Raised in China, where my exposure to English was minimal, coming to America and enrolling in college represented a great challenge for me. But the hard part was yet to come: getting good grades. While I wish my rates could have been higher, given the uphill battle that I confronted to bring my English up to speed so quickly, I am generally pleased with how I have performed. I could not be more proud of the fact, most of all, that I will be graduating in only three years, while most of my fellow students are finishing only after 4.
Girls are generally discriminated against under Communist Chinese patriarchy—despite their rhetoric—in terms of education, one’s subsequent employment, the rights of a woman and a mother as part of a family, inheritance, etc. Both my mother and I have suffered under this system. My mom always told me to become successful so as to demonstrate how women can do what men do and often do it even better, and she made my education her priority. Piano, violin, drawing, speech, ballet, and most of all, my classes in preparation for the Mathematics Olympics, often took up the whole weekend in addition to after school. I sometimes complained because I had no time to relax, but when I thought about the purpose behind all these, I felt thankful that I had more opportunities than most other girls in our society. Even many of my relatives try to send only the boys in the family to college, wanting the girls to stay home and get married. Even when girls go to college, it is often assumed that the sole purpose of doing so is to find a husband who will have a well-paying job.
I was the first person on either side of my family to come to the United States to study. From that point forward, my relatives treated me differently. Chinese people have always admired Western culture. English was a mandatory class in most schools in the city where I grew up, beginning with the first grade. While in kindergarten, my parents brought me to a Canadian tutoring center where I had an opportunity to talk to a Canadian for one hour once a week to enhance my listening and speaking ability. Always near the top of my class in English, I learned as much grammar and vocabulary as I could in school. I won second place in the National English Contest for elementary school students in the sixth grade.
When my parents sent me to study in America, I thought I would have no problem doing well in classes in English because of the many extracurricular English classes I had taken in China. When I first arrived, however, I found living, working, and learning everything in English complicated. At first, I was shy in school but gradually grew more comfortable as time passed. In my ESL classes, I quickly realized I was not alone and that most of my ESL peers faced a more significant challenge than I did. I am thankful for my native-English-speaking friends who heeded my request to correct me when I made mistakes. My English has improved year by year, and I am well on my way to speaking English as a near-native speaker.
Nevertheless, my academic journey has been filled with roadblocks, bumps, and holes. By the beginning of my sophomore year, I began to worry about what I wanted to do after graduation. I even made a list of potential careers and worked to shorten it. While Mathematics has long been my first love and central academic passion, it was not immediately apparent to me how to best go about converting my dedication to Math into a way to support myself, especially since—despite completing a four-year program in 3 years—I also had to work to make ends meet economically. I got a job as an assistant to the accountant of a 3D printing company and was pleased by the fact that I learned a lot about accounting, payroll processing, and bookkeeping.
About 7 or 8 months ago, I read an article about how we measure happiness, annual income, house, car, etc. The project was funded and executed by the Hitachi Company. They gathered data from their employees due to their wearing sensors that tracked and recorded their movements and interactions. This study demonstrated a profoundly significant link between happiness and interactivity and productivity and interactivity. This was the moment when I recognized for the first time the sheer power of data and statistics and the profound impact they can have on life, fulfillment, and economic development. If employers want to increase creativity and productivity, they should increase interactions and happiness in the workplace. I love the simplicity of this finding and the way it vindicates so much of what I find most charming about the workplace. Thus, I have continued to learn everything I could about data and how it is put to good use, along with statistics and their impact on development and scientific advancement, searching for a way to contribute to this progress through the career choices I would soon make. Hence, my application to XXXX is to earn my Master’s Degree and become an XXXX professional.
I am currently working at my college as a supplemental instruction leader for a calculus class, leading learning sessions for about seven students. I am convinced that this experience will help me hit the ground running at Berkeley and distinguish myself as a student in your Masters's Program in XXXX.