on a plane with my mom and my brother. We were on our way to Africa to visit family we haven't seen in a long time. It was a very emotional time for my mother because she seldom gets to spend time with her ill and aging parents. I met many of the children there, but I always felt sort of awkward around them. They knew I lived in America, which to them, is the land where everyone succeeds. To them, living in America is equivalent to hitting the lottery. I sensed that they felt I was a spoiled rich kid who didn't deserve to live in paradise, when in reality, my family has had plenty of financial struggles. Seeing their struggles, any materialistic feelings I had, vanished. After witnessing their struggles, I became very selfless. Luckily, the dollar was very strong at this time, so later on in the trip, we went to a resort. Even though it looked so good that it could have been straight out of a post card, I felt kind of bad leaving the kids from the village behind. We went to a beach over there, and you could swear that we were in Europe everybody there was white. They were all playing soccer, so we just jumped into a game. We met people from Belgium, Germany, France, the Netherlands, and more. The kids looked down at us because it was quickly assumed that we resided in the same third world country that they vacation in. they believed that they were much higher than my brother and I because they lived lavishly, and we supposedly lived in slums. When we told them of our American citizenship, they merely disregarded it and sort of avoided us. I didn't fit in with the rich or the poor.

Okay, you have several problems within this essay.

For one, you don't explain exactly how each experience influenced you or benefit you. The first paragraph especially seemed like a laundry list of all these different people you met. It gets tiring, as if you're just showing off how many types of people you know, even if that is not your intention. It may be better to simply mention some groups (for example, "I've become friends with different backgrounds such as Ethiopia, India, and Poland") and give one group a detailed description with the impact it gave you rather than try to list them all with a short description.

Your second paragraph is confusing and too assuming. For one, living in America itself, in comparison to the children in Africa is a huge advantage that you should not dismiss. It seems as if you are disregarding their hardships for a moment in the middle of this paragraph. Again, you jump from Africa to the beach and I can't really figure out your point.

Your conclusion is too abrupt and the second paragraph especially is too informal ("I felt kind of bad" or "you could swear that we were in Europe everybody there was white").

Most importantly you don't really even answer the prompt. You barely address how a diverse situation would benefit you and you don't say how you would contribute to the environment. You leave it to the reader to infer that all of these experiences will make you some unique person that will add to the diversity, but how? How have all these experiences affected you and how did you contribute back? (At least this will give examples to how you will contribute and how you will benefit.)

Don't hold back lol jp

Sorry, haha, hope it was helpful ^^;

where do you fit in?no offense meant but this gives the impression that you are somekind of pariah.

you could explain how seeing the poor kids and rich ones changed your view of people having different social status and also increased your understanding of the different reasons there sometimes are misunderstandings between the different classes of citizen.

I agree with the other comments. You should expand upon how you will fit in at Rutgers, and why it is a good fit for you.