Admissions Essay Samples, Personal Statement Of Purpose Samples From 10+ Colleges

Admissions Essay Samples, Personal Statement Of Purpose Samples From 10+ Colleges I am forever grateful to Pride and Prejudice for reigniting the passion for reading I had lost in middle school. The move to Texas was one of the hardest transitions in my life as I was greeted with a culture shock and had to reinvent myself. On an almost daily basis I was asked to defend my views on a subject, but my debating skills were limited to logical fallacies and ad hominem attacks so I wasn’t too successful. In my eyes it didn’t matter what I said because I was right and they were wrong. The Book Thief refuses to flee from this ambiguity. Instead, the characters within its pages are mixtures of everything and its opposite. My experience of Lolita is intrinsically connected to the discussions I had with my brother. Lolita inspired in me a fervent hunger for discussion of truth. By the time high school rolled around, that girl was nowhere to be found. The notion that prejudice clouds perception was a truth that I don’t imagine I’d have come to as early without the help of Austen and it made me wonder how much more I could learn from reading. After that I became obsessed with reading, falling into my old habits of staying up late to read the last chapter, staying in to read at lunch, and going to the library every weekend. A Pole reciting the opening of Pan Tadeusz is like an American reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. Its author, Adam Mickiewicz, is considered something of a literary god, somewhere between Dante and Shakespeare. The novel focuses on ways the Soviet regime exerted its power on its people. Coming from a post-Soviet country still struggling with its past, where some adore past times while others despise them, I am interested in how the regime worked to indoctrinate people. In California my peers and I had shared the same views. We were all so liberal which at the time felt like a blessing, but when I got to Texas it seemed as though everywhere I went my ideas were challenged. After years and years of being told what to think and the “right” questions to ask, I had retreated into intellectual paralysis. I would uncomprehendingly coast through my classes, molding my knowledge to fit the next quiz and promptly forgetting it afterwards. School didn’t require, and at times, actively discouraged my insatiable desire to figure out the puzzles of the world, so I shoved that side of myself away and forgot that it even existed. This epic is not only a great bookâ€"it is the great book of Poland, as important and symbolic as the Vistula River that flows from the Polish mountains to the Baltic sea. Constitution, Poles are required to memorize sections of Pan Tadeusz, especially those which are thought to embody the core of what it means to be Polish. For fear of being next to disappear or jealousy because someone lives a tiny bit better than you, espionage and treason become a normal part of life. This sense of clarity I received, was due in part to Pride and Prejudice because even though it did not provide me with the answers to my questions, it had given me a sense of self awareness. The story’s protagonist, Liesel Meminger, learns this lesson through her experiences in Nazi Germany, a place and time in which we are often inclined to believe that good and evil existed as separate entities. The Book Thief introduces a myriad cast of characters and thrusts them into the polarizing world of Nazi Germany. Not one of the book’s characters can be defined in terms of “good” and “evil,” or “right” and “wrong.” Rather, they are all unequivocally human, for better or for worse. The one absolute truth to our existence is the divide between life and deathâ€"and, some may argue that death is the only cessation of our humanity. Although the novel is not a history book, its presentation of characters helps to crystallize the essence of what the Soviet Union looked like. The fact of it being a literary work has made it easier for me to comprehend and visualize the historical period which was so devastating to my country. The novel helped me understand that the harder an ideology is pushed on people, the harder they will rebel in indirect ways. The constant fear turned people into animals willing to do anything to survive. After reading Lolita, my brother and I spent the following days dissecting every minute detail, trying to find some kind of understanding of Lolita. We searched together for insight, sat up late after dinner arguing about whether or not Humbert loved Dolores, and what the final meeting between Humbert and Dolores meant.