Any constructive criticism or advice that could help me revise this essay for the better will be tremendously appreciated. I'm transferring in Fall '10, and I'm hoping to get into UC Berkeley or UCLA, but UCSD is my safety. Thanks in advance.
Prompt #1 - What is your intended major? Discuss how your interest in the subject developed and describe any experience you have had in the field — such as volunteer work, internships and employment, participation in student organizations and activities — and what you have gained from your involvement.My intended major is political science. The main reason I've chosen this major is that, throughout my life and intellectual development, the political aspects of subjects and a political understanding of human behavior have been the fundamental factors unifying most of my interests and studies, and have proven to be inextricable from my intellectual being. Indeed, insofar as political science, defined as the study of who gets what, when and how or of the workings of power and decision making, can be understood as a perspective with which one views reality and a set of methods with which one analyzes reality, politics and political science are some of the primary ways I connect with and comprehend the world.
Even when politics isn't the subject at hand, the political perspective always prevails, whether it's in analyzing the Dada art movement as a radical reaction against the bourgeois capitalist order of WWI era Europe, or examining the history of the political activity of Ancient Rome in the transition from republic to empire. Regardless, specifically political matters are the centerpiece of my intellectual activity, with a large portion of my time spent studying public policy, political philosophy and theory, and political history. Nearly all of my relevant experience in the field is comprised of research, of reading and thinking. I attempt to draw from as broad a selection of sources as possible, including everything from academic journals such Foreign Affairs, to books on political philosophy such as those by John Stuart Mill, to articles in the New York Times.
I believe that political science is the area in which I will be the most successful.
Prompt #2 - Tell us about a personal quality, talent, accomplishment, contribution or experience that is important to you. What about this quality or accomplishment makes you proud and how does it relate to the person you are?That which is most essential to my personality and that which I am most proud of is my ability to assert myself, and the experiences that lead to the development of that ability. Those experiences began in the period leading up to and during High School, which was for me as it is for many others, a place in which various influences and factors violated the wholeness of myself, resulting, through both my own choice and through the coercion of circumstance, in my assuming a persona (i.e. thoughts, actions, interests, etc) that was largely disingenuous. Perhaps most fundamental was that, while I was deeply intellectually curious as a child, my desire to fit in with teenage culture led me to accept its vacuity as a standard that needed to be lived up to. While my attempts to reengineer myself remained unsuccessful in any fundamental sense, those early teenage years saw me severed from those people who mattered to me most, my life abandoned to chaos and disarray, my academic performance falling to the point of failure, in short, everything I loved had been exchanged for everything I hated.
By the time I neared the end of the ninth grade I had resolved to keep myself from losing control entirely, and so I decided to leave public school in exchange for Coast Redwood, a charter school which operates as a home school with a slight degree of guidance. Where I was once immersed to the point of suffocation in the miasma of peer pressure and the oppression inherent in the public school system, I was now free. Indeed, in a way I was frighteningly alone; all the affections and mannerisms I had built up around myself to maintain appearances, all the mental processes that I had attempted to force into the form of a normal student, all of the shallow cluttering of superficial friendships that I had held around myself, all that I had learned to rest my self esteem and self worth on were now irrelevant. I was, almost at once, liberated from my most drastic failures and my most integral means of self-justification. I was left with the mere kernel of my truest self.
I discovered, in the aloneness inherent in my charter school, the means for self-determination needed to reconstruct myself. Coast Redwood allowed me to choose my own coursework, learning methods, and to operate with a large deal of autonomy. Unencumbered by the impositions on my interests that were a necessary part of public school, old intellectual curiosities, dormant since childhood, reemerged, and my academic performance improved greatly. I read voraciously, consuming copious amounts of knowledge and immersing myself in everything from Greek philosophy to classical music to politics. I renewed myself intellectually during my time in Coast Redwood, committing myself to academic success, and simultaneously returning to a purer state and moving further toward a more perfect realization of myself.
Coast Redwood was, while a boon for my personal development, academically limiting. The possible success that I might have achieved there was restrained by the fact that it was still a high school. Eventually, it became clear that my best recourse would be my local community college, Cabrillo College, which I began to attend full time at 16 (while remaining nominally a Coast Redwood student). During my time spent at Cabrillo my intellectual interests broadened and flourished in a much more structured fashion than they had at Coast Redwood, and I excelled academically to a larger degree than I had ever done before or than I had ever thought possible. I eventually completed about three quarters of my transfer requirement with a near perfect GPA before I was 18.
I was struck by the deeper continuity of my personality that had been present throughout my personal development. For instance, certain traits, such as a strong desire for knowledge and understanding, or a love of learning, seemed inextricable from my character. The forces that affected this constant self, such as peer pressure or conformity, are basically an inevitable part of life and the eventual purgation of their effects during my sojourn in Coast Redwood was necessary insofar as it allowed me to develop my defenses against those forces. On a fundamental level, it was at Cabrillo where I, by my own volition, moved closer toward a more perfect realization of my potential and where I further developed the ability to assert myself.
Evan Estrella
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