Admission Essay
While growing up I really hated math and this was not because I was bad at it. I was always at the top of my class. My parents never understood why I detested something I was good at. Truth be told, I didn’t understand it either until I visited my first museum. The trip to the museum was part of a series of class trips my history class took when we got to the fourth grade. The formal tour was rather uneventful; the museum guide kept droning on about facts that we were probably too young to fully appreciate. After the formal tour, we were allowed to explore on our own. We walked through each section of the museum in groups of five so that none of us got lost in the massive building. My group moved through each section until we came upon a room full of portraits. Each portrait bore the beaming face of a man or a woman; some appeared to be porcelain white in complexion while others had skins with a creamy-yellow tint. There were others whose skin was so dark, it was almost black. The other faces in the portraits had orange, red and green complexions. None of the faces in the portraits were familiar. As a matter of fact, they did look a little absurd for I had never seen an orange or green man in my life.
A guide walked and saw the bemused expressions on our faces; he asked what we saw in the portraits. The first word that came to mind was ‘ice cream’ and I actually said it out loud. The guide smiled and told me that he saw ice cream too. Only the ice cream in his mind was not a milky dessert but the joyous fusion of flavor we get from interacting with people from all over the world. We spent the rest of the day in that room of portraits listening to the story behind the multi-colored portraits. Each color represented a different race as well as different kinds of people. I particularly recall him telling us the story behind the green lady’s jealousy and the orange lady’s temper.
For the first time I took a moment to appreciate the multi-cultural and multi-temporal nature of the world and the way each color of emotion or skin, no matter how beautiful or ugly it may appear had a role to play in the running of the world. On that day my perspective changed. I no longer see people or emotions such as anger or love; I see color instead. I realized that I hated math because I could not visualize numbers in terms of color but with people and emotions, I could paint a masterpiece in my mind. I hope that by enrolling at the American University of Rome, I would have the opportunity to interact with other people in the world who can understand the world in terms of art; the art of communication, interaction and tolerance. As a student I would have access to one of the largest pools of color in the world as well as the duty to show the rest of the world all the color that surrounds them. At the very least, I hope to add my own unique shade to the existing pool.
