<p>Please feel free to critique, proofread, and make suggestions over my essay.
Prompt: A range of academic interests, personal perspectives, and life experiences adds much to the educational mix. Given your personal background, describe an experience that illustrates what you would bring to the diversity in a college community, or an encounter that demonstrated the importance of diversity to you.</p>
<p><em>Soy Sauce</em></p>
<p>"Doostet oomad!" My mom calls out to me in our native tongue Persian. " You're friend has come!". My friend Stephen is coming over to my particularly Iranian natured house for the very first time. The sweet aroma of rice takes over the house's atmosphere, as my mother cooks us her famous reshteh polo, a scrumptious meal among many others found in the Iranian cuisine. I open the door for my friend and we share our greetings and exchange friendly words. After noticing the delicious fragrance of the cooked rice, Stephen asks me if we could eat first. Being quite hungry myself, I willingly answered yes. So we sit down on the table and converse, while my mom serves us the steaming hot dish alongside some ice cold refreshments. After we start eating, Stephen asks me if we have soy sauce. Confused at first, I try to tell him that Persian food would probably not coincide well with a sauce commonly used in Asian cuisines. He assured me that he would enjoy it. So I give him some soy sauce, and much to my surprise, he finishes his whole plate and tells me how delicious the meal is. In my curiosity, I also try out the food with soy sauce, and discover that Stephen is right. Reshteh polo with soy sauce is delicious!<br>
Being an Iranian living in a small isolated town in northeast Tennessee, Diversity is something I have always added to my community. However, interestingly enough, it is my friends interesting twist to a food that makes me realize the importance of diversity. If he had never introduced me to this interesting mix of an Asian sauce to a Persian dish, I would never have known the interesting burst of flavor it adds on to it. Also, if I had never invited him to experience a food native to my land, Stephen wouldn't have had the ability to try a dish in the Iranian cuisine in the first place. So why is diversity important? The answer has become clear for me now: so we can experience new things. So we can learn and exchange our ideas, beliefs, and customs and expand our minds with knowledge of the world, whether it be in science, math, history, language, or in so many other subjects.
So later on the day, when Stephen is about to leave, he asks me if I would like to go to his church, a Baptist church, with him the following day. I had never been to a Baptist church before, so this was a golden opportunity to experience it. "Of course, man!" I reply, smiling.</p>