College Admissions Essay

College Admissions Essay I immediately found my people and a continual comfort of my environment which automatically equated to the feeling of being home. Home is the feeling of being comfortable with the uncertainty and uncomfortable situations. The feeling of being involved, nervous and excited all at the same time. I couldn’t find any dominance or submission in the classes and everyone was truly involved in learning from each other, whether it was a tutor or student. My values in education and learning had started to collide with the ones in my school. ” the educational authorities from my school responds, “It is what it is! ” As I think learning has its own value in itself. Surprisingly enough I made friends within 20 minutes of being on campus. I was able to share my obsession with reading and the knowledge I gathered on any subject I put my mind to. After I came home, I knew I needed more information. I wanted to know more, I wanted to experience it myself. The summer after my Junior year I signed up for a Summer Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. Although his writing is not easy to understand at first, I find that it’s worth the struggle. Everything Calvino writes is the perfect mixture of scientific fact and fable-like fantasy, and I’m so glad that I took my mom’s advice in that bookstore in New York. I am too used to sitting in crowded high school classes where more than half the class did not do the reading. Reading is not checking off a box or attaining a grade, but something I have chosen many times and will continue to choose for the rest of my life. I made an even more intimate group of friends who I still keep in touch with because they are more than friends to me, they are family. I think that my sophomore to senior years of high school have been a great preparation for a school like St. John’s. Each year I had a two hour seminar course every day, in which half of the grade is based on discussion, and the other half is on papers. Calvino makes me ponder the deeper questions of the universe. Although I don’t love having a constant existential crisis, I do love reading things that push me to consider new ways of thinking. That’s why I consider this a great book, because it takes creativity and self- ­reflection and ideas about love and brings them together in new and powerful ways that make me feel more attuned to my surroundings. This has given me unique experience both in practice with writing analytical papers on a text, as well as practice with reading and discussing a text in a deeper way. This experience will not only be beneficial to me in discussion, but will hopefully raise the quality of a seminar for the class as a whole. The small enrollment size of as well as the overall approach to education makes St. John’s the ideal place for me to extend my positive experience of high school into the college setting. St John’s advertises itself as the school for readers and thinkers, people who want more than a degree. In my pursuit to find a catch, I could only find nothing. Unlike other colleges with special course requirements, unstable administration, and strange traditional customs such as Freshman not being able to say the word ‘duck’, I found complete and absolute nothing. I signed up for more information; they stayed true to the image and personality of the college. I visited the Santa Fe campus and experienced classes, the campus, and the people. However my purpose was fulfilling my curiosity, rather than just memorizing other’s idea for the matter of winning or losing competition with my friends. Therefore the way I learn had to be different from the way of learning where the “efficiency”, which my school claimed, was mostly concerned. I chose this story as an example of a book that I consider great and has influenced me because it showcases the fun, yet calculated, way in which Calvino relates these tales. This story and others like it inCosmicomics influence me to look at the world differently, and cause me to question things we take as fact. The ways to achieve it are numerous and depends on what one’s purpose of learning is. In my previous experience of the education system that I was given in Korea had its purpose having the value that students could grasp a great amount of knowledge at short time from teachers lecturing. The most important aspect about the Summer Academy was finding my people, the ones who talked about Nietzsche and Plato at lunch and had long debates and poetry slams after Seminar. Making friends was never an easy feat for me, but at the Summer Academy, I found everyone I talked to felt like we had been friends for years.