College Admissions Essay: If I Want To Go To College

“If I were you, I would go to UCLA. You may not realize it, but you will appreciate being close to home” my father told me as senior year of high school came to an end. 18 years living in the same house with my family made me want to get as far away from California as I could for college. UCLA, a 50-minute drive from my home in Irvine, did not seem as exciting as going off to the east coast by myself, which was always how I envisioned my college experience. As a naïve 18-year-old, I figured I no longer needed my parents’ help. I would go to Baltimore and be fine on my own, because after all, it was through my own hard work that I had been accepted to college.
My mom, having left her home in California to go study in Guadalajara, did not seem as eager to keep me close to home. I suppose it is due to my father’s upbringing in Iran, where life revolves around the family, and people rarely move far from their families. As Massoume Price, a social anthropologist from Iran, says in her piece for the Iran Chamber Society, “For Iranians family is the most important social institution and children are the focal point of
This led to him living in poverty and put him at a severe disadvantage. Given the time period he grew up in, he became an outsider. He was born into a well-off family, but the death of his father put my grandfather and his mother into a much lower social class, in which he did not have as many benefits as he would have had had his father been alive. His perseverance despite these unfortunate circumstances and his journey to make a better life for his future family are inspirational to me and show me that with all of the opportunities I am afforded I have no excuse to not make the most of them. I do not have to worry about putting myself through school, much less putting food on the table for my family from a young