Personal Experience In My Life

We are interested in learning more about you and the context in which you have grown up, formed your aspirations, and accomplished your academic successes. Please describe the factors and challenges that have most shaped your personal life and aspirations. How have these factors helped you to grow? (800)

I look up to see a smiling baby with blue eyes, so sweet and innocent. Who knew life would throw these obstacles at us. Only a few days old and her future began to become unclear, already having to go through life changing surgeries. Everybody has a personal experience, some happy while others are not as joyful. Sometimes all you can do is hope that there is a chance things can go your way. But the hardest part is staying strong for those you love.

My heart trickled down to one beat per minute. I slowly realized the different types of people surrounding me on a day to day basis. I asked myself the following question: “Alex, why have you molded yourself into a new person?” Realizing the pace and discomfort my life was going towards, I sought to answer the question. I had lost a genuine friendship built over several years. This loss had affected me very deeply to the point I did not recognize the myself in the mirror anymore. Entering freshmen year, I was unable to enjoy the social interaction which took place around me. Trusting new people became nearly impossible. I punished those who had my best interest at heart, because I assumed they would betray me like my previous friendship. I had also assumed that every new friendship I built had an immediate expiration date. This means I chose to purposefully distance myself in order to not get hurt. The Alex Curry people became acquainted to was a falsified character of my true self. My pain developed my character into a overly trusting person to a person who could not even trust their family anymore.

It’s hard to imagine what your life will be like, where it’ll take you, or what the future holds for you. If you told 13-year-old me that I was going to be on the path of 8 more years of schooling after high school, working towards a medical degree, I probably would have laughed and repeated the line that I have said so many times: “I’ll never become a doctor...that’s so gross”. At that age, my dream was to become a pastry-chef in a patisserie somewhere in the south of France, living life peacefully. I thought that I could never follow in my parents’ footsteps, sacrificing the best years of my life for the all-consuming difficulty and intensity of the pre-med track. And it is very intense. If you ever come across a pre-med student, they’re likely stumbling over the clutter of their biology textbooks and boundless research papers, frantically searching for the cure for some disease that no one can actually pronounce, all the while cramming for the MCAT that’s in 912 days because they have not yet memorized every bone in the human body. I’d like to dissociate myself from that stereotype. While most aspiring pre-med students were worrying about medical school acceptance rates, I was dreading my dad’s weekly case-study reading that he absolutely had to have my opinion on. Not to mention the countless visits I made to my mother’s work Christmas parties, where the nurses were constantly dressed in their scrubs, and I mean constantly, and the food unmistakably came straight from

On June 10, 2006, I woke up like any other Saturday, expecting it to be a good day of baseball. Little did I know, how much my life was about to be turned upside down. Getting the news that my father had passed away from a heart attack, at the age of 30, really took a toll on my family and I. I couldn’t let that stop me from having a successful life because he wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. That meant it was time for me to step up to the plate and be a man, be a role model for my little brother, and also be the shoulder that my mom could lean on. Even though I was only 10 years old and in the fifth grade, I really grew up and matured since that day.

I grew up in Romania where I called a camper my home for the first eight years of my life. We moved from city to city reaching out to the Gypsy community. A childhood in which one gets lice most summers, intermingles two languages assuming everyone understands both, and attends second grade in three different countries is, of course, an unconventional upbringing. With the unconventional upbringing, however, came extraordinary experiences that have shaped who I am and the life I have chosen to pursue.

EVErY FAmILY hAS ThEIr STorY, ALL with aspects that brings them together or drive them apart. I come from a Mexican family, where family is the only thing we know. We share each other’s pain and misery and we rejoice for our miracles. We learn and grow through each other.

When I was seven years of age my family and I lived in Los Angeles, California, approximately thirty-five miles from the city of Reseda, the epicenter of the now infamous 1994 Northridge earthquake. Many memories from my childhood are a blur, but the morning of January seventeenth is crystal clear. I recall being awakened roughly at 4:30 in the morning when my bed began trembling uncontrollably beneath me. An unexplainable fear took over me, which kept me from jumping out of my bed and running out of my room, so I laid on my bed, paralyzed, waiting for my father to save me. However, before my father was able to find his way to my room, the shaking stopped.

It was the beginning of summer after my seventh grade year. The sun was blazing, the birds were chirping, and I felt an overwhelming sense of freedom. Life seemed great, until the next day when I was bored out of my mind and had nothing to do. During middle school, I followed my brother, Isaac, around like a mime. Whatever he did I would aspire to do the same. This was no different when, bored out of my mind, I found out my brother was going to go disc golfing with the neighbor friends. When Isaac asked me if I wanted to come with, I jumped up, ran to my bike, and told him I was ready whenever he was. I had never heard of what “disc golf” was, but I knew that since my brother was doing it, it was cool! So I followed Isaac and the neighbor friends all the way to Northside Park, sweating immensely from the summer heat and from how quickly I was biking. On the first hole, Isaac gave me my own disc to borrow for the round. This sport was completely foreign to me, so I threw my disc as hard as I possibly could, in an attempt to impress Isaac and his friends. Not only did the disc go absolutely nowhere, but I threw it so high that the wind actually pushed it backwards. I felt humiliated as everybody laughed at me. Isaac, however, came up to me and explained to me how discs fly and the proper way to throw. Each hole, I could visibly see my disc traveling further than the previous hole. Every time Isaac saw me doing something improperly, he would correct me and tell me how to fix

My mother perpetually advises me by stating “সর্বদা আপনার সেরা করা,” which translates from Bengali to English as “always do your best.” Taking heed of my mother’s advice has led me to always try to be the best possible version of myself, in school and outside of it. Knowing myself, junior year was going to be arduous as is; I would be studying profusely for my SATs and ACTs, going nights with minimal sleep as I would be taking nine total classes, eight of which were Advanced Placement classes, and further pursuing ways to aid others through my will to volunteer. None of this was going to be facilitated by the added stress of finding out my father had just been diagnosed with having an “enlarged prostate,” meaning less and less time would

A personal experience I have encountered would be growing up without my birth parents. At the age of 6 my mother put me up for adoption. My father was no we’re to be in sight, I never meet him in my entire life. Growing up in the foster system has a lot of pros and cons for example, I was separated from my brothers and sisters for a very long time, also there would be days that I would go to two or three different homes in a single day. Bouncing around from family to family is not the way a kid should live. At the time I didn’t really comprehend what was going on, as I got older I finally realized that I got nobody but myself. Some nights I would cry because I missed my mom, brother and sisters. Life was hard not having family, but I

Being an individual of many interests, life experiences and commitments, I know that I will enrich the UWM community. I believe that life experiences are extremely crucial in self-development. The more you experience, the more you grow as an individual. I say that with such pride because I can say myself that the life experiences I have gone through has shaped who I am. Commitments rather they are large or small, you are dedicating yourself to something which comes easy to me. When I am dedicated to something, I give it my all. One should give their 110% in all that they do because that’s what makes someone successful. With that being said, I will give my 110% to enrich the community of UWM with my life experiences, commitments and

Ten years ago, I was officially a college dropout; leaving Wiley College after only two years was the biggest mistake of my life. Ten years ago, I created a narrative about the type of people who went to college. I made myself believe that college was a place exclusively for extremely smart people who came from nice middle-class families. College was not a place where an African American who lived in subsidized housing went. Although I was enrolled in college and doing quite well, I fell victim to self-doubt and ultimately believed that I did not have the ability to graduate. Consequently, after only two years, I dropped out of college.

My friends had motorcycles before I got my hands on one and it was probably on one of these machines eventually the idea of helping my parents clouded over. In Pakistan, gas prices are high, so having a small displacement motorcycle sure cut down on money and time provided you can keep your ego aside from riding basically a modest means of transport. My motorcycle that my parents got me a little after my twelfth birthday was a great experience for me. Not only did it help me keep burdens of transport off my parents, save time and money, but also gave me an unprecedented feeling of independence. The new freedom was my next big step to growing up, however, I know it was kind of risky and I was not an expert to ride a bike by myself, but used to ask my dad to teach me when I had to go alone somewhere with him.

Imagine your story becoming the forerunner of someone else’s. Someone you have never met, yet because of one story, he or she found the strength and courage to become a person far greater than ever imagined. A story of unimaginable adventures, lessons, and hardships, this is the story I, Thu Dang, will create for myself and others.