Now that I'm nearing the end of my senior year in high school, the stressful sleepless nights spent agonizing over my college application are long gone. l am now committed to the Rutgers New Brunswick Business School and I am pretty excited to graduate and enter college for the next four years. However, I still remember the panic I felt when my mind was like the "College Essay" document open in front of me: blank.
After a couple of weeks, more stress piled up as other students in my grade began to finish their essays and writing supplements and were in their final stages of editing and submitting their work. I wrote countless drafts that I ended up deleting and took stray ideas from disposed drafts and combined them into new pieces of work. The process was long, treacherous, and definitely not very fun until my effort really shined and pulled through. It was a few weeks before the first college application deadline that I submitted my essay, proud and satisfied. After reading many guidelines about college essays, I finally found what I wanted to write about and what I wanted colleges to know about me.
I received so much help while writing my essay, from numerous friends and relatives to a handful of examples people shared online of their own writing pieces. After all the help I received from other people, I realized how much I wanted to share my own essay piece in hopes of helping other people and providing them an example of how I portrayed myself as a student and as an individual to the colleges I applied to. Therefore, the following is the Common Application #1 essay that I submitted to a majority of colleges. I hope you will be able to take away some ideas from my essay or learn something new about me as you read it!
Since I was young, I have always been whisked away on trips of exploration. I have walked through the labyrinth of artworks at the Louvre, toured the basilicas of Italy, and visited the Queen’s crown at Buckingham Palace. In fact, I even got lost in the Sistine Chapel, heartbreakingly separated from my parents for a few hours by huge masses of incoming tour groups. However, compared to all of my oversea trips so far, my most memorable experience was my class trip to China two springs ago. It was through this trip that I learned about my interest in traveling globally and challenging cultural differences.
China has differences that allow it to stand out among other countries. One of the special highlights is the bustling underground marketplaces in the cities. When I first entered one of the markets in Beijing, I was immediately drawn to the authentic ways of shopping in China. The marketplace sold about anything and everything, from chopsticks and paper fans, to jade and pearl jewelry. When my classmates and I stopped at a stall selling pearl accessories, we were ready to put our haggling skills up to the test. Already, sellers from neighboring stalls began to talk about where we came from, assuming we were unfamiliar with the Chinese marketplace. The woman at the stall greeted us in Chinese and punched three digits into a calculator. She placed it in front of us, and smiled. The white pearl necklace in front of us cost 300 yuan.
Before the woman could continue advertising her jewelry to us, we intercepted first. “Tai gui le!” It’s too expensive! “Ke yi pian yi yi dian ma?” Can you lower the price a bit? All of the sellers in the marketplace grew quiet for a split second. The lady selling jewelry looked at us with a surprised expression. Our profound knowledge in the Chinese language was our secret weapon. A few minutes later, we walked away triumphantly, each holding our own necklaces priced at 50 yuan. After my purchase, I learned something new about business in China; negotiation was essential in order to get the best deal for my money.
After our visit to the Terracotta Warriors in Xi’an, we were waiting to re-board the bus when a man casually approached us. He held a flipped-over cardboard box that became a useful surface to display the squishy toys for sale. He said hello, continuously demonstrated how fun the toys could be when you slapped them on a flat surface, and advertised that they were only five yuan each. The moment we started talking to him in broken Chinese, another woman joined the party with her cardboard box. Before we knew it, we had five different people bringing over their cardboard boxes selling the same product. Competition was fierce, but despite the language barrier, they did their best to joke and bargain their products with us. Selling to thousands of people everyday, their ability to persevere in such tough business earned my respect.
During my visit to China, I learned to understand the variety of lifestyles and interests of the Chinese people. These understandings are essential in the field of business. A person needs to possess the ability to form connections easily and analyze the lifestyles of other individuals in order to better communicate and cultivate relationships with other people. Business is not only made up of sitting at an office desk and squinting in front of a computer monitor; it is stepping out into the world and exploring what it has to offer. At Rutgers, I want to take advantage of the endless amount of opportunities I will have to acquire internships globally as well as research projects with my professors. Utilizing Rutgers' high-end facilities and resources, I believe I can be the person to discover and take business to a new level at the Rutgers Business School.
