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.
The meeting with new people is always an invigorating experience for me. The experience not only refreshes my mind fed up with routine, but also gives me the lessons about my life. The recent experience with unfamiliar but amiable people made me realize that the diversity means more than difference to me. The encounter with Northerners, who brought my attention to what extent diversity affected me and how I should cope with it, clearly showed that diversity can change one’s thoughts about one’s values, perspectives and life.
When I was initially taking bus to meet Satumins, the official term for the Northerners who immigrated to the South Korea, I was ambivalent: half-excited because it was fresh to meet people who had been only in textbooks and newspapers throughout my life and half-nervous because they were different; they were “foreigners” to me because I could not connect myself with them except with the fact that we have the same lineage as the textbooks of the South Korea schools always have emphasized. That difference seemed to divide me and them like the 38-line still exists between us.
As I took off the bus outside the Seoul which looked like a rural country and walked through the unpaved road blowing with wind which softly embraces the tense atmosphere, I felt somewhat relieved. After all, I got enough experience and education for this meeting. I had met various kinds of people including foreign workers who also immigrated to the Korea for living, orphans and the old who had had hardship in their lives. And also especially for this volunteer work, I got special lesson about the Satumins’ backgrounds: their former lives in the north, routes of the escape and their future after the education in Hanawon twice. As far as concerning the theoretical aspects, I was fully ready to espouse the Satumins.
When I arrived at the building surrounded with the nature, however, it did not take long to realize that I was not ready; not because they were so exotic that I could not understand them ,but because they were perfectly normal. They looked like the rural farmers. In our first meeting they said hello to me first even though they were not my mentees (We, the voluntary workers use the term ‘mentor’ and ‘mentee’ because we believe that we are not teaching them, but guiding their lives in the South), always used the honorific expressions (they were always older than I), enjoyed strolling across the surrounding forests in their free time, and smiled really brightly when they got comfort in their liberties. We had the perfectly disparate backgrounds, but I was attracted to them. Something in their dispositions and atmospheres made me even more want to know about them, even though I could not clearly know what it is.
One day, the incident that enlightened me about ‘something’ came. After the class time was gone, I was outside sitting at the bench and looking at the Satumins playing basketball. I wanted to join them. In the class time, I could impart my knowledge but they did not include me in their conversation. I wanted to know more about them.’. I made known my basic knowledge about the basketball and A anonymous person (I cannot expose their names outside the Hanawon because it can be quite dangerous to the families in the North of the anonymous person) namely Chulsoo became so friendly to me that we spent times left after the class talking about each other’s past, present and future. We promised to get in touch with each other after his settlement in the South.
In the process of this interaction I came to believe that diversity has more meaning than difference; diversity was something that could be embraced and cherished with mutual respect. I realized that when we truly tried to acknowledge each other with sincere heart, diversity creates harmonious relationship blossoming life-long amity.
댓글 없음:
댓글 쓰기