This is Personal.

That is my first attempt at a personal statement. It's a statement, and it says "this is personal." Get it? I have to confess I was pretty proud of myself for coming up with this witty pun. But a witty pun would not suffice in the mind of a college reader, so here is my second attempt:

Tell us about a personal quality, talent, accomplishment, contribution, or experience that is important to you. What about this quality or accomplishment makes you proud and how does it relate to the person you are?

People tell me I am a kind person. But really I am just a time-traveler, teleporter, and body-swapper. I have perspective, and this has become my most vital quality because without it, I couldn’t do any of the things that are most important to my life. I wasn’t born with this ability, so like most things; it started with a big bang. More like a crash. Of the stock market, that is. When the Great Recession began, my dad’s local business magazine (who’s biggest advertisers were bankers and real estate agents) quickly started to plummet. This was not unusual, lots of people were hurting, but as a twelve year old I didn’t have a perspective wider than that of my personal bubble. When I would ask my mom for things we normally could’ve afforded, and she would tell me no over and over again, I couldn’t understand why. Exasperated she finally said, “Look at it from my perspective. We just had to buy another house because we couldn’t afford our old one. We’ve been trying to sell our old one for almost a year, paying two mortgages. Your dad has no income, I’m working overtime. There is no extra money. No.” This began the shift from knowing nothing about the “grown-up stuff” to needing to know all about it in order to understand. I finally started seeing different perspectives other than my own.

Everyone has a story, and this realization started to infiltrate my daily activities. This began the body-swapping days. If my teacher was yelling at us, I would try to put myself in her shoes. She has kids of her own, doesn’t make very much money, she could have had a bad morning; I’ll be extra nice to her today. She would do that for me. By getting into the habit of thinking like this, how I treated everyone started to change for the better. This came in handy later when junior year my fellow members of poetry club at school got in a misunderstanding with our advisor and began giving him the cold shoulder and not showing up. Because of my ability to see perspective, I saw the problem for what it was (a misunderstanding) and was able to start to mediate the conflict. This “body-swapping” as I call it led to the kindness that people see in me and the belief that because everyone has a story, there is something to be learned from everyone.

The time-traveling started when I was six and was put into piano lessons, but I didn’t see it as that until I applied a new perspective to playing piano, and found a new passion for it. When I started playing my first classical piece, Chopin’s Prelude in E minor, I hated it. It was dreary, depressing, and boring. But when I saw it from a new perspective given in a TED talk, the piece came to life in a new way. The speaker, Benjamin Zander, prompted the audience to think of someone you loved very much but no longer was with, and you would hear everything Chopin had to say. It transformed the Prelude from boring to relevant, and although it was still dreary, I could share and connect with the exact emotions Chopin was feeling as he was writing it. It still astounds me to think about how I can experience the same perspective of a French man, who doesn’t speak the same language, or live in the same century as me. That is as about close to time travel as anyone can get, with reading and writing at a close second.


I stopped writing it here because I felt it was getting off topic and I didn't like it anymore. It was sounding too much like a TED talk. But this was my first go around, so it can only get better from here. Hopefully I can figure it out soon!
~Kat