Personal Statement
In life, there are many challenges and experiences that an individual goes through. These challenges can either make or break an individual. However, depending on how an individual takes these experiences, they can be experiences towards being a better person. In this perspective, I wish to give of an experience that I believe helped mold me into a better individual.
During my freshman year, I signed up as an intern to help Mayor Lee Land Yee as he was running for the post of San Francisco’s lawyer. I understood that I had to work for 8 hours per day through the semester, but this did not seem to be a problem for me since I believed that I would have simple responsibilities that would be easy to accomplish. This was not to be. I was given tasks that were quite challenging. These are as explained below.
In the first assignment, I had to visit several districts in San Francisco, knocking on people’s doors and trying to convince them to vote for Lee. The main challenge I encountered in this was that being an international student, I was not very good with the American persuasive skills. I, therefore, got rude responses and even had people slam their doors on me. To add insult to injury, I had a problem with communication skills. This made the problem worse as the people could not have the patience to listen to me.
Through the challenges, I gained some insight and experience in handling people. I got an opportunity to talk to people across genders, age groups. I also got an opportunity to meet and interact with different kinds of people which I believe helped in shaping my social skills.
My second assignment was to act as a call center. My job was to call people and try to convince or persuade them to vote for Lee. Again, the communication issues were a major problem for me as I could not convince the people effectively. Again, I got a lot of rude responses and was, at times, scolded by the people. Due to these challenges, I realized that I needed to do something about my communication skills. As such, I talked to several of my friends on how I could improve my communication and convincing skills. I also sought other sources of information such as the internet and got tactics on persuasive argument. This improved my chances of success and the rude responses reduced significantly. For this, I was happy that I could site a problem and set out to find a working solution for the same. This was quiet a fulfilling achievement.
At the end of the exercise, Mayor Lee congratulated me and the other interns, and I even got a recommendation as well as a thank you letter from him. This was quite fulfilling for me. Generally, I could say that the experience helped me to hone my communication skills. Initially, I had a major problem in interacting with and socializing with people from different countries simply because I could not effectively communicate with them. However, the exercise changed all these. I acquired good communication skills which can make me interact and socialize with different people regardless of their age, language, or culture. For this reason, I could say that the experience shaped me to be a good member of the society, one who can easily interact with all and sunder.
