10 College Application Essay Dos And Donts

10 College Application Essay Dos And Don'ts I forged alliances, and realigned them as necessary. Sometimes, I was the poor, defenseless little brother; sometimes I was the omniscient elder. When I was thirteen and visiting Liberia, I contracted what turned out to be yellow fever. I met with the local doctor, but he couldn’t make a diagnosis simply because he didn't have access to blood tests and because symptoms such as “My skin feels like it’s on fire” matched many tropical diseases. This completely different perspective broadened my understanding of the surgical field and changed my initial perception of who and what a surgeon was. I not only want to help those who are ill and injured, but also to be entrusted with difficult decisions the occupation entails. Discovering that surgery is also a moral vocation beyond the generic application of a trained skill set encouraged me. I now understand surgeons to be much more complex practitioners of medicine, and I am certain that this is the field for me. Because of this, I decided to choose a monumental moment I experienced with my grandfather and build off of that. The moment I chose was when I was 9 years old, I was raking leaves with him, and doing a subpar job. He looked at me and said a sentence in half English and half Vietnamese â€" but I knew what it meant. As I sip a mug of hot chocolate on a dreary winter’s day, I am already planning in my mind what I will do the next summer. I briefly ponder the traditional routes, such as taking a job or spending most of the summer at the beach. After sticking up my magnets on the locker door, I ran my fingers across the bottom of the bag, and I realized that one remained. Through this experience as a leader, I have come to realize, as a community, we hope together, we dream together, we work together, and we succeed together. This is the phenomenon of interdependency, the interconnectedness of life, the pivotal reason for human existence. While pursuing research in California, I was also able to meet many similarly motivated, interesting people from across the United States and abroad. As I learned about their unique lifestyles, I also shared with them the diverse perspectives I have gained from my travel abroad and my Chinese cultural heritage. I will never forget the invaluable opportunity I had to explore California along with these bright people. Never before had I seen anything this gruesomeâ€"as even open surgery paled in comparison. Doctors in the operating room are calm, cool, and collected, making textbook incisions with machine-like, detached precision. It is a profession founded solely on skill and techniqueâ€"or so I thought. This grisly experience exposed an entirely different side of this profession I hope to pursue. The hourglass of life incessantly trickles on and we are powerless to stop it. Luckily, my family managed to drive me several hours away to an urban hospital, where I was treated. Yellow fever shouldn’t be fatal, but in Africa it often is. I couldn’t believe that such a solvable issue could be so severe at the timeâ€"so I began to explore. Different things to different people, as the situation demanded. We were in Laredo, having just finished our first day at a Habitat for Humanity work site. The Hotchkiss volunteers had already left, off to enjoy some Texas BBQ, leaving me behind with the college kids to clean up. Not until we were stranded did we realize we were locked out of the van. Read this year's essay prompts for the University of Massachusetts on the Common Application website. Instead of diving right into the writing process, I wanted to plan out the points I was going to hit before putting pen to paper. Like I said earlier, I really wanted to focus on my character, goals, and accomplishments.