Common Application #1 Growing up in a multicultural home is something that definitely has shaped me as a person. My mother emigrated from Poland in 1989 where she met my father in 1991. Their relationship escalated until they both married in 1993 and I was born five years later. Two weeks after my sister was born in March 2000, my parents moved from South Carolina to Poughquag, New York. My mother, being moved to a whole new area, searched for Polish families and groups with whom she could feel at home again. This played a key part in my upbringing due to the fact that by growing up surrounded by people from other cultures allowed for me to be open to different cultures from a young age. Conveniently I was around three or four years old
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These little excursions to Europe proved to open up my mind as a child. I was able to do something that not many children were able to do, walk a mile in the shoes of a child from a poor country. Poland was not necessarily “poor” so to speak, but it definitely was not nearly as wealthy as the United States. Whenever I was in Poland, we lived in my grandfather’s small apartment in Łódź, where we had to count every penny that we came with. With that being said, we were never bored. Both of my grandparents were alive when we first came, which added a nice little dynamic that I never had when I was in America. It was also convenient that my sister and I had two cousins around our age that lived down the street. This was the first time that we met them, but by the end of the trip, we goofed around like four peas in a pod. This relationship has only grown since that first summer of ’05 and I am a better person from it. As the years went on, we settled into a steady pattern of going every year, and the wealth gap has grown significantly. Where the exchange rate for American Dollar to Polish Zloty used to be 1 USD per 2 PLN, it has skyrocketed to 1 USD per 4 PLN. The effects have shifted my perspective because over the last summer, I saw how prices for products were excessively expensive for my cousins but seemingly insignificant to
These little excursions to Europe proved to open up my mind as a child. I was able to do something that not many children were able to do, walk a mile in the shoes of a child from a poor country. Poland was not necessarily “poor” so to speak, but it definitely was not nearly as wealthy as the United States. Whenever I was in Poland, we lived in my grandfather’s small apartment in Łódź, where we had to count every penny that we came with. With that being said, we were never bored. Both of my grandparents were alive when we first came, which added a nice little dynamic that I never had when I was in America. It was also convenient that my sister and I had two cousins around our age that lived down the street. This was the first time that we met them, but by the end of the trip, we goofed around like four peas in a pod. This relationship has only grown since that first summer of ’05 and I am a better person from it. As the years went on, we settled into a steady pattern of going every year, and the wealth gap has grown significantly. Where the exchange rate for American Dollar to Polish Zloty used to be 1 USD per 2 PLN, it has skyrocketed to 1 USD per 4 PLN. The effects have shifted my perspective because over the last summer, I saw how prices for products were excessively expensive for my cousins but seemingly insignificant to