<p>I'm going for the Visual Arts.</p>
<p>I submitted this already to the panel, but I wanted to know your reactions. There were two essays, both one page, double spaced. The first asked for an autobiography with our personal aspirations. The second asked for why we wished to go to Governor's school in the first place. I'd really appreciate some readers and comments on both.</p>
<p>Eh. CC seemed to have gotten rid of all of my formatting.</p>
<p>First Essay:</p>
<p>It has occurred to me many times that at some point in my life I really should feel some sort of identity crisis, having lived in China, Japan, and Canada before my family finally settled down in the United States. Somehow or other, I’ve never managed to empathize with that particular sentiment, or indeed feel any sort of homesickness altogether – wherever home was – beyond the superficial disappointment of bygone childhood friendships. The conflict of cultures or a need to be Americanized did not exist – I simply was. I look like the typical Asian; my eyes are colored, or so I’ve fancied, deep amber, but then again I’d say my hair is dark brown, and heard it described quite varyingly when others were presented with the same question. That, I’ve always wanted to explain, is the extent of my heritage’s influence on the person I am, so why go through all the trouble with the fortune cookie wisdom and keep on asking?</p>
<p>Unlike the stereotypical artist, as hopelessly romantic as the notion may be, I am not the mysterious loner who finds no solace in academics or society, pouring out the despairs and epiphanies of my desperate soul onto the canvas. Instead, I have been described as an obsessive overachiever, a recurrent caffeine addict, an antisocial wreck, and a great friend. I value intelligence, innovation, individuality, and beauty, with the latter based entirely upon my own aesthetic judgment. To be able to set down a vision that integrates those ideals – that was what prompted me to turn to art. I aspire to personal integrity and I plan to follow my childhood dreams of becoming a surgeon. Beyond that, I hardly know where I, as a human, want to go, except that one day I want my fingers to graze the side of a scalpel that shines smooth and glimpse the crimson reflection that says this, this is who you are: the person you’ve always wanted to be.</p>
<p>I want, in short, to achieve success on my own terms, utterly and wholly with my morals intact and in line. Art is the medium by which it could be told and given. Art is what details the world that could be and what it already is through a person’s eyes. Between four countries, ten different schools, and a paucity of sleep, there’s little else that could hold such a message. </p>
<p>It occurred to me that I could be an artist.</p>
<p>Second Essay:</p>
<p>Mother once took me to New York. Cars blared all around that evening, cursing cab drivers and self-righteous pedestrians galore as we strode down a city street. We had passed by a street stall then, just another one out of hundreds, manned by a nameless artist. He was sketching a woman, the general tourist with faux designer purse, smeared-on eyeliner, and an expression that was an obvious attempt at a surly pose. She said some hurried words about being late for the train – I couldn’t catch everything, though that hardly mattered. I would have easily ignored her existence, dismissing it as that of just another wanting narcissist, had my eyes not caught the deft, graphite strokes that were boldly set down upon the cheap paper which served as canvas. For that moment, reality shifted as strangers looked upon one another with uncommon familiarity: she was the artist’s world, and he was her creator.</p>
<p>But stop and rewind. My artistic ambitions didn’t start there. When I was a little girl, I had been the one to proclaim that “I didn’t need a teacher; I knew how to draw.” Indeed, my childhood hours were spent all too often working on some new piece or that, possessed with rampant binges of imagination. There was the Anime Mania of 1995, the Puppy Craze of 1996, the Pokemon Fad of 1997, and more. In all honestly, I became addicted to seeing my visions come alive between the soft nurturing touch of pencil and paper. There were no boundaries I could break aside from the delicate edges of the paper, and no one to tell me what I could and couldn’t do. I was the monarch. I was the dictator. I was in love with playing God in a world that screamed of me, me, and me.</p>
<p>Fast forward to the dirty streets of New York where a man was hurriedly recreating existence as we know it, where a woman was running late for her ride back to god knows where, where the taxi-horns blared and tourists and city-dwellers alike gave each other the finger. Now that I think of it, perhaps I’d been riding on a 16-year-old ego trip all along. Maybe I really wasn’t as good as I thought, or as talented as other people have told me. I don’t know. I’ve been flitting the line between imagination and reality, and I want a chance to settle down, says the kid who once rejected art class. I want the world, my world, and nothing less. For creation, for imagination, for ambition, for love, for anything I have worthy in me – that is why I wish to attend Governor’s School.</p>