PS Frist Draft, Please help out! Forum

[Anonymous User]

I glance up at the foreign characters above me and see it’s my stop on the line. I try to move and I can’t. I am literally trapped by a wall of people and none of them are showing any intention of making way for those who may want off at this stop. The bus is about to start moving again and I begin to panic. I have seconds to make a decision so I make a desperate grab for the handrail across several people. It takes all my strength, and a total abandonment of any sense of decorum, to rip myself from the claws of the packed crowd and out into the daylight. As I fill my lungs with their first full breath of “clean” air I realize with horror that in the process of escaping I have dislodged an old woman onto the street. Without so much as a glance though, the woman shoves herself and her bags back on to the bus matter-of-factly and it begins to moves along full of people who will soon forget my face and the event itself. I on the other hand stand on the street forever impacted.
Looking back on my experience studying abroad in China this memory has become one of my fondest because I feel like it so aptly represents my initial culture shock. Coming from Reno, Nevada even my move to Las Vegas for college wasn’t a huge leap from my norm. China on the other hand was truly a whole new world. The few stares I had elicited that day were with curiosity for the six-foot three white student late to a Mauy Thai practice, and had nothing to do with my behavior. Of my countless incredible experiences while studying abroad in Chengdu, China this one was one of the most surreal because I realized in that moment, in that place, for the first time in my life I was not normal or average and behavior that had made me really uncomfortable, was.
For the semester I immersed myself in a radically different culture, lived in a city with a population above 4 million, which was small by Chinese standards, as I learned the radically different language of Mandarin by necessity to buy food and, well necessities. My time in China made me fall in love with economics all over again because I saw again and again that regardless of how different a culture was, a language, a people, economics was something that explained human behavior in a beautiful way. I will graduate with a BSBA in Economics because economics in many ways is a quest for that same perspective I was searching for while studying abroad, and throughout my life. It answers the why. It is understanding business, understanding cause and effect. It is learning causality, variables, and relations to the whole. It is finding the effect that anything has upon something else, testing for significance. It is learning under assumptions of free entry and exit, or a perfect world. These assumptions can be accepted in America but were unimaginable while I studied abroad.
I will forever remember the hardest essay I have ever written rivaled only by my Chinese character paper at semesters end. During a Modern Government and Politics class I took while in China we talked at length about the massive Bo Xilai scandal that had began a year prior in the very city I was now a resident of. He was eventually charged for corruption, bribery, and abuse of power but not before seeking asylum with the American Consulate in Chengdu. When lecturing on this topic, our teacher had us all turn off our phones and stop taking notes while we spoke for fear of his own safety. After the discussion we were assigned to write an essay focusing on Chinese corruption. I will never forget the multitude of attempts it took to properly cite and reference that paper. Every time I would type China+Corruption into a search engine my computer would disconnect from the Internet, I would be redirected, or my computer would slow to an impossible speed before quitting my browser completely. I needed a proxy just to finish that paper and I will never forget the feeling of pride for my home country’s set of laws and basic citizen rights. Studying economics in our country where concepts such as this are unimaginable gave me a curiosity for the law I hadn’t had before. Economic practice I had studied was protected and regulated, I had never seen first hand, in every day life economic injustice like this. The initial interest turned into a passion as I came home and saw the connections with my major. Numbers connected to words, quantifiable data linked to policy as the two progressed along with the rest of my undergraduate career.
I see the next bus stop on my line at ______ to study law. If economics is strategy in the game of life then I see law as the rules. Economics explains why people do much of what they do but law is the code with which that cause and effect must confine itself to. I can think of no better step to continue to build myself into a business professional who understands the world in which we live than ___________.

[CanadianWolf]

First, consider deleting all phrases such as "I will forever remember" or "I will never forget" as they are speculative phrases that add nothing to your communication.

Second, change the second use of "radically" when referring to the Mandarin dialect of the Chinese language.

Overall, a high energy, interesting writing that lets the reader share in your enthusiasm for your new found understandings.

[Anonymous User]

Alright, definitely get what you're saying there

[CanadianWolf]

The ending is very good as it offers a conclusion brought about by your analysis of your recent experiences & how it prompts you to enter law school. Great first paragraph as you show & tell how you realized that normal has a different meaning in foreign environments.