One of the main reasons I did not write for awhile was that I was very stressed out about applying to colleges. But I would like you to know that this is the essay that I ended up with. I was accepted to Hamline on Jan 12th, but now I have to wait to see if I am accepted to Macalaster because I applied there early decision.

For the first time in my life I could not participate in class discussions or even comprehend what the teacher was saying. My classmates jotted notes in their textbooks, chanted a song to remember verb conjugation, and joked with the teacher, but it was my first day of Japanese class and instead of class work, all I could do was scan the board and strain my ears for words I knew such as “남자” (nam-ja) and “학생” (haksaeng), meaning “boy” and “student”. As a foreign exchange student to Seoul, South Korea my Japanese class was not being taught in English or even Japanese, but in the country’s native language, Korean.

The Korean alphabet, hangul, consists of fourteen consonants and ten vowels, none of which remotely resemble the Romanized alphabet on paper, and the sentence structure is subject, object, then verb instead of subject, verb, then object. I studied the basics before arriving in Korea, but in Korean high school my processing time was too slow and vocabulary too low to understand the main topics in classes.

My Japanese teacher, Mrs. Chu, could not speak English, encouraged the students not to speak English to me unless explaining part of the lesson, and gave me a copy of the Japanese Hiragana alphabet the first week and asked me to memorize it. For a few days I focused on studying Korean and not Japanese, but at the next class period she called on me to read out loud. Since the passage was written in Japanese, I could only recognize the character ‘ka’, and my classmates had to help me syllable for syllable.

That night I created Japanese flashcards and studied them until the hiragana letters embedded themselves in my head. I began copying into my own textbook the same notes my classmates had been jotting and asking the students what the Japanese words meant. Sometimes they answered in English, but if the response was in Korean I could use my dictionary to find the English word and learned a new Korean word at the same time. With my host mom’s help I began translating homework from Japanese into Korean, and then English so by the next time Mrs. Chu asked me to participate I knew both how to pronounce the words and their meanings.

Japanese and Korean have similar sentence structures so studying the languages together helped me adapt to the sentence structure I need when using Korean in my everyday life. I still do not claim that I am even intermediate in either language, but I have created an intense study schedule for the two months of winter break, hoping that when I return to school for the first semester in March I will not only be able to understand the main topics in class, but to ask Mrs. Chu questions in Korean when I am confused. I am usually an active participant in my classes and I will not let a language barrier change my personality and work ethic.

This is the one that I applied to Mac with...

Between the rolling cornfields of Sogn Valley and Welch Village are farms like the Hernke’s that have been owned by the same Scandinavian families since before Minnesota gained its statehood. Freshly constructed town homes are inhabited by Cannon Falls’ newest residents of third generation European descent and when Sunday rolls around some citizens attend Mass at St. Pius V, while others gather for Protestant services at one of the six other churches. Cannon Falls High School’s students of color total about twenty-five in a student body of five hundred. Macalester College appeals to me because this is not their definition of diversity.

Macalester, usually mentioned in conjunction with cultural awareness or the international community of the metropolitan area, creates an ideal environment for nurturing international awareness through their Department of Multicultural Life that I can not find at other universities.

The month I turned nine years old my family moved away from my childhood home of fifteen-o-five Prentice Street, Arlington, Texas. Koreans, Indians from two different castes, Latin Americans, a family from Kenya, and two homosexual couples shared Prentice Street with a minority of middle class, white, two point five child families.

One of the Indian families followed a tradition that the first son receives a first birthday party as large as a wedding. Hamid, the son, was five years old by the time of the festival. I was seven. The YMCA room smelt like the spice isle of a grocery store with all the lids removed. I bit into a doughy roll expecting sugary sweetness, but encountering a hot spice I had never before tasted. Dancers twirled and bowed and lit up the room with their vibrant robes and veils. During my childhood in Texas, cultural experiences such as Hamid’s birthday party seemed to be part of the average life.

Since moving to a small, predominantly white middle class Christian town, I have learned that few people experience cultural diversity naturally. Macalester creates its community of diverse cultural understanding by hosting the fourth largest population of international students and providing monthly cultural discussions through “In the Kitchen With…” and “Soup & Substance” along with student organizations to support students of all sexualities, religions and heritages.

Since I left Texas, I have worked to keep my diverse cultural perspective by becoming Spanish Club treasurer and taking extra Spanish classes at the Resource Center for the Americas in Minneapolis. In history and sociology classes I challenge fellow students to place themselves in the mindsets of other cultural communities and to not use racial or sexual jokes. Throughout the years I have befriended numerous exchange students and am now in Seoul, South Korea for a year of studying language and culture. I hope to provide the perspectives of a diverse metropolitan neighborhood, a small Scandinavian descended town, and an Asian city to the Macalester community. On hot September days and cold February afternoons, I want to sit down in the Lealtad-Suzuki Center and digest some substance with my soup.