(nearly) Final Draft PS: Comments appreciated
Posted: Thu Aug 12, 2010 1:44 pm
The Arabic language: classified by the US Department of State as one of the world’s five most difficult languages. Its twenty-eight characters, many with no English pronunciation equivalent, are written right-to-left with grammatical rules that make simple processes like forming plurals into intellectual endeavors rivaling nuclear physics. The ranking is warranted. Yet, instead of being deterred by this daunting collection of incomprehensible scribbles, I am inspired. I am driven to excel by challenges and thrive when confronted with insurmountable tasks. This has proven true in high school, college, and while studying French and Arabic abroad, and I am confident it will again prove true in law school.
My first linguistic challenge came through a semester immersion program in France. Due to an inadequate number of semesters of French, I had been forced to gain special approval into the program, and when I arrived, I was admittedly in over my head. The entire first night, I was unable to utter a complete sentence, and my host family even turned to English to make sure I understood the rules. Slightly embarrassed, I sought to remedy the problem as aggressively as possible. While most of my friends retreated to English language novels and TV shows, I “Francified” all my activities. In my leisure, I played soccer twice a week with French students at the university, watched local TV, and read French novels. I started with short stories and plays, but by the end of the semester I had read over 4,000 pages in French, and every morning, I read the Figaro newspaper cover to cover. When my parents came to visit near the end of the semester, my host mother confessed that when I arrived, I was the worst French speaker of the twenty-five Americans they had hosted, but that I was now the best they had ever had. Due to my diligent strategizing, I responded to the challenge of immersing myself in a culture, in which I could hardly order lunch, and reached my current level of fluency in French.
Armed with this confidence, I decided to up the ante and apply for the US State Department’s Critical Languages Scholarship for beginning Arabic. A week after returning from France, I was once again airborne over the Atlantic. Destination: Tunis, Tunisia. Whatever confidence I had developed while in France vanished about thirty seconds into the first lesson, when my professor informed me that my notebooks was upside down. How else could we write from right to left? Over the course of the summer, the thirty college and post-graduate students chosen to be among the 6% worthy of the government grant were tested to the edge of their limits. We were there on the government’s dime, and they did not intend to have it wasted. Nine hours at the program’s center was the norm and we had a minimum of five hours of homework to grapple with nightly. On our weekend “breaks,” students were constantly piping the dreaded I-Vocab through their headphones or drilling exercises in Al-Kitaab in preparation for our weekly examination. Many of my fellow students, exhausted by the daily grind, refused to utter a word of Arabic outside of the walls of our program center, but I approached it differently. I sought out every opportunity to speak with Tunisians. I spent hours at meals with our host family, hoping to absorb whatever vocabulary I could, and conversed with the employees at the local café so often that I was invited to join their weekly soccer match. All of this hard work finally paid of at the end of the summer when I earned the highest grade of anyone in the program, 99%, on our final examination. In the face of the hardest intellectual challenge of my life, I had once again flourished.
Through these experiences abroad, my studies as a Global Relations major, and my longstanding passion for law, I have developed a strong desire to work in the growing field of international law. Currently, I am working with the Chertoff Group, an organization providing strategic security advice and risk management solutions for commercial and government clients. Following law school, I will pursue a career devoted to issues concerning the relationship between governmental and commercial prerogatives, international norms, and the legal rights of citizens in matters of security. These experiences and my proven ability to respond well to challenges will allow me to make significant contributions to the XXXX community. In addition, my experience in Sewanee’s intellectual setting, focusing on writing skills, a low student-faculty ratio, classroom discussion, and an interdisciplinary approach to the subject matter have prepared for the similar educational environment at XXXX. I am therefore extremely confident that I will be a valuable asset in the classroom and a successful student at XXXX.
My first linguistic challenge came through a semester immersion program in France. Due to an inadequate number of semesters of French, I had been forced to gain special approval into the program, and when I arrived, I was admittedly in over my head. The entire first night, I was unable to utter a complete sentence, and my host family even turned to English to make sure I understood the rules. Slightly embarrassed, I sought to remedy the problem as aggressively as possible. While most of my friends retreated to English language novels and TV shows, I “Francified” all my activities. In my leisure, I played soccer twice a week with French students at the university, watched local TV, and read French novels. I started with short stories and plays, but by the end of the semester I had read over 4,000 pages in French, and every morning, I read the Figaro newspaper cover to cover. When my parents came to visit near the end of the semester, my host mother confessed that when I arrived, I was the worst French speaker of the twenty-five Americans they had hosted, but that I was now the best they had ever had. Due to my diligent strategizing, I responded to the challenge of immersing myself in a culture, in which I could hardly order lunch, and reached my current level of fluency in French.
Armed with this confidence, I decided to up the ante and apply for the US State Department’s Critical Languages Scholarship for beginning Arabic. A week after returning from France, I was once again airborne over the Atlantic. Destination: Tunis, Tunisia. Whatever confidence I had developed while in France vanished about thirty seconds into the first lesson, when my professor informed me that my notebooks was upside down. How else could we write from right to left? Over the course of the summer, the thirty college and post-graduate students chosen to be among the 6% worthy of the government grant were tested to the edge of their limits. We were there on the government’s dime, and they did not intend to have it wasted. Nine hours at the program’s center was the norm and we had a minimum of five hours of homework to grapple with nightly. On our weekend “breaks,” students were constantly piping the dreaded I-Vocab through their headphones or drilling exercises in Al-Kitaab in preparation for our weekly examination. Many of my fellow students, exhausted by the daily grind, refused to utter a word of Arabic outside of the walls of our program center, but I approached it differently. I sought out every opportunity to speak with Tunisians. I spent hours at meals with our host family, hoping to absorb whatever vocabulary I could, and conversed with the employees at the local café so often that I was invited to join their weekly soccer match. All of this hard work finally paid of at the end of the summer when I earned the highest grade of anyone in the program, 99%, on our final examination. In the face of the hardest intellectual challenge of my life, I had once again flourished.
Through these experiences abroad, my studies as a Global Relations major, and my longstanding passion for law, I have developed a strong desire to work in the growing field of international law. Currently, I am working with the Chertoff Group, an organization providing strategic security advice and risk management solutions for commercial and government clients. Following law school, I will pursue a career devoted to issues concerning the relationship between governmental and commercial prerogatives, international norms, and the legal rights of citizens in matters of security. These experiences and my proven ability to respond well to challenges will allow me to make significant contributions to the XXXX community. In addition, my experience in Sewanee’s intellectual setting, focusing on writing skills, a low student-faculty ratio, classroom discussion, and an interdisciplinary approach to the subject matter have prepared for the similar educational environment at XXXX. I am therefore extremely confident that I will be a valuable asset in the classroom and a successful student at XXXX.