College Experiences - Admission/Application Essay Example

College Experiences Many expand their view of the world during their time in college and I hope to be among those whose horizons have broadened tremendously. Most of my life thus far has been spent in a relatively small town in East Texas. The people I spent my time with have been predominantly white Christians who, regardless of how much or how little they practiced their religions, nevertheless hold the same holidays and basic ideals as sacred. Living in this location, I have spent very little time traveling and have been raised with traditional Texas ideals including hunting, fishing, a fierce sense of independence and a willingness to fight for what I believe is right.

In the not too distant past, my town became famous for a serious hate crime that was committed here against a black man. While most of the people in my community don’t subscribe to such ideas, including myself, there remain pockets of individuals who still feel black people are somehow inferior to white people. In some ways because of this, I think a future potential classmate that I could learn a great deal of information from would be a student from a foreign country, preferably somewhere in Africa.

This person would be very different from me in many ways, including their cultural and academic experiences and possibly in their economic situation as well. This person would provide a completely different perspective on life that was formed on their childhood living conditions just as my ideas have been formed by mine. The school system in Africa must be much different from the system used here in the United States, perhaps even more closely tied to the seasons and harvests than our own.

I have only known the Texas system, but I know that other states have different standards to their curriculum and I can only imagine what the different standards must be in a country as different as Africa is to the United States. Yet I believe that the standards established for the school system reveals a lot about what a state or a country holds important, otherwise why would they work so hard to ensure their children learn it? It would be enlightening, I think, to learn what a developing country would consider to be of priority as compared to our system.

For example, do business classes hold the same amount of weight, or are agricultural classes continually cut from the state’s budget? This potential future classmate could also teach me a lot about my own culture just by habitually expressing his own. There is a saying that suggests the best way to hide something is to leave it out in the open. I’m sure there are many aspects of my own culture that I do not even yet realize are cultural ideas instead of basic human nature. I once saw a show where people sat on the floor to eat dinner off a rug spread in front of them.

While I believe this scene was actually from the Middle East, what other differences might a student from Africa bring forward? Even if I was only able to observe this individual from within the classroom, he may have vastly different ways of expressing his ideas or bring new ideas into subjects that had seemed drained of any sense of originality. Since a great deal of my objective in pursuing a college education is to learn more about myself as well as more about other people, though, I would hope to become friends with this individual already described, so that I can begin to understand more about how the rest of the world works.

At the same time, perhaps I could be of some assistance to this other person in helping them to understand more about how people in the United States, or at least the portion of the United States I am familiar with, looks at the world.