Monday, August 3, 2020

Mba Admissions

Mba Admissions We discussed Herodotus’s description of the Battle of Thermopylae. Our tutor, Ms. Shukla, posed the question, “Is bravery reasonable? ” My fellow students and I talked more quickly than I could jot down notes, and I left the classroom feeling more energized and awake than I had two hours before. On our way back to Murchison, my dorm mates and I compared notes on what we had discussed in our different seminars and talked about Leonidas and the Spartans until lights-out. When I went to the Summer Academy program last summer in Santa Fe, I found myself most looking forward to the math and science tutorials. An easy focus of Rowling’s accessible wordplay are the spells. Usually a crafted mix of Latin and English, their verbalization sounds “magical” but still allows readers to suss out a guess as to the spell’s purpose. As a high school Latin student, I find this especially impressive. Rowling’s incorporation of Latin, the foundation of many modern languages, lends the spells more universality (who wants spells in English, anyway?) and adds to the realism of the series. Antigone has become my favorite book because it wraps political and legal theory around complex characters and a compelling narrative. Prior to reading Antigone , I assumed that if I hadn’t read every book that pertained to the architecture of US government, I had at least heard of them. Antigone proved this assumption wrong because Antigone itself was a case study in the actual consequences of ideas discussed by political philosophers. In other words, Antigone humanized the esoteric and function-driven debates I’d studied last year. By the time I was in middle school, reading turned into a barren desert where every once in a while a teen fiction novel might roll in like a tumbleweed. It was a tough period not just for me but for our entire family, as we were losing my grandpa to Alzheimer’s while my mother was spiraling into depression. I could no longer hide in the pages of books and I had to face reality as daunting as it seemed. I still tried to read as much as I could but everything seemed pointless and I thought I’d never be able to find meaning in a book again. On weekends I struggled to carry twenty books at a time, stacked way up high as I left my local library. J.K. Rowling clearly saw her application of appellations not as a burden, but an opportunity to enrich the story and world she had created and expand its reach. She leaves it to the readers to discover or concoct an explanation for why wizards shout bastardized Latin phrases to cast spells, stick their heads in fireplaces to chat with friends, and send letters via owl. I saw a statement about our significance in the world. The novel focuses on ways the Soviet regime exerted its power on its people. Coming from a post-Soviet country still struggling with its past, where some adore past times while others despise them, I am interested in how the regime worked to indoctrinate people. While some others groaned that it was time to do our Archimedes reading for the next day, I excitedly isolated myself in the back of the library. I loved reading so closely and spending the time discovering Archimedes’ theories. At school I would have despised the lesson about water displacement but when I was given the actual works by Archimedes and had to follow the logic on my own it made sense. During the tutorial I loved how the tutor went line by line asking questions for us to discuss and I loved drawing out the diagrams. I dream of a place where everyone enjoys books differently. There is greatness to be found in every book, but these are some of the writers that challenged what I thought to be true and opened the door to moral questions that will take more than my lifetime to answer. I hope to start answering these questions at St. John’s. My senior year, my class was assigned Kafka’s Metamorphosis. My peers neglected the reading, doing only what they had to do to maintain decent grades. I came to class having read the story and enjoyed it. Unlike my classmates, I see books as worlds I can get lost in. Finishing the play, I was ashamed that I’d harbored such skepticism at the outset of my reading. My experience with Antigone reminds me why I get excited each time I use calculus in physics or art in cooking, and I look forward to a lifetime of making these connections. I am a reader because I am a writer, not the other way around. Index cards, store receipts, and any other paper I can find, covered in notes I took, stick out of the tops of my books. Although the novel is not a history book, its presentation of characters helps to crystallize the essence of what the Soviet Union looked like. The fact of it being a literary work has made it easier for me to comprehend and visualize the historical period which was so devastating to my country. The novel helped me understand that the harder an ideology is pushed on people, the harder they will rebel in indirect ways. The constant fear turned people into animals willing to do anything to survive. For fear of being next to disappear or jealousy because someone lives a tiny bit better than you, espionage and treason become a normal part of life.

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