College Admissions Essay: Learning Who You Are

Learning Who You Are The world is full of the unknown, from the space around us, to the smallest life processes that occur in every living being. The world is a mystery waiting to be fiddled with, examined and solved. I grew up in a family that likes to keep to themselves, but I love learning and exploring the world around me. When I was younger, I always felt secluded because I was so timid. I only felt comfortable with my own family. It’s amazing to see how much I’ve changed over the past eighteen years into someone unafraid to explore her future. From what I remember, most of my childhood was spent with my younger sister and with my cousins. Both of my parents worked, and they dropped me off at my aunt’s house all the time. Any time

I was trapped in a vicious cycle through the week: school, tennis, studying, matches, and repeat. I enjoyed playing tennis, but playing competitively was a stressor on its own. The most pressure I felt was from my mom when I played matches. She was a woman who wasn’t afraid to sigh loudly to show her discontent from the errors I made. I almost never had time to myself or to hang out with friends. I began to hate studying and stopped enjoying learning. School was just a motion I had to go through every day. It wasn’t until sixth grade when I walked into a new teacher’s classroom filled with colorful posters about atoms, the phases of the moon, anything and everything science related. Mrs. Hamer was a teacher that opened my eyes about the world of science. In her class, the forces of nature and the life processes of animals seemed so unbelievable it sounded like they came out of a fantasy book. It was eye opening to see how everything works together. School no longer became a chore, it became a way for me to learn about the world around me. Science quickly became my best and favorite subject and I started to make more time to read. I immersed myself into every science book I could get my hands on. I became a nerd, packed to the brim with facts about nature, the animal kingdom, and extraneous tidbits. As I read more about the different branches of science, biology became a subject I deeply invested myself in. As I continued reading science books, I found myself being fascinated with how the human body functions. It wasn’t until my first anatomy class when I started picturing myself as a