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Picture yourself in the year 2020. Where are you? What are you doing?
I am flying over Africa with a group of my colleagues, examining the results of an experimental new corn hybrid. Below us, fertile green fields dot the brown sub-Saharan terrain and new roads snake from these fields to urban centers. I have to smile, because this is part of a dream come true for me. The year is 2023, and I am many things--a dreamer, an activist, and an artist - but my day job as a developmental agricultural engineer. I wish to never stop learning and to always seek more complete knowledge. My ultimate dream, ever since I was small, has been to impact the world - to make sure no children go to bed hungry. My goal is to feed the world, or rather, to help the people of the world feed themselves. Although many changes, both favorable and unfavorable, have occurred in the past twenty years, we are still dealing with many of the same issues. The United States is currently not at war, however, tensions continue to run high in hot spots all over the world, including the Middle and Far East. A war with Iraq twenty years ago accomplished very little in 'the war on terrorism' and people throughout the world live in an uneasy peace. Pollution, long a political buzz word, is finally being reduced. Cleaner chemicals are being developed and factories and farmers alike are required to be more conscientious when dealing with potentially harmful substances. Great technological advances have led to the dawn of a new era where everyone is 'connected' at all times. We are starting to fight the war on hunger and poverty with the same fervor we once devoted to 'the war on terrorism' - hurting other people rather than helping them. The world population is growing by approximately 80 million people each year. Most of the population is being added to the undeveloped countries that are least able to cope with their burgeoning population. Ten years ago, these countries sufffered from extremely poor education conditions and used stagnant and obsolete agricultural practices. Today, with the aid of biotechnology and the American farmer, these countries are starting to establish a standard of living. Twenty years ago, the United States tried to feed third world countries, but they went about it in all the wrong ways. The United States constantly subsidized crops in these countries, which seemed like a good idea in theory, but actually worsened the economic conditions. Native farmers could not compete in the global or even the local market, because U.S. grain was cheaper and more readily available. Although the U.S. tried giving 'relief aid' in the form of large quantities of U.S.-grown commodities, this depressed the local crop prices in the region. Furthermore, the gift grain led to such a dependency that the countries could not live with U.S. support but could also not live without it. Today, this has changed, and I am proud to say that I have had a part in it. As an adviser to the Secretary of Agriculture, I have helped the U.S. government and the people see that the answer lies in helping the people help themselves. I have worked closely with a group of scientists and farmers to develop not only plants suitable to growing in less than perfect conditions, but to develop ways to make even the poorest of soils fertile. Biotechnology has helped tremendously in developing these new hybrids of plants. We have been able to take the proteins out of wheat and implant them into corn - making it possible to grow corn that one can use to make a load of raised corn bread. We have also used biotechnology to transplant natural disease resistance from one species of plant to another. Although biotechnology was largely misunderstood twenty years ago, a variety of research and media campaigns have spread the word that its benefits far outweigh its disadvantages. By helping agriculture in third world countries, we have also helped further develop agriculture in our own country. Low-value crop farms - producing the standard corn, soybeans, and wheat - are huge and almost completely control that market. Family and small farms have been forced to produce a higher value product in order to stay competitive. Scientists develop these biotechnologically engineered crops, small farms grow them. It is incredibly important for the farms to produce identity-preserved grain to prove or disprove the value of a biotechnological development. By saving children from hunger in far away countries, we have also saved the small and family farms in America. Farming has been revolutionized in the past twenty years; small farms have found niche markets - organic foods, pharmacrops, or biotechnologically engineered crops - and are no longer forced to compete with rich and powerful agribusinesses. Farm subsidies have been redistributed to help fund these huge technological developments and foreign subsidies have been redirected as well. The problem of world hunger stems not only from a lack of sustainable crop, but also from distribution. Once farmers were able to produce more crops, the market collapsed because there was no way to get these crops from the farms to the larger urban markets. Foreign aid is now being used to hire native workers to build roads, improving both the living condition in the country and the farm economy. In 2002, Norman Borlaug, the man who inspired my dream of alleviating world hunger, said, 'Human misery and widespread poverty is a fertile seedbed for planting the seeds of all kinds of terrorism.' We continue to fight the war on terrorism, but we are now doing it more intelligently. Instead of fighting with guns and killing innocent civilians in the name of justice, we are fighting with human empowerment.
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Major essay: topic of my choice
"Ouch, my feet hurt. Ouch, my feet hurt. Ouch, my feet hurt." It had been repeating over and over in my head for the last two miles and would continue to do so with every step I took until we arrived at our campsite. When my brain is filled with thoughts like these, I have trouble remembering why I enjoy putting myself through this type of pain, but it is not always like this. Most thoughts I have while hiking are not thoughts of pain and suffering, but are happy, entertaining, interesting, or at least useful. I went on my first hike soon after I learned how to walk, and I have enjoyed hiking ever since. The types of hikes I have been on have ranged from a quarter of a mile toddling on a paved road to a twenty-two day Outward Bound backpacking trip in the High Sierras. One of the things that I love most about hiking is that it gives me the chance to escape from the constant stimulation of my hectic daily life and to be alone with my thoughts. Sometimes when I hike, the lack of artificial clutter around me somehow stimulates my brain to reorganize itself. It sorts through everything that has happened recently and files it in some way that makes more sense to it. Although I do not understand how or why, I find that, much like how my computer runs much more smoothly because I defragmented its hard drive a few weeks ago, I am much better able to cope with the quick pace of daily life when all of my thoughts are properly organized. Other times, I let my mind wander and think about things that I would never bother to think about otherwise. I remember once when I spent over an hour debating with myself over the merits of paper and plastic bags. I also often find myself thinking about issues that I feel strongly about and determining what I believe. Because I have thought about them at great lengths, I can feel certain of my beliefs, or at least I can be confident that I want my groceries put in plastic bags. On longer hikes when I have more time to think, I will sometimes imagine things. I can become an explorer hacking his way through the thick underbrush of the Amazon Rain Forest or an eagle soaring high above the mountains. As a part of my Outward Bound course, I spent seventy-two hours alone ten miles from the nearest trail. To keep myself entertained, I decided to make up stories about two anthills near the river where I got my water. They became warring kingdoms, space colonies, and giant cities. I would follow individual ants around for hours, imagining what they were doing and what they were saying to each other. Rather than being bored, I entertained myself so well with my knights, spacemen, and businessmen that I was surprised when, on the morning of the fourth day, my time alone was over. I hike because I appreciate the beauty of nature and because I enjoy the conversations that I have while hiking, but most of all, because I love how the unadulterated physical magnificence around me stimulates in me thoughts that I would otherwise never have. After all, while the blisters on my aching feet will heal and fade away with time, I will always be able to carry these thoughts with me.
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Essay Question:
"Major" essay: personal statement.
I'm quite irritated with all the colleges I'm applying to. Though their applications are thorough and their essay questions thought-provoking, not a single one has asked me to make a list of the books I've read in the last year. My childhood friend Cindy described this question to me from one of her applications last fall, and I practically swooned with delight. This was it! This was the question! After years of pursuing various intellectual disciplines in the early hours of the morning, huddled in bed with a book and a pen, I was finally going to get to tell someone about it! Granted, two people already knew about it; my parents have been footing the bill for my outrageous literary appetite since I was small. But my mom has long since tired of hearing about Margaret Atwood's tone in Lady Oracle, and, as she puts it, 'got over' the insistent feminism of The Women's Room by 1975. My dad, a history buff to the bone, will happily lend me Woodward's The Strange Career of Jim Crow, but rolls his eyes at the raucous comedy of A Confederacy of Dunces. My parents are already pretty educated. They've seen a lot of this before. But years of weather, death, bureaucracy, and taxes have softened mom and dad's analytical teeth. The uncompromising thesis has become too extreme: Sylvia Plath's journals too depressing, Alan Ginsberg's collected interviews too weird. If it isn't already apparent, this is not the case for me. One of my favorite childhood volumes contains the following rhyme: 'Books to the ceiling, books to the sky; my piles of books are miles high. How I love them, how I need them; I'll have a long beard by the time I read them!' Though I will most likely never grow a beard, this is a strikingly apt description of my bedroom. I own more books than the average monkey eats bananas. They make very nice end tables once I've read them. I'm obsessed with American literature in all its forms, from James Baldwin to Nathaniel Hawthorne to John Irving to Jane Smiley. I love contemplating the rich and tangled An armchair sociologist, I love reading books about foster care in New York City even though my friends tune me out when I try to share the passage of Jonathan Kozol that's haunting me. Christian mysticism is one of my newest discoveries, and I've been devouring Madeline L'Engle, John Shelby Spong, and Georges Bernanos' The Diary of A Country Priest. I also enjoy feminist literature and sociology. So, there. I've satistified my itch to share my jumbled reading tastes with some poor, unsuspecting admissions counselor. I've explained why, when asked for 'possible academic interests', I attempt to cram five or six disciplines into a tiny application blank. I'm ready to leave the world of ink and paper for the world of living, breathing people and ideas. I can't wait to take courses on all the things I've been reading about for years. My guess is, however, that no amount of education or life experience will ever stifle my habit of 1 am epiphanies with Charles Simic or rainy afternoons with Charles Dickens.
