Accepted by Cornell

Accepted by Cornell

Question: Tell us about an opinion have you had to defend. How has this affected your belief system?

I chuckle to myself every time I think about this. I am perceived as a mild-mannered, intelligent individual until I mention that I am involved in riflery. It is interesting to watch someone's expression change. It is as if I instantaneously grew a pair of horns and a sharp set of claws. Believe me this gets worst; I am a member of the NRA. I try to tell these folks that I belong to the NRA to fire my rifle. "Oh my God! You fire real guns? with real bullets?!?" they remark with a perplexed look on their face. Besides having horns and claws, I now possess a tail and leathery wings.

This is how it began five years ago. I had played on a soccer team for several years. As I grew older I began having difficulty playing soccer because of shortness of breath. I was diagnosed as having mild asthma which ended my soccer career and eliminated my participation in most physical sports.

Shortly afterward, during a Boy Scout summer camp, I participated in riflery at their shooting range. This was the first time I had ever touched a firearm. To my amazement, I won the camp's first place award for marksmanship. I was more than eager when a friend of mine asked me if I would like to join a shooting club.

My parents were wary when I asked to join the rifle club. My mother feared guns, but my father felt there was no problem with trying this sport. Gratefully, he gave me the opportunity to try rifle marksmanship, despite secretly hoping that I would quit. Both of my parents were afraid of what people would think about their son's involvement with guns.

Like my parents a majority of people believe that all firearms are dangerous to our society. All they remember are the hysterical news releases of street violence and injured children. I am often asked how many deer I've shot. Frankly, I could never bring myself to injure another living creature and neither would most of the competitors I have met. Yet, I keep finding myself defending the sport from all of the misconceptions that surround it. Most people have developed a negative impression of the sport and I have found that these prejudices are difficult, if not impossible, to rectify.

Because of this conflict, I have become an open minded individual. I express my opinions without reservation, and I have learned to accept opinions and viewpoints contrary to my own. I do not intend to alter what I enjoy because of the ignorance of friends and acquaintances. If people have a negative view of me simply because of the sport I am active in, then they must be so superficial that they cannot see the person who I really am. I am no longer apprehensive of being perceived as a gun toting, trigger happy fanatic, even though I still endeavor to educate my friends and relatives on the beauty of this sport.

Accepted by Wellesley

It took me eighteen years to realize what an extraordinary influence my mother has been on my life. She’s the kind of person who has thoughtful discussions about which artist she would most want to have her portrait painted by (Sargent), the kind of mother who always has time for her four children, and the kind of community leader who has a seat on the board of every major project to assist Washington’ s impoverished citizens. Growing up with such a strong role model, I developed many of her enthusiasms. I not only came to love the excitement of learning simply for the sake of knowing something new, but I also came to understand the idea of giving back to the community in exchange for a new sense of life, love, and spirit.

My mother’s enthusiasm for learning is most apparent in travel. I was nine years old when my family visited Greece. Every night for three weeks before the trip, my older brother Peter and I sat with my mother on her bed reading Greek myths and taking notes on the Greek Gods. Despite the fact that we were traveling with fourteen-month-old twins, we managed to be at each ruin when the site opened at sunrise. I vividly remember standing in an empty ampitheatre pretending to be an ancient tragedian, picking out my favorite sculpture in the Acropolis museum, and inserting our family into modified tales of the battle at Troy. Eight years and half a dozen passport stamps later I have come to value what I have learned on these journeys about global history, politics and culture, as well as my family and myself.

While I treasure the various worlds my mother has opened to me abroad, my life has been equally transformed by what she has shown me just two miles from my house. As a ten year old, I often accompanied my mother to (name deleted), a local soup kitchen and children’s center. While she attended meetings, I helped with the Summer Program by chasing children around the building and performing magic tricks. Having finally perfected the “floating paintbrush” trick, I began work as a full time volunteer with the five and six year old children last June. It is here that I met Jane Doe, an exceptionally strong girl with a vigor that is contagious. At the end of the summer, I decided to continue my work at (name deleted) as Jane’s tutor. Although the position is often difficult, the personal rewards are beyond articulation. In the seven years since I first walked through the doors of (name deleted), I have learned not only the idea of giving to others, but also of deriving from them a sense of spirit.

Everything that my mother has ever done has been overshadowed by the thought behind it. While the raw experiences I have had at home and abroad have been spectacular, I have learned to truly value them by watching my mother. She has enriched my life with her passion for learning, and changed it with her devotion to humanity. In her endless love of everything and everyone she is touched by, I have seen a hope and life that is truly exceptional. Next year, I will find a new home miles away. However, my mother will always be by my side.

ADMISSIONS COMMITTEE COMMENTS:
The topic of this essay is the writer’s mother. However, the writer definitely focuses on herself, which makes this essay so strong. She manages to impress the reader with her travel experience, volunteer and community experience, and commitment to learning without ever sounding boastful or full of herself. The essay is also very well organized.

Bean Soup for the Soul

I met the Bean Counters in preschool.

They introduced me to the Bean Tray.

It was a simple concept. On the Bean Tray were two bowls, one filled with black beans, the other with white. Each day, we took turns at the Bean Tray Table. It was here that we learned to count--we counted beans. I, however, was a bright child. The envy of my peers, I could count to 100 effortlessly at the tender age of three. I thus deemed bean counting tedious and unnecessary.

I clearly articulated this point to my teachers; nevertheless, I was assigned the obligatory fifteen minutes--eternity to a three-year-old--with the Bean Tray. I had no intention of displeasing my teachers, so I counted 100 beans. I then counted the 100 beans backwards as I returned them to their designated bowls. That showed I knew how to count but left me with about ten minutes. I was bored, but I knew I would not be permitted to leave the Bean Tray. So, I decided to amuse myself by pretending to be a cook. I unknowingly proceeded to do the forbidden: I mixed the black and white beans together to make bean soup.

My teacher soon discovered my transgression, and I was duly punished. I had to separate the black and white beans I had mixed, picking each individual bean out of the giant Bean Bowl. I'd broken a cardinal rule: beans were for counting, not making soup.

But, in the end, all was not lost. They never made me count beans again.

Bean Counter Theorem #1: Beans are that which cannot be divided for any purpose other than existing as beans. The bean is complete unto itself and thus allows for no division or opposition.

As the years progressed, I encountered several variants of the Bean Counter Theorem, for, as I have found, Bean Counters prevail in every aspect of life.

At my elementary school, there was no institution more intrinsic, more indispensable to daily existence than The Line. If the children were restricted to the rigid confines of a perfectly straight line, teachers reasoned, childlike exuberance would be suppressed, thus minimizing disorder. As a result, everything we did was done in lines.

When the bell rang in the morning and school began, we were not allowed to simply gather at the classroom door; we had to line up before we went inside. Likewise, when the bell
rang for recess, we could not just leave; we had to line up first. There was a boys' line and a girls' line, and whichever line was the straightest and quietest got to go outside first. Whenever the class walked anywhere, even if we were just changing classes, we had to be in lines. If the lines were not straight, the class was reprimanded; God help the unfortunate child who fell Out of formation.

The irony of it all was that the submissive obedience mandated by The Line simply made the children want to rebel, which defeated The Line's very purpose. The control the teachers were trying to achieve via The Line was at cross purposes with the natural energy of children.

A common scenario when dealing with Bean Counters.

Bean Counter Axiom #49: Disorder--marked by the loss of control over one's environment--is not to be tolerated As the natural tendency of order is toward disorder, it is imperative that unleashed energy be corralled and remolded into an orderly state.

Bean Counters continued to affect my life throughout junior high as well. In seventh grade, I began to become bored with school. My teacher had a tendency to reduce complexities to formulas, making the marvelous into the mundane. I wasn't being encouraged to question, to challenge, to think. And I was a little suspicious.

So I started reading the encyclopedia.

It began unintentionally. I was thumbing through volume 21 of World Book looking for information on West Virginia for a report. Suddenly, I realized there were lots of interesting things that began with W. I read the entire article on Frank Lloyd Wright and immediately had an ardent (albeit short-lived) desire to be an architect. I read about whales (and Wales). Warsaw, Poland. Watergate. Andy Warhol. The Whiskey Rebellion of 1794. I even read the inordinately long (twelve pages) article on wheat. About two hours had passed before I finally found West Virginia and wrote my report. Reading the encyclopedia soon became a daily activity. I was learning interesting things they never taught me in school.

Bean Counter Postulate #12: The shortest distance between the end and beginning of an essay is a straight line, which means you should ignore all the curious little diversions in between (like the difference between a blue and a humpbacked whale).

More recently, I've had to deal with yet another type of Bean Counter. As a volunteer for the March of Dimes Birth Defects Foundation, I lobby state legislators for passage of March of Dimes-sponsored bills. I am trying to be a voice for people who are less fortunate than I. Yet, the first time I lobbied, I discovered I faced opposition. A legislator told me that what I was trying to achieve was a good idea, but it would cost far too much money and was therefore impractical. This struck me as incredibly illogical. What's more important, money or the life or a child?

Typical Bean Counter reasoning. He was only thinking of the beans.

Bean Counter Corollary #63: Do you promise to support the bean, the whole bean, and nothing but the bean, and forswear to use the bean for any purpose other than propagation of the bean?

As I approach college life, I look back to see the pervasiveness of Bean Counters and their philosophies. They permeate politics, seep into social issues, and clutter up the classroom. And I have tired of them. What I desire, where I aim to spend my college years, is that environment that sees beyond the bottom line of the bean, that is not threatened by the curious and the creative, that understands--as with encyclopedias and soups--that the complexity of our existence is rarely reducible to the bean, or the formulations of the Bean Counters.

Because I am not a bean counter. I make soup.

Wild Boar Hunts

When I was four, my father and I would go on “wild boar hunts” near the Palvolgyi caves in Budapest. We never caught any boar, but we never questioned their presence. When I was seven, we traveled from my Moscow home to Africa. Wearing Egyptian headwear, I learned to ride a camel, and because of my size, I could scamper through the tunnels of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

Curiosity has always connected me to the world.

At age nine a Tokyo Fish Market vendor offered me a morsel of raw tuna. It would have been rude to refuse. I climbed the Acropolis at twelve, sweating and panting under the Athenian sun.

The world was my first classroom.

Standing in Van Gogh’s room at Cloitre Saint Paul, I shared the barren space--a bed, a chair, and a window looking over fields of sunflowers--he saw in his last years. And last summer, at sixteen, I sat on the side of an Irish highway with my Celtic band waiting for someone to fix our flat tire. We sat, singing, in the long grass.

I prefer first-hand, tactile experiences.

At ten I climbed into a pool where Puka, the dolphin, waited. Billy, the one-armed dolphin trainer, and I gave commands, including the one I preferred avoiding: with my hand on Puka’s blowhole, Billy whistled, and Puka shot up a spray. Billy called out, laughing, “You’ve got dolphin boogers on your hand!”

Since this encounter, I have deepened my love for the scientific process. I thrill to the hunt: long hours tweaking variables, late nights mixing solutions in my school’s biology lab, lengthy e-mails seeking genetically modified cells for experimentation, and nerve-wracking examinations by experts.

When I was thirteen, I undertook a Science Fair Project proposing onion DNA as a “sunblock.” Needing proper equipment to quantify my results, I knocked on the door of a UCSC chemist I had never met, a bit nervous, but prepared to explain my experiment. She smiled and ushered me in.

Curiosity is the force that drives my ambition in science and my passion for music.

Sitting on my father’s shoulders in a packed Red Square, I listened to cannons blasting to the 1812 Overture, inspiring the crowd to support Yeltsin against a coup. On another occasion, I stood alone on the stage. It was the beginning of the Bay Opera’s second act of Tosca. I proudly sang my solo as the Shepherd. I was eleven. Like travel, music joins in me the traditions of continents, religions, cultures and time periods. As I sing, I feel connected.

Because my experiences have given me an appreciation for diversity, taught me the effects of complex variables, and blended my voice with others’, I desire a community that cherishes collaborative thinking about the world and my generation’s role in it. I would be honored to extend my curiosity at Brown, and while I expect I will not find wild boars in Providence either, I will still thrill to the hunt.