JE18 Your Attributes

           The person who has always influenced me for a long time is my mom. Since I was a child, I spent a lot of time with her and therefore she taught me a lot of rules about life. When I was younger, she always told me to be honest about myself and do my best to achieve everything. Sometimes it is okay to fail as long as I learn why I made the mistakes. I think this helped me a lot because I think I always had this perfectionism quality stuck in my head. Sometimes I feel upset about the results. But my mom always tells me that it is fine if I tried my best already. Talking to her always made me feel better. Now I am only a perfectionist on my process, not the result.

A lot of things that my mom told me shaped for who I am today. She is a very ethical person who always follows the discipline and asks me to be punctual for every appointment. She is also very considerate and always thinks about what other feels. Moreover, she always try to make me feel happy and to have a positive attitude on everything. She said life is too short to be upset. Though sometimes I am still upset about some things I have done after introspecting myself. But she told me the meaning of introspection is not to make the same mistake again. Now I can be more confident for the works I have done and stay positive for every event that happens to me. 

JE17 Oral History

            During the process of creating the oral history project, including interviewing, I learned about my subject’s influential person and how was she being influenced. I saw things from her point of view to get the feeling she felt at the moment so that I could describe her feelings over the event. I also learned that there are many things for us to learn by only observing little events. They don't have to be big ones. Only an anecdote could change someone’s life. The influential person didn't have to directly affect us, but it could happen in a more indirect means. If I have more time to work on this project, I would like to interview more with my subject s o that I could write more details in it. If I can choose anyone as my subject, I would probably choose someone successful because I want to know what are the stories behind him/her that made him/her succeeded. Oral history is important because it is told by a person, instead of just being writing it our. By interviewing, we can know what was the subject’s attitude toward the event. We can also observe the subject’s feelings. I think in some ways it is like a memoir because it was being told by a person who thought about his/her past. It was mainly about the emotions and feelings instead of facts. 

JE16 Emergency

            Emergencies such as natural disaster, car crash never really happened to me before. Mostly the situation was about forgotten homework, projects, tests, etc. For example, I just forgot that I have a presentation to do today. I thought we were going to do the mini oral history presentations today. I was extremely nervous. Surely I didn't want to fail my presentation! 15 minutes before class began, I rushed to Austin and told him about it. We settled down at the hallway and complete everything. Although it was done in a limited of time, we did not panic. We calmly finished our presentation and uploaded it to GoogleDoc. Even though, I must admit, it was not done in the best quality, our presentation was not a total disaster.

            There’s another emergency that I had been through. I remember I was twelve years old and my grandpa was driving me to a movie theater. There were my grandma and my aunt on the car as well. When we were chatting, there’s suddenly a shadow running toward us. “Bomb!” A bus crashed our car. Luckily, no one was hurt, except for the car. I was in panic because I had never been through a car crash before, especially with my grandparents. The least thing I wanted was someone being hurt. The police even came to deal with the situation. For a 12 years old boy, it was really scary. My grandma and my aunt calmed me down and told me everything was all right. After seeing nobody was hurt, I settled down and waited for the event to be over. 

JE15 Disappointment

            I often have trouble writing essays or projects usually because I cannot come up with a good thesis. Sometimes it is because that I don't understand the topic of the essay. By this point I would just google some related issues or ask others’ opinions so that I can have a brief idea on the essay topic. And then I will start writing some random ideas into bullet points. After that I will draw a essay structure diagram and organize them into different part of the essay. Writer blocks always happen. For example, writing the scarlet letter say was quite a challenge for me. At the beginning, it was hard to connect scarlet letter’s symbolic meaning with Hester’s identity. Therefore, I looked up the Internet and read others’ views on this topic. By that I can have a clearer idea and find further details in the book. However, writing The Scarlet Letter essay was easier because it has sources. I think the hardest part is to write an essay like significant experience essay because there are no sources on the Internet. I can only squeeze my brain for ideas. Sometimes, I would ask some people related in my story to look for details. If I still cannot think of anything, I would probably just randomly write some ideas and make it to a story until I can write the official one.

JE14 Your Influence

            Relationships between people are reciprocal. Your impression to people will always reflect on how others treat you. I think you can study what kind of person you are by observing other people. Actions and reactions between people are mutually equal. I have a friend who influenced me a lot in many different aspects. Correspondingly, I also have influence on her too. Though our influences to each other are not exactly the same, we both learned a lot from each other. Even so, there is actually one influence that is collinear – creativity. We usually talked about lots of stuffs and inspire each other to do different things. I don't think I will appear on anyone’s college application essay though. For most of the time, I only work on my own stuffs. When I am with friends, I only complain or talk about funny stuffs. I rarely discuss some deeper issues with friends unless they are close to me. But I think I always have some influences on other people who know me well. I think I am pretty mature for my age so sometimes people are influenced by the way I think and see things. For sure I wish I could be on someone’s college application essay because it makes me feel like a hero!

JE13 Influential Person

            I have a close friend who has a big influence in my life. Before I met her, I always had strong opinions toward things. I could not really judge one thing fairly and objectively. After I met her and talked to her, she changed my mind. I was actually a little arrogant back then. But I realized she know so many things that I didn't know. Therefore, I started to talk to her more and ask her about things. One thing in common for both of us is music. I refused to listen to different genres of songs that I had never tried before. But after her suggestions, I reluctantly listened to few. And I found them unexpectedly good. At this point, she opened a window in my mind telling me there are lots of amazing things in the world to be explored. Since then, I become more humble and open-minded. She also led me to explore the world of art and English. My English was really bad back then and she helped me a lot with it. She often recommended some great novels for me to read. Also, she gave me lots of new ideas on art. I remember we decorated our classroom together and our creation was the best of all. Now, not only that I look at things objectively, I also try to venture different parts of this world to gain more knowledge.