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College Admissions Essay: My Diverse Life Experiences

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I have lived my entire life in the shadow of the Boulder flatirons, surrounded by the city’s ‘hippie’ culture and diverse population. My life experience and worldview have been shaped by my own background, but by the diverse life experiences of the people who I interact with as well. I come from a tight-knit, well-educated family. Eight of my parents nine siblings live in Colorado, so my entire childhood was spent in the company of my extended family fostering a deep sense of love, community, and unbounded support. My mother is an elementary school teacher, and from a young age, she passed onto me a great love of learning. My entire life, I was given the resources to succeed and excel in academics. My growing passion for learning was cultivated …show more content…

I originally saw the job as an opportunity to gain some experience in the workforce and earn a little extra money, but it turned out to be one of the most enriching, eye-opening experiences of my life. I was always extremely shy and introverted. Most of my life, I had confined myself to small circles of friends and acquaintances, most of whom were just like me: driven students who obsessed over grades and quizzes and spent afternoons participating in clubs and sports. Given my introverted nature, I neither had the desire nor the courage to test the boundaries of my social circles. As I got to know my new coworkers, that bubble that I had confined myself to finally burst. Most of my co-workers were high school students. Like me, but they had drastically different life experiences and motivations. I was taken aback by the drastic diversity in their life experiences as I learned about their lives and circumstances which were vastly different from anything I had …show more content…

Before joining the wait-staff team at the nursing home, I had never seen him before, despite spending seven hours a day in the same building for the past three years. Over folded napkins, I learned that he spent much of his time in school across the street, smoking and doing drugs. My whole life, I have been very invested in school, I didn’t have the time nor the desire to fraternize with this other group of students. I took every advanced class and spent every afternoon participating in History Day or science club. At Boulder High, I’d taken as many AP classes as I could since my freshman year. Until I met him, I hadn’t realized how many people I had never crossed paths with, even in my own grade. Although we had chosen very different directions in life and I did not approve of his decisions, I was intrigued by his motivations and his life experiences. Meeting him helped me realize the broad spectrum of people in my life and taught me to embrace the different trajectories of our life experiences; because, despite our differences, we worked side by side, making salads and cutting pies. No one follows the same path through life, but my work experiences altered my preconceived notions about the people around me. I learned how to work and form relationships with people whose life experiences are very different from my

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