Hi, I am looking for helpful editings of my UIUC essay prompt #2!
PROMPT;Tell us about one interest or experience of yours that allows us to get to know you as an individual. Please limit your response to approximately 300 words.
The only thing that I can clearly express my momentous experience throughout my high school life is my volunteer activity at a Korean-Japanese museum in Tokyo. This activity gave me many opportunities to encounter people, perspectives, and aims that I had not been aware of.
Having realized that I was a samsae―a third generation of Korean immigrants―at age four, I have grown up in an environment where I always seek the peaceful relationship between Japan and Korea at a political and at an interpersonal. This was the impetus that strongly inspired me to become a bridge of friendship between Japanese and Korean-Japanese people.
I did this volunteering at a Korean-Japanese museum. The concept of this museum is simple: construction of amicable relations between Japanese and Korean-Japanese people in terms of understanding their mutual history by showcasing the different exhibitions of their life style. As a bilingual who speaks both Japanese and Korean, I have worked as a tour-guide and as an interpreter, and I explained exhibitions. In addition, tourists often asked me my own experiences and perspectives because I was the only tour-guide of Korean descent. At first, my job was very satisfying because I could speak both Japanese and Korean and recount my experiences to tourists, but I later realized that I felt most content when tourists sought not only the exhibitions but my unique perspectives. For example, at an exhibitions on the daily lives of Koreans living in Japan, I told them that my family often discouraged me from revealing that I am of Korean descent. In fact, many Korean-Japanese hide their Korean descent out of fear of discrimination.
Although my individual activity is not enough to prompt the entire awareness of the situation of Korean-Japanese living in Japan, it can at least give people a small motive to take actions. Every time I meet tourists interested in learning the plight of Korean-Japanese, I feel encouraged to continue raising awareness of this issue. (329 words)
While this a good essay, it deviates a bit from the essay prompt. It is my belief that you will better answer the essay and also lessen your word count if, rather than discussing the work that you did at the museum, you instead discussed how working at the museum help you reconnect with your Korean roots and taught you some things about your heritage that you would not learn from school, history lessons, or your family members. That way you truly present a unique experience that helps the admissions officer to get to know you better as an individual. After all, the job at the museum is interesting, but your connection to the job and why it proved to be high interest and value to you is more important than the work that you did as a tourist guide at the museum :-)
