COLLEGE ESSAY FOR MSU

This is a draft of my application essay to Michigan State.  Please help me with it!

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PROMPT: If admitted to Michigan State, you will join a diverse community of students, faculty, staff, and alumni. Please respond to the following hypothetical situation: In your first-semester English course you are assigned a group writing project to be completed within a week. In addition to yourself, your group is comprised of five other students, some of whom are from different countries and/or have different racial/ethnic backgrounds than you. Please explain how your past life experiences will help you effectively collaborate with your group members in order to achieve success on this project.

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From ages 2 to 8, I lived in a suburb of Nashville called Franklin, Tennessee.  Although I was too young to realize it at the time, just by living in Franklin I had been set up to harbor some undesirable opinions about other races, and I didn’t even realize this until recently.  This past July I drove down to Tennessee with my family to visit old neighbors and friends and for the first time in my life, I realized how happy I was that I moved to northern Ohio when I was 8.  I began to notice racism towards African-Americans, Hispanics, and Arabs alike indented deeply into the brains of the people who had made my childhood amazing, and suffice it to say I was shocked.  I could not believe that those people could still have such barbaric views on race- and that they shared it so openly.

Of all the kids in the old neighborhood, my brother, my sister and I were among the only ones to have parents who worked closely with international cultures.  Both of my parents taught me cultural acceptance since I was small because they both work in jobs where they need to deal with other ethnicities.  My mother works as a Spanish teacher at a local high school where she teaches the Spanish language but she learns about the backgrounds of many of her students.   My father works as an international salesman has travelled the world with his work.  Both of my parents are bilingual with English and Spanish. 

You could say I took my genetic gift for languages and ran with it.  In the summer of 2010 I did program at Kent State University where I studied the Arabic language and culture day and night for a month straight.  When I got home from Kent I started my job as a lifeguard, where I immediately picked up on the most prominent racism we have here in Westlake: towards Arabs.  It was clear that my coworkers had no understanding of the Arabic culture and held hostility against Arabs because of it.  I tried to explain why the women wore their hijabs in the pool and why the children didn’t always follow the rules, but the lifeguards around me were persistent in their bigotry, and it was one of the reasons I quit my lifeguard job.

Through these life experiences I have found that I have a talent for celebrating foreign cultures.  I am very good with empathy; I know how to use it to find out how to work well with other people.  

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okay so if you have read this it is REQUIRED that you comment.  Please tell me anything you like or don't like, anything you think I should add and ESPECIALLY anything you think I could cut from the essay because it is 429 words and it needs to be 400 or less.