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I've seen many posts here along the lines of "colleges should lower their English standards for me because I'm an immigrant", and I really don't want the assumption that foreign students have a license to write badly
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Well, in fairness, some people have a harder time picking up the nuances of a new language than others, and it is probably easier to gain English proficiency if one's first language is a modern European language than, say, from an Asian language. In fact, learning French might have been the tougher accomplishment for you, as Swedish & English are both Germanic languages which linguistically are closer to one another. (Cute picture of Indo-European languages here: <a href="http://www.public.iastate.edu/%7Ecfford/Indoeuropean%20language%20family%20tree.jpg%5B/url%5D">http://www.public.iastate.edu/~cfford/Indoeuropean%20language%20family%20tree.jpg</a> )</p>
<p>In any case, I do think that your English writing skills are impressive, but at the same time my experience has been that children of diplomats tend to become proficient quickly, perhaps because it is important for their parents as well to aim for proficiency -- and your casual voice in your writing style tells me that this is a teenager talking, not an English teacher. You broke a lot of English-teacher type "rules" that apply for formal academic writing, but don't apply in conversational English -- so I figure that you have picked up a LOT of your skills by hanging out with American teens & watching American t.v. & movies. Also, I am seeing with the internet that the even teens who live in other countries are very quickly to pick up informal English writing skills, with all the various message boards & IM sites -- it's really become the lingua franca of the internet. So I don't think that the ad com will be at all suspicious -- this seems to me like a very good essay clearly written by a teenager, and it is a good thing (not bad) that you can demonstrate a high level of fluency in English. I'll bet you are coming from a high school that is well-respected and known to have high standards as well.</p>
<p>By the way, I'd be willing to bet that your admission to Bryn Mawr, Chicago, Macalester & Middlebury is pretty much assured. I don't know enough about the admission practices of the others to venture a guess, but I would be surprised if you don't get admitted to several more as well.</p>