What experiences have awakened your interest and will help you contribute to the Global Initiatives Program at Poly? In what ways do you hope that the Global Scholars program will expand and deepen your global perspectives?
I am really lucky and proud that my family loves to travel and can travel a lot, both in the US and internationally, often to unconventional places and less often to more touristy destinations. I have been from the Louvre in Paris to Mao’s tomb in Beijing all in one summer. My earliest memory was me running down a cobblestone street in Venice when I was three, and most of my memories from when I was younger today are thousands of miles away from LA. Some stick out more than others though, and have enlightened me into the global traveler and global student I am today. I remember visiting French Polynesia again in third grade, and my parents made an effort to have us stay in a real local environment this time, rather than a western hotel. I do not remember the specific island we stayed on, but it was a pretty unassertive hostel with a lot of space. At the time, my Kindle Fire enveloped my world, and I was glued to that thing whenever I could pry it away from my dad. When I was not swimming or snorkeling that trip, I was playing Minecraft in a hammock, which I never got bored of. The native Polynesian owners of the hostel fashioned it in a way with a lot of communal spaces for eating, cooking, and whatnot, and I brought my Kindle everywhere. I remember seeing a kid around my age throughout the grounds, who played soccer which I played too at the time. The kid did not speak English, but eventually one of us found enough courage to attempt to ask the other to play, and I just recall playing soccer with him for a few hours, and me being not the most socially conscious kid, really wanted to go play Minecraft, which I invited him to do with me on my Kindle, and I think I introduced him to it for the first time, because for the rest of our stay, the kid and I took turns playing Minecraft on my small tablet whenever I was free, and despite us not understanding each other clearly, there was a real connection there and humbled my ten-year-old self obsessed with Legos and other materialistic things in my bubble. Most of the best memories I have traveling are from going out of my comfort zone and immersing myself in a place. In Japan, we ate thousand-year-old eggs and went to sumo wrestling matches, in China, we learned how to make dumplings in someone’s apartment and stayed in the tallest building in Shanghai, in Cambodia, I learned how to make wheelchairs for bomb survivors, in Mexico, we went cave diving in Acapulco, in Scandinavia, we took a cruise on a cargo ship, and in Martinique, I became a certified scuba diver. All of these experiences traveling and many more have given me my worldview, my cultural identity, and my love of world history, and I feel they fit well for joining the Global Initiatives program. I have already taken a GIP trip in ninth grade which was incredible, to say the least, and I hope that if I join GIP, I will be able to have many more cultural broadening experiences and help myself experience more of the beautiful world we live in. Though GIP was not the only motivation to do this, we have already hosted a French and an Italian exchange student, and my experiences with them definitely deepened my global perspective, and furthermore, GIP is also very in tune with my hope to study abroad like our guests but for a semester in college.
0 Comments
|
Photo used under Creative Commons from mac.rj