<p>This is the first draft of my admission essay for the University of California. I would appreciate any feedback on how to improve, and maybe shorten the essay (its a little lengthy, about 630 words). The main idea is "Living in a rural area gave me a passion for technology/engineering because it felt exotic and would let me escape my small town". I also talked a little bit about how I being in a rural area made me have to connect with other kids who shared my interests, so we could support each other.</p>
<p>Thanks for reading</p>
<p>ESSAY STARTS HERE:</p>
<p>My friend let out an awkward squawk, “Heads!” he exclaimed as a grey blur flashed past my face and landed at my feet. A small crowbar missed my head by only a few inches, and now stood protruding from the dirt. At that moment my friends and I realized that throwing junk at tree branches wasn’t the best way to retrieve our rocket that was tangled in a redwood after a rough landing. We looked ridiculous as we fumbled around in the middle of a cow pasture, but this moment, like many others, showed how out of place my friends and I were.
Growing up in a small town, Science and technology seemed exotic to me. My hometown always seemed to be a few decades behind the modern world. As a child, excursions into the city made me feel like an explorer making first contact with an advanced alien species, as I marveled at seemingly trivial things like high-speed Internet, and plasma screen TVs. This curiosity sticks with me to this day, but it didn’t fully blossom until high school.
I mostly saw going to a small school as a disadvantage; however, it did make it easier to find people who shared my interests. There was a group of students who would take as many academic classes as our school’s limited selection would allow. I eventually befriended many of these students, and its through this group that I was able to find my true calling, while also get a taste of whatever my hometown was lacking.
We went way overboard with our school projects, especially science, exploiting all we could out of our regular A-G classes. We often collected left over materials from lab experiments, anything from a few electronic components to rockets that the physics class lost. We also conducted science experiments for extra credit, and when room for extra credit ran out, we continued anyway, conducting even more audacious experiments. I had the idea to start an experiment to make termite poison out of wood-eating fungus. It failed in the end, but the project was ambitious enough to turn some heads.
I was even able to dabble in areas such like film and music. I discovered how fun filming could be during school projects, specifically the editing process, which I found myself volunteering for as often as I could. In my spare time, I even made some short films with my new group of friends. I use the word “film” liberally, considering the script mostly was a loose collection of cheesy one-liners. Media software and editing also inspired me to pick up music as a hobby. Interestingly enough, I learned to edit and layer guitar tracks before I knew how to play the instrument.
While bouncing all sort of projects between my friends let me experience what I was missing in a rural town, my true passion remained with technology. This crystalized during my upperclassman years, when I finally saw my chance to express myself academically.
Thanks to a few well-placed grants, the actions of a few observant teachers, and an enthusiastic pool of students, our school was able to form a STEM program. Short for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics; STEM allowed accepted students to take classes such as: Electronics, Computer Science, and Robotics. I enrolled myself in these classes at the first opportunity I had.
What some people looked at me and my friends with confused or condescending faces, wondering how someone could find what I was working on interesting. Ironically, this criticism is one of the reasons I fell in love with Technology, it represents freedom from a place clinging to the past; It represents new and exciting change In a place where technology creeps in at an agonizingly slow rate. And yes, the rocket is still stuck in the tree.</p>