♥ M y P e t i t e L i f e

♥ Monday, March 30, 2009

My Petite Life ♥

Why Chicago?

I wanted to post my Why Yale essay, which is a lot shorter (around 300 words if i remember correctly), more to-the-point and overall just better-written. But I couldn't find it anywhere, so i'll post this first.
The bad things about this essay is that it's way too long (800 words). Rarely should an application essay exceed 5-600 words, because you start to lose focus somewhere 3/4 into the essay and the reader loses interest. And that's bad. Nobody wants an essay that's all over the place. This was done in a time crunch, so the grammar is shaky in parts. Sigh. I'm such a grammar Nazi but I believe its important to get the backbone right before you try to do anything else. There's way too much about me in this essay, while it was supposed to be about Chicago /:
That said, here's the essay. Have fun reading it! (if you can, that is...)

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Question 1: How does the University of Chicago, as you know it now, satisfy your desire for a particular kind of learning, community, and future? Please address with some specificity your own wishes and how they relate to Chicago.

At the age of twelve, I sensed that I was “uncommon”. My reading list already included “The Politics” by Aristotle and “The Republic” by Plato, two English books which my father had bought home from the United States per my request. I insisted on taking German in secondary school, while English was all the rage then. Partly because I knew my enthusiasm with German, my father’s “second mother tongue” as he likes to call it, would make him happy, and partly because I was already teaching myself English in order to devour those books. In a way that children are often overconfident about their abilities, having made it to the last page of Politics (and misunderstood half of Aristotle’s ideas as I now realized), I was convinced of my proficiency in English and my readiness to conquer the next foreign language. Of course, I was wrong on many levels and the German plan only came to fruition much later, but that is another story.

As I grew up, I detracted further from the image of the prototypical Vietnamese teenager. While the other kids buried themselves in Japanese comic books and Cartoon Networks, I asked my parents for cable TV to watch international news, questioned everything from the government’s stand on separatist regions in the South, and read up on everything from Bill Clinton’s policies to Vaclav Havel’s rise to the Czech presidency. I defied stereotypes by being both a Chemistry geek and a Literature enthusiast, a bookworm and a badminton player, a girl and a sports fan. (<--- This part's terrible. I don't know why i didn't edit it out... -mich)

At the age of sixteen, I reveled in the much more liberal educational system of Singapore. I dwelled in debates on everything from the Cold War, to the conflict between Indian and Pakistan, to the 2008 US Presidential election. More than ever, I knew that I enjoyed to be intellectually challenged, and that I would seek a college that would supply such an intellectual community, and whose focus would be most decidedly on the academia.

I was introduced to the University of Chicago’s website by a friend who was researching on the best university for Economics, and liked it instantly. Perhaps it was the common “uncommonness” that drew us together. I chuckled at the cheeky name of the then Chicago application – the Uncommon Application. As I got to know more about it, I became more convinced that it was the place for me. The Chicagoan education is often described as tough, demanding but infinitely rewarding for those with a zest for knowledge. I love the Common Core, the fact that Chicago is concerned with equipping its students, the future leaders and industry titans of the world, with the ‘whole scope of human knowledge”, so that they can sustain a conversation with anyone on anything, and even the fact that freshmen are required to read hefty volumes by Marx, Nietzsche, Adam Smith, Aristotle and Plato, amongst others. I have even come to love the prospect of experiencing the haphazard weather of “The Windy City”. But most of all, I love the thirst for knowledge that is internalized in all Chicagoans from the classroom to the lecture stand. Every Chicagoan I know takes with good humor the parodies bestowed upon their university’s commitment to education. They would tell me, “Ah, you want to spend the next four years at “where the fun goes to die”,” and share with me a few more unflattering quotes. We would have a good laugh and the conversation always ends with “But seriously, it’s the best place to learn. You cannot ask for a better education”. I would smile at that confirmation of something I have known all along.

At the age of nineteen, I am finally out of high school and know what I want to do with my next four years. I want to explore the world of politics at a higher level, and Chicago has one of the best political science departments in the world with faculty members like Herbert Simon, Steven Wilkinson and Nathan Tarcov, whose books I have admired and whose quotes I have often seen in the papers. I want a discussion on the role of religion in contemporary wars as my housemates and I lounge around in the common area. I want a debate on the Middle East as we take a stroll in Millennium Park one lazy Sunday afternoon. I want every idea that I have to be questioned, analyzed and ripped apart to shreds, so that I will think of bigger and better ones. I want an education in a big city, with all its exuberance and understated beauty, with people of all colors, backgrounds and occupations who will teach me priceless things about the world, with the best restaurants and theaters, but also with some dark corners of poverty where we can extend our helping hands. And I don’t know any place more capable of providing such things than the University of Chicago.

Labels: US Application, Writing

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3/30/2009 05:52:00 AM

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♥ Sunday, March 29, 2009

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What Singapore gave me...

I posted this on a public forum after someone alluded to the fact that the college admission process is unfair, that colleges said they would look favorably upon someone who prevailed over his circumstantial limitations to achieve great things in high school, and ended up admitting someone like me who "got special helps from her GC" (big lulz at this, but we'll get to that in a minute), and was affluent enough to spend four years abroad in Singapore (that's just not true, because i was on a full government scholarship). The poster lamented the fact that I was picked over "many poor Vietnamese American students from public schools [in America]" (and probably the many mainland Vietnamese students in Vietnam).

I know some of you reading this blog share such sentiments. You think that we, the Vietnamese who studied in Singapore, have an "unfair" edge over the Vietnamese kids who studied at home because we are given amazing opportunities in Singapore to both further our academic studies and build a "glowing" portfolio jampacked with prestigious-sounding competitions and stuff. This post would be my answer to you.

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Feb 05, 2009

Okay this is silly (and outdated, since the quoted post is from Jan 14) but i feel obligated to reply because the person directly addressed (attacked?) me.

First of all, let me make this clear, the "special help from counselor" was just a 10-minute talk about US universities in general. He left my Singapore school (which is a public school) for a private, higher-ranked place a week after our chat and was warning me about applying to HYPS as an international. He didn't help me with ANYTHING, not college list (okay he recommended WashU and Northwestern, and I ended up only applying to the former), not forms, certainly not essays or resume. I received no substantial help whatsoever with the college admission process since after the original GC is gone, his replacement knows squat about US admissions. She didn't even have a form for the fee waiver, so I had to write my own...

I do realize that four years in Singapore gave me a much more competitive profile than the typical Vietnamese student who went to school in Vietnam, but to suggest that I got there by special helps by anybody at all is unwarranted. In many way, a poor Vietnamese student in Singapore is still in many ways disadvantaged compared to the typical local students. Everybody attended tuition classes here and I had none. Hell, everybody has their family here with them to help them with schoolwork or just to be there for them, and I had none. I didn't even go home in the summer because there's always some research project or some competition that i had to go through. Please don't even start by insinuating that I got where I am thanks to my family's wealth. We have none to speak of. My annual family income is 8,000USD and I went to Singapore on a full scholarship awarded by the Singapore government. I didn't go for any SAT prep classes which, let's face it, a good number of students go for including those in Vietnam. Sometimes I lived on 10 dollars a week, and of course private consulting is unheard of.

Yes, I had a high school education in English which surely helped my command of the foreign language. I had more opportunities to "diversify" my portfolio. But I had to slave around for four years with virtually no support system. The stress level was insane and my days sometimes start at 5:30AM and end at 12AM. Let me outline a day in the life of a Vietnamese student in Hanoi for you: School from 7:30 until 12PM, then tuition classes from 2-5PM and another shift from 7-9. Boring, but a lot less stressful and a lot more time to actually study. I left home since i was fourteen and had to deal with all the puberty crap and school drama by myself. I became someone who's cynical, but with a maturity of thought that not many students in my home country have. I think that shows in my essays and during interviews, and was viewed favorably by Yale. If people like me (international students who went to school elsewhere) have a slight edge over others in our country, it's because colleges recognize the added hardship that we withstand, the colorful life experiences we had, and the signs of maturity that some of us might exhibit.

Remember that before Singapore i was in public schools in Hanoi (Vietnam) all the way. And remember again that wherever I am, English to me is still foreign language and it didn't just magically improve after I was thrown into an English-speaking country. Everything I have achieved is by my effort, and mine alone. I don't know how you can think that I got it better than the rest, or that the Yale admission process is unfair/unwarranted because of my admission. I'm not saying that I'm better than the other applicants or that I deserve a place at an elite institution, but I did give them sound reasons to admit me.

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I'm in no way a representative voice for all the Vietnamese in Singapore. God knows I don't even like some of them and make no bones about it, but to be fair, if we do have a good portfolio, that is because we worked like mad dogs for four years for it. Nothing was handed to us in a silver platter. Singapore is not a Disneyland for the nerdy and competitive. It's a very tiny foreign country where the loneliness can kill you and the rat race can bleed you dry. Teachers here don't spoon-feed you opportunities, especially in a top school like NJ where for every spot in a team for any competition, there's a good number of qualified people. Sometimes I asked myself if Singapore was worth it. Sometimes I walked home alone from school at a quarter past 11, when my friends were picked up by their parents in shiny cars and I couldn't help but tear up a little (and if you know me, I'm anything but sentimental). I envisioned my dad in his dirty old motorbike, hideous shorts and torn slippers in my head, and I walked on.

I've gotten a lot more cynical after Singapore. I've never been one to be fooled easily before, but boy, what I'd give to be a tad more innocent and trusting like I was before I got on that plane and was whizzed off to a land where some friends turn backstabbing, gossip-spreading enemies in a heartbeat. I traded innocence for maturity and (some) wisdom. Probably. But sometimes you just want to be carefree and happy and not thinking about everything like you should be at your age (starting from three years ago). To quote Blair Waldorf, I might be headed for a "midlife crisis at eighteen". Sigh.

Many people have come to me for advice regarding the scholarship to Singapore, and I stressed over and over again that they have to really look at their kids and think if he or she is ready for four years studying abroad. But I think my efforts went down the drain, because some people are just too obsessed with the prestige and their bragging rights to their stupid coworkers. They don't really give a crap about their kid's life. I told them that not every Vietnamese kid who studies in Singapore becomes successful. Sometimes people just look at the "success stories" and get a sugar-coated version of the truth. And even those success stories are marred with dark patches that sometimes, even the protagonists chose to obliterate.

At the risk of sounding self-obsessed and pompous, I'd close this overly long post by saying that Singapore is not like a cosmetic surgery center when no matter how disfigured the original specimen is, the end-product is always a perfectly proportioned spectacle. People don't become genius because they come here. It's more of a platform for some to reach their potential. It gives some people the nudge they needed to become something great, but it is also capable of shattering budding dreams and illusions.

Labels: Rants, US Application

♥ Michelle: Auf Wiedersehen!

3/29/2009 01:26:00 AM

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♥ Friday, March 27, 2009

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Faith of My Fathers - a review

- This was submitted as part of my application to the University of Chicago. Yes, I wrote about McCain's memoir in an application to Obama's school (horror with a capital H!). I wrote this in like 1 hour or so, so it's not as polished or concise as I'd like it to be (as if any of my essays was ever concise, but you get the point). In fact I pretty much just wrote down whatever came to my mind -.- talk about last minute work... Looking back, I'm quite appalled by how slipshod it is. -

PROMPT: Would you please tell us about a few of your favourite books, poems, authors, films, plays, pieces of music, musicians, performers, paintings, artists, magazines or newspapers? Feel free to touch on one, some, or all of the categories listed, or add a category of your own.

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ESSAY:

I realized that the University of Chicago’s application might not be the best place to rave about anything created by Senator John McCain. My timing might be a little off, too. After all, the inauguration of the 44th President of the United States is weeks away now. But Faith of My Fathers is not just another memoir written by a politician amidst the heat of the presidential race, a self-advertising campaign aimed at garnering a few electoral votes. It doesn’t even have anything to do with his political career to begin with. I stumbled across McCain’s book while doing research for my A Level Honors paper on the post-Vietnam War educational landscape in Vietnam. I love to explore different perspectives regarding a subject matter, and after months reading and agonizing over every government-approved material available in my home country, I was seriously in need of hearing an American voice on the war. McCain’s was perhaps the best I’ve known yet. Candid, touching and inspiring, the book tells the unimaginable sufferings of a captured pilot and his five and a half year trekking from one Vietnamese prison to the next, getting beaten and tortured during interrogation, and being left for months in solitary confinement for his lucidity to wither and his wounded body to rot. The story was captivating from start to finish, never once degenerated into whining or irrational bashing of the other side. McCain the prisoner (or Mac Kane as his captors called him, the rebellious one to keep an eye on) was emaciated and dependent on a pair of crutches to move about, but his spirit shone through and his love for America was heart wrenching. More than just a tale of the cruelty of war, the book is a recollection of his encounters with heroic individuals. There was Mike, the Navy navigator who sewed an American flag on his prisoner’s shirt, which was then hung up everyday as the rest of the prisoners recited the Pledge of Allegiance. He was severely punished for it. And later that night, with his eyes nearly swollen shut and his ribs broken, he gathered his thread and needle and begun sewing a new flag. There were many who refused to name names despite torture or the risk of death. Some of them were lucky enough to survive, most didn’t.

Faith of My Fathers is one of those rare books that make you cry your heart out and laugh until you tear up at the same time. It makes your mind work at full speed to decipher the symbolism of even the slightest act, and your heart ache when you actually do.

There are many reasons why I should not love this book. If I were an American, I would be a Democrat. And like a large majority of Democrats this year, I should look at McCain with nothing but disdain and disgust. But more than that, I am a North Vietnamese who, until the age of fifteen, was taught by every history teacher to abhor the Americans and American imperialism. I should be appalled by McCain’s attempts to satirize his prison guards and the North Vietnamese’s brainwashing, or “re-education”, efforts, like the radio program “Voice of Vietnam” by Hanoi Hannah that they were made to listen to twice daily. But perhaps being brought up in a household of a Western-educated intellect who favors argument and debate made you immune to one-sided propaganda and appreciate the knowledge that you can extract from impassioned, lopsided and perhaps biased prose.

Sometimes life is not about winning. Ironically, the young John McCain discovered that in a war that to him and many of his contemporaries, his country was never slated to lose. He spent his whole life before Vietnam envisioning chasing after the glory that was bestowed upon his father and grandfather, both of who were four-star Navy admirals. As he limped towards the American transport plane at Gia Lam airport on the outskirts of Hanoi on the day of his liberation, he refused to take the pair of crutches provided to him by his “hosts”. He took away nothing but the truth about war, honor and courage. He learned that “glory is not a conceit. It is not a decoration for valor. […] Glory belongs to the act of being constant to something greater than yourself, to a cause, to your principles, to the people on whom you rely, and who rely on you in return. No misfortune, no injury, no humiliation can destroy it.”

I picked up Faith of My Fathers expecting it to fit into the host of political books that filled my shelves. I like books where reasons matter, where the authors’ arguments, not their sappy stories, dictate how you feel about them. After all, I was and still am a fan of Aristotle’s Politics and Nicomachean Ethics, Plato’s Republic and Hobbes’ Leviathan, among other books. Instead, I found something else. Something that is both intelligent and touching. It’s the wonderful tale of a young man enlisting in a war without a moment’s hesitation just because combat is his heritage, and coming out of it a whole new person, crippled but stronger than ever in spirits. I read the book before the 2008 US presidential race got tougher and uglier, and was able to take in the heroism of McCain’s image and the beauty of his story in their entirety, and I’m glad I did.

Labels: Book Review, US Application, Writing

♥ Michelle: Auf Wiedersehen!

3/27/2009 05:16:00 AM

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Blog revamped!

Yet another attempt at blogging... Hopefully this time it won't be short-lived. I redid the template, cleaned up the Links section to remove those that are now dead or defunct, and added a few widgets. One thing remains the same, and that is the pinkness of this blog. I can't help it. I despise myself for liking pink, but praise God, for I have yet to don a pink ensemble outside the walls of my room.

I wanted to type something else, but i'm exhausted from all the HTML-editing... I know nuts about html, so what you see here can be considered quite a spectacular feat. Well i'm exaggerating, but that's besides the point. I'm not 100% satisfied with the banner yet, but let's leave it to another time.

I still kept all the old blog entries, so new visitors, feel free to check them out. But you should be warned that there's a lot of bitching and complaining so...

To quote the Germans, Auf Wiedersehen!

♥ Michelle: Auf Wiedersehen!

3/27/2009 01:09:00 AM

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SAT Essays

So I have decided to share the writings that I did during the course of my college application. Maybe one day i'll even post my main application essays (only two of them). These SAT essays were done under timed condition (25 minutes), so please mind the bad grammar and funky choice of words...

May 4th, 2008. (SCORE: 11)

ESSAY PROMPT
Common sense suggests an obvious division between the past and present, between history and current events. In many cases, however, this boundary is not clear cut because earlier events are not locked away in the past. Events from history remain alive through people's memories and through books, films, and other media. For both individuals and groups, incidents from the past continue to influence the present--sometimes positively and sometimes negatively.

ASSIGNMENT: Do incidents from the past continue to influence the present? Plan and write an essay in which you develop your point of view on this issue. Support your position with reasoning and examples taken from your reading, studies, experience, or observations.

ESSAY:
The cover of the composition book is faded, and its corners are bent. It doesn’t lie flat as I have marked many of my favourite places with stickers and pins. This diary of my uncle, a combatant who died at the tender age of twenty-one during the Vietnam War, has survived more than thirty years to come to define who I am today. More than anything, it has made me mature in my thoughts and come to realize that history extends its influence into our lives today. Especially, for a country strangled by devastating wars for almost ten centuries like Vietnam, history defines its past and present, and dictates its way to development in the future. However, remember the war-ravaged past and commemorating the heroes who had fallen down for peace and the country’s unification doesn’t equate to forever immersing ourselves in mourning and hatred against our enemies. We need to look forward to a new era of cooperation and genuine friendships, too.
When I was younger I was told that time would heal all the wounds. Images of battlefields on fire and piling corpses will fade into the mist. The society needs to, and will, move on, leaving the bad memories behind. Yet, I have learnt that the past left indelible marks on people. For the paralyzed during the great Vietnam War, there will not be running, or rolling in the grass with children. For families like my own who has lost its beloved members, the memories continue to be hidden wounds in our hearts and souls that hurt as badly today as they did three decades back. Every year, my grandparents would cry terribly when it came to my uncle’s birthday, reminding me that bad memories affect most adversely the parents. But as Dostoevsky once said, “Great ideas are spawn from sufferings”, reflecting on the loss of our loved ones urges us to meditate on how to live rightly amongst others in peace.
Vietnam has certainly improved on its relationship with the United States, its wartime enemy. Investments from US firms pour into Vietnam every year, accounting for a large portion of its domestic incomes. Did this normalization of relation between two sworn enemies in the past come easily? Hardly. In fact, it took more than twenty years for us to finally shake hands with the Americans and truly mean it. Vietnam doesn’t forget, as I am sure neither does America. War veterans from both sides don’t forget the wartime atrocities they witnessed, as attested to by many war memorials. But what is most important is that we remember the past and build the future upon it, cherishing newfound friendships and intensifying built relations. Just like how my grandmother sent my dad to college in the States, the country that took away her other son.

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(Word count: 469)

Oct 22nd, 2008. (SCORE: 11)

ESSAY PROMPT:
Governments, businesses, groups, or people reveal themselves by how they act, not by what they say. A company may claim to value its customers, or a politician may claim to be committed to a cause, but what do their actions say? People or groups may state what they wish were true or what they think others want to hear, but it is their actions that reveal their true values.

ASSIGNMENT: Do actions, not words, reveal a person or group's true attitudes and intentions? Plan and write an essay in which you develop your point of view on this issue. Support your position with reasoning and examples taken from your reading, studies, experience, or observations.

ESSAY
As the old adage goes, “Actions speak louder than words”, I believe it is actions, not mere flowery and empty promises that reveal the most about a person’s true colours. This is especially true in the world of politics, where chicanery is often employed to gain political points or obtain electoral votes, but more often than not turns out to be a mere illusory tactic.

When Robert Mugabe won the 1980 democratic election in Zimbabwe, the country showered him with goodwill and genuine congratulations, simply because the pleasant-looking man promised to bring about an era of unprecedented prosperity and bring the country to greater heights in all aspects. Once in power, Mugabe wasted no time to reveal his criminal nature. Instead of introducing more democratic reforms as promised, he imposed press censorship to silence political opposition, and committed various acts of political terrorism to scare his opponents to enforce his dominance in Zimbabwean politics. A self-serving dictator who only sought to amass wealth for himself, he carried out disastrous economic policies that saw the country’s inflation rate riding as high as 2 million percent in 2008. Instead of bringing Zimbabwe “to greater heights”, Mugabe plunged it to rock bottom in terms of economic growth and political freedom, reducing the country to a grotesque parody of the vibrant democracy it used to be prior to his inauguration.

This phenomenon is not peculiar to Zimbabwe alone, but applicable to a wide range of countries under authoritarian rule, either in the form of one party dominance or military dictatorship. Without any form of checks and balances, the ruling regimes embark on propaganda campaigns, advertising all kinds of miraculous development the country experiences. However, statistical data reveal the true consequences of these dictators’ policies. In the past, the Soviet Union often painted a picture of itself as champion of socialism, an utopian version of a classless society where everyone enjoyed an equal degree of prosperity and wealth. However, the people of the USSR soon discovered what their leaders’ intentions truly were as they found themselves enduring more hardship while those policy makers were purchasing penthouses in the Caribbean and luxurious cars. Policies of centralizing economic resources, putting power in the hands of a handful of members of the Politburo spoke clearly and loudly that the intentions of a few highest-ranking members of the Communist Party were just to enforce their political hegemony and amass wealth. Fast forward to the modern day Myanmar, where the ruling military junta disappointed the public a million times over by failing to carry out reforms, fair and free elections and releasing the country’s most prominent opposition figure Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest. Cleary, one has to delve into the records of policies and actions carried out by these political leaders to see what their true intentions are.

On the other hand, the world has also witnessed many philanthropic heroes who often speak in a cold, harsh manner, if they do speak at all, but turn out to be altruistic people at heart. One prime example of this is the former millionaire Zell Kravinsky. Often reticent in public, he chose to work in the background to help non-profit organizations to deliver immunization vaccines to Third World countries. Refusing any form of press coverage or recognition, he donated almost all of his $45 million real estate empire to philanthropic causes, choosing to retain only a small amount of money to cover his family’s daily expenses. Kravinsky does not speak at all about his altruistic intentions, but his actions, once revealed by a news agency who was curious about his sudden retirement from the business world, touched millions of hearts. Kravinsky was a silent hero.

It is clear, then, that indeed, actions speak much louder than words in uncovering people’s attitudes and intentions. Nice words often please the ears and fool the masses into believing, and voting for, corrupt politicians and would-be dictators, but it is those heroes with altruistic intentions at heart that should be venerated and appreciated.

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Word count: 669 (!)

If you want to see my (nice) handwriting, click here: Page 1, Page 2 :D

Labels: US Application, Writing

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3/27/2009 12:24:00 AM

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Snippets of my Columbia application

- Reposted from Facebook :) -

I know it's not a lot, but I'm bored, and some of you might be interested in reading this :) Everything is written on Page 4 of the Application Part 2. There's a strict character limit. I didn't like spend a lot of time polishing my answers like with my Yale app (which i freaking hand-wrote!). I just typed out whatever i could remember, and proofread it once (or twice, for the last answer).

Oh, I was accepted to Columbia College, Class of 2013 Regular Decision (likely candidate).

List the books you read for pleasure in the past year
The Future of Freedom, Faith of My Fathers, My Life, The Central Liberal Truth, The Clash of Civilisations, The Last Lecture, The Post-American World, The Ghost Wars, Living History, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, Homosexuality and Civilisations, The Kite Runner, Memoirs of a Geisha.

Just bought/Currently reading: Twilight (yes i'm lame, i know), The Three Trillion Dollar War.

I love love LOVE McCain's FoMF, so i'd recommend that to everyone, especially the Vietnamese. It's touching and funny and very meaningful. You can just skip the parts on his granddad and his dad (basically they're great Navy admirals) and read the part about him being a prisoner of war in Hanoi. Then there are the Clintons' memoirs. Hillary's is actually better, in all fairness, but i still have a schoolgirl crush on Bill so... :"> He sort of just rambles on about a lot of things, so if you don't like him you're gonna find his book very tiresome to read. I put in 2 from Fareed Zakaria (the Newsweek dude), and 2 quite controversial ones. Loved Doris Kearns Goodwin's biography of LBJ. I don't know why, given that her most famous are ones on JFK and Lincoln. Maybe it's the Vietnam War connection. 3 purely for pleasure, and 1 because you could totally see it coming.

List the required readings you enjoyed most in the past year
The Cold War: A New History, The Arab-Israeli Conflict: A History, SAT II US History (Kaplan's), Heart of Darkness, Using History, The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War, Vietnam: A History, Essence of Decisions, The Indo-Pakistani Conflict, Longitudes and Attitudes: The World in The Age of Terrorism.

Now most of these aren't exactly "required" reading. We aren't required to read anything for As at least for my subject combination, as far as I know. But most of these books are related to topics that I explored formally in class (History, history research & GP - the terrorism one). Heart of Darkness was a required reading for Literature, and jiahui nicely lent me a book (which i never return, yet xD). I nvr took Lit, but God knows i wanted to and would totally have if it hadnt been for the fact that i can't for the life of me understand poetry...

List the print and/or electronic publication you read regularly
TIME, Newsweek, New York Times, The New Yorker, British Broadcast Corporation, American Political Science Review, Vanity Fair, People, VNExpress, Amazon.com, TED.com

I wanted to give some gossip/notsomainstream websites that i subscribed to, but then decided against it. I didn't want to freak them out. In retrospect, i should have. Lol. Diversity is the key, right?

List the films, performances, exhibits, concerts, shows, etc. you enjoyed most in the past yeart
The West Wing, Iron Man, Rendition, The Dark Knight, Charlie Wilson's War, W., Brideshead Revisited, Becoming Jane, The Other Boleyn Girl, Priest, Seeing. Feeling. Being.: Alberto Giacometti, The Ellen DeGeneres Show, Singapore Arts Festival, Vietnam! From Myth to Modernity.

Of these, TWW, CW's War, W. are political. I wanted to put in Frost/Nixon (which is actually a much better movie than W, which is a humanized version of George W Bush's life), but i went with W cos of character limits xD Priest is an old movie (1994) about a closeted gay Catholic priest (take that!) which is VERY good and powerful.

What you find most appealing about Columbia, and why
"We are New York", says the homepage of Columbia College, and in many ways the analogy is most apt. The College values plurality and individuality, while its students are diverse, dynamic and intriguing. I look forward to being enchanted with the Core Curriculum, crossing paths with people of different cultures and backgrounds who will teach me many things about the world, and visiting the MET for a sculpture we discussed during Art Humanities. Nested inside the diplomatic, artistic and culinary center of the world, Columbia offers everything that I, as an aspiring diplomat, could ask for and more.

It's just a flowery way of saying: New York City. Which is the complete truth, with the "shopping heaven" part left out. I italicized "many" in the 3rd sentence because I meant to include that, but couldn't due to (darn) character limit.

I didn't get an interview despite having been offered one due to demographic limitations. I did send a photo, which is the one Hanh took for my "corner" on the old Royal Commonweath Society website. I was wearing a blue T-shirt dress, looking all smiley and very non-threatening (that's the trick xD).

For the "additional information" part, I sent in my resume and a 2nd essay. While it (the essay) might have helped, I would definitely advise everyone against doing the same thing. One reason is they've specifically asked us NOT to, and the second is to put it bluntly, your essay might not be as earth-shatteringly good as you think it is... It's tiring enough to read one essay, another might just push your admission officer over the cliff.

Yep, that's all. 6 days more for everyone else who's still awaiting replies from Columbia and the rest of the Ivies. Hang in there guys!

Labels: US Application, Writing

♥ Michelle: Auf Wiedersehen!

3/27/2009 12:22:00 AM

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