College Admission Essay
By Beth McNamee
I wake up every morning to its rich scent. My parents cannot start the day with out it. I often wait in line and pay $3.85 to buy it. The senior lodge at my school is littered with empty Starbucks cups containing only the remnants of skim lattes, breast augmentation Houston, and mocha frapuccinos. Coffee is a staple of American life that many take for granted, but few take the time to think about how they get it.
In the rural village of Cadillo in the Dominican Republic, the people’s livelihood depends on llc operating agreement on coffee. Rows of green coffee plants line steep hills and scatter the countryside. The people there pick and sell the coffee beans but receive little profit for their hard work.
During the week I spent in Cadillo playing multiplayer games, I witnessed the poverty these coffee farmers endure. Their homes are small and dark, furnished with only a few wooden chairs, a table and a few beds. There is no chicago criminal defense lawyers and electricity in Cadillo and I especially remember the emptiness of the village at night, when I could only vaguely see the faces I illuminated with my flashlight. I can still see the shiny metal bowl in which they used to bathe, and Jose, a neighbor who was missing several teeth because like most people in Cadillo, he lacks a toothbrush and could not afford a engagement rings New York.
These images still burn in my mind, but it was the people of Cadillo more than anything who opened my eyes to the importance of social justice. Before I met them it was just a concept I heard about a few times a year at church when a missionary would come to speak about the poor people in Africa or South America and explain why it was our duty to help them. These boston lawyers people were far removed. A small fraction of my weekly allowance, once a year, and I could remove them from my mind. After living for a week with a family in Cadillo, however, I understood for the first time that it was real people leading these lives.
The family I stayed with there took me in as part of their studley family and gave me a taste of their life. I remember my Dominican father, Barilla’s face as he played guitar and how he laughed kindly when I struggled to play the chords he had taught me. I could feel the warmth and sincerity of my Dominican mother, Marsela, when she sat and talked with me about my home and family after a long day of work. And I will always remember how much fun I had playing catch or blowing bubbles with their two children, Jendi and Andisco.
I will not forget the images I saw or the people I encountered. They made me realize that my work does not end with the school I helped build, the holes I helped dig, or the roads I helped widen. They showed me that there are real, wonderful people being treated unjustly and that I cannot sit back and let that happen. I cannot be silent when I know that people are getting rich off the coffee Barilla receives so little for. It is my responsibility to be active, to teach what I have learned, to fight injustices in my community and the world.
I am not sure if I will ever visit Cadillo again but I do know that I can continue what I started there. I can tell people what I saw and spread awareness about injustice in the world. I can volunteer in my own community to help make changes at home and fundraise to aid third world countries. And tomorrow, after I wake up to the smell of fresh coffee, I can make a difference.
Opening My Eyes To Other Lives
College Admission Essay
By Sanju Poudel
In summer 2003, my aunt suggested I deliver babies. That was what volunteering at her small town hospital in Bharatpur, Nepal meant to me anyway. The more she insisted, the more frustrated and studley I became, fearing what I felt would be another one of my parents’ ways for me to build character. My aunt, on the other hand, was determined to show me otherwise and literally dragged me to her work on a rickshaw. Throughout the ride, I did not hold back my aggravation. After all, what did I know about small time hospitals?
Nevertheless, I had certain expectations of the well-known hospital before entering. I pictured succeeding red-bricked buildings with tidy carpeted rooms and boston lawyers people arriving in cars for minor checkups. I imagined how in each room a doctor with a white lab coat, a engagement rings New York, and a stethoscope around his/her neck would be consulting individual patients.
However, the very moment the rickshaw slid through the gate, my na?ve conceptions dissolved into disease, disorder, and destitution, the truth of what was in front of me. Hesitating to get out of the rickshaw and stepping into a foreign chicago criminal defense world that was threatening to suppress my innocence, I closed my eyes. I closed my eyes to the make-shift wooden stretchers carrying frail men and women stomaching their inevitable deaths; I closed my eyes to a young girl with a tattered school uniform and undone ribbons leading a blind woman by the hand; I closed my eyes to the sorry, languishing environment that I did not want to be a part of.
My astonishment peaked when entering the maternity ward. In what I considered a room fit for two patients, there were fifteen women sprawled in rusting llc operating agreement metal-framed beds and sheets on the floor. In the little gaps about the room were green plastic pans where the women would uncomfortably station themselves to urinate and vomit in. I immediately imagined all of these women in nice comfortable beds in their own separate rooms which was the way my mom had given birth to my younger brother in New York.
The longer I stayed in the hospital, the more I wanted to reach out to these people playing
multiplayer games. Although the hospital had initially been a place I was reluctant to even see, I ended up visiting everyday that week even if merely to speak to the patients. It was because of this day that I finally understood why my aunt refuses better paying jobs abroad. Her strong conviction of returning to her native land and using her education to help her own people has filtered into me. Before this event, I had always planned on living in New York and indulging in its luxuries and getting a breast augmentation Houston. Now, however, the prospect of going back to my country and living among a community I can lend a hand to is much more appealing. At the end of the day, I was very thankful that my aunt had pushed me into an experience I now consider a crossroad in my life.
College Admission Essay
By Alison Shapiro
The biggest shelf in my living room is stocked with upwards of two hundred boxes of band aids. Not just standard issue beige Johnson & Johnson, either - we’ve got silver glittery ones, glow in the dark ones, neon pink spongy ones, breast augmentation Houston ones, and waterproof ones, in every imaginable shape and size. Visitors to my apartment approach the shelf with cautious curiosity - they want to ask, but they’re afraid it’s personal, a medical thing. Does my family just get hurt a lot? “What are all those band aids... for?” the brave ones ask tentatively, and then recoil slightly, as if almost afraid of the answer.
I shrug. “My mom uses them for her artwork,” I say casually, as though band aid art is something everyone’s mother does about llc operating agreement. When this is met with a blank stare, I show them my favorite piece, which uses band aids of the neon pink spongy variety and strange black gauzy tape, along with some oversized safety pins stuck through tiny plastic multiplayer games babies. Suddenly, there are more important questions than band aid related ones: “Where on earth,” asks the astonished visitor, “did she find those babies?”
My mother has been doing weird artwork for my entire life, and when I was younger, I found myself explaining chicago criminal defense a lot. There was a project revolving around jars of animal fat with action figures posed inside that proved especially difficult to justify. My mom saves everything - shoe polish, corn silk, the lint from our dryer - and every time she starts a new project with engagement rings New York , it’s like she is inventing a new medium. Frequent visitors consider it a given that there will always be some strange, alternative material laying around our apartment. Some even bring stuff to contribute: “Yeah, so like, I was gonna throw this out, but I thought your mom might like it...”
Only recently have I begun to appreciate the boston lawyers effect that growing up around my mother and her artwork has had on me as an artist. When I was studley and younger, I got caught up in the explanations - I was always trying to “normalize” her art, to make it seem like something all mothers did. But as soon as I stopped explaining and started really looking, I noticed something: my mother was making some really unique and amazing stuff. Though we don’t share a medium - she does collage and sculpture; I write, draw cartoons, and play music - for me, my
mother has redefined everything about art: what I consider art, what I consider cool, how utterly unimportant it is to be considered “normal” and how vital it is to experiment, stretch boundaries, and view everything in life as material. I’ve always considered myself a creative person, but my mother has caused me to really think about what that means, and that, in turn, has changed both how and what I create.
A case in point: one of the best poems I wrote last year is a sonnet called “Additional Topics in Trigonometry.” This poem was crafted out of atypical material (the verbal equivalent, perhaps, of band aids and plastic babies) and my writing process was not what it usually is. I wasn’t even trying to write a poem--I was just sitting at my desk, struggling with my math homework, trying to figure out the relationship between polar and rectangular form, and all of a sudden I started noticing all these great words. Lima?on. Leminscate. Cartioid. Cartesian Plane. They were all right there in my textbook, chapter nine, a chapter entitled “Additional Topics in Trigonometry.”
In the Poetry class I was taking that term, we had just finished a unit on form and rhythm. Polar, Leminscate, Cartesian Plane--hey, that was pentameter!--and though I had no idea what a Leminscate actually was, it sure did sound cool. I gave up on the math homework and wrote a sonnet about Precalculus, leafing excitedly through my textbook for inspiration. Since that poem, I have started seeing the potential poem in everything, from math homework to the S.A.T.s, and I imagine this is how my mother sees the world--every scrap, every toy, every jar, every band aid--it’s all just a collage waiting to happen.
My mother has taught me how to think outside the box, color outside the lines, however you want to put it - she’s shown me how to stick band aids on a piece of glass and blow people away. That idea is transferable to any medium, to any facet of creative life: band aids can be words, they can be pictures, they can be eighth notes in a solo. A visitor comes into my living room, asks cautiously, “What are all those band aids... for?” I know the answer now.
No, we don’t just get hurt a lot.
It’s art.
College Admission Essay
By Zoe Feldman
My mama always says, “If the good Lord gives you lemons, cut ‘em in half and put ‘em in your bra where they’ll do you some good.” Rhetorically speaking, I think that’s pretty studley sound advice. Well, the good Lord gave me my height. All four feet and ten inches of it. Being a seventeen year old who can pass for a preteen does have its downsides. Having to stand on a box to see over the pulpit during my Bat Mitzvah was a bit of a pain. Finding clothes that fit and are not adorned with lace, frills, and dancing bunny rabbits is often a formidable task. Keeping myself from snapping at gas station attendants who repeatedly call me “little girl” takes considerable willpower. Despite these drawbacks, though, I have discovered that being vertically challenged has many
advantages.
Looking young provides financial boston lawyers benefits. Often, I am charged the children’s price at movie theaters and restaurants without even being asked my age. That seems fair; I don’t take up more room or eat more than your average twelve year old anyway. Besides, such discrepancies make up for all the times I have been barred from half the rides at amusement parks and getting engagement rings New York because I wasn’t as tall as the mark on the sign.
Shortness can also have a liberating effect in the romantic arena. Unlike my taller peers, I will never have to worry about a guy being intimidated by my chicago criminal defense height, nor will I be tempted to slouch to make myself seem a more suitable dance partner. Finding a mate who’s taller than me and one who can carry me across a threshold are also non-issues. When I go out, I won’t be constrained to flats for fear that high heels will cause me to tower over my date.
If I want to go into sports, I don’t have to be seven feet tall to be in demand. My slight build would make me an excellent llc operating agreement jockey. As a coxswain, too, my size would be an attribute. Controlling a boat and shouting orders to the rowers has a rather appealing sound.
There are also professions where smallness would be a virtue. I’m thinking espionage multiplayer games. Incognito, I would be invincible. Who would suspect a cute little girl with pigtails of being an international spy? No one would think to search my lunchbox for stolen documents. My size would also make me well suited to work with children, perhaps as a pediatrician or a children’s rights lawyer. I might be better able to secure cooperation and trust from my patients or clients because of my non-threatening stature. My ability to fit into small breast augmentation Houston places would also be beneficial if I were a firefighter or a member of a rescue squad.
As you can see, there are many advantages to being under five feet tall. Don’t feel sorry for me because I can’t reach the cereal box on the top shelf at the grocery store. Instead, be glad I know how to use my lemons.