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11,000 Miles Alone

Accepted to Georgetown, Class of 2026

Personal Statement​

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What started as a normal sightseeing tour transformed into an eye-opening 2-month odyssey across the United States. With classes completed for the semester, I was all set for my cross-country road trip.

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Driving over 11,000 miles alone, I spiraled through the Sonora desert to California, up Highway One, and finally took the Oregon trail backwards home to Ohio. Traveling on a limited budget, I slept in my car, used Wi-Fi in hotel lobbies, and occasionally munched on a raw head of lettuce for breakfast.

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Beyond teaching me to be crafty with my meals, over my journey I realized that the histories I had been fascinated with in the classroom were incredibly abstract, confined only to historical facts and figures. Visiting the sites I read about in textbooks and having spontaneous conversations with the people there, however, humanized cultures that had previously only seemed to exist in nineteenth-century paintings or outdated maps. Over time, I realized that all communities are dynamic, and face complex, modern challenges, rather than being historical relics.  

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This realization began in Louisiana when I scheduled a stop at the Acadian Cultural Center in Thibodaux, a small town in rural South Louisiana. I had read about the British Empire exiling the Acadians from Nova Scotia to Louisiana where they became the Cajuns, and I figured the museum would be an opportunity to learn more.

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Visiting on my own, rather than on a school trip or on a pre-defined research project, I found my mind wandering. How has Cajun culture adapted to 2021? How do Cajuns feel about modern issues like climate change? What are real Cajuns like? While the museum was filled with artifacts, displays, and texts, it also felt abstract and impersonal, like my textbooks. 

I started asking my questions to the staff, who called a retired veteran and actual Cajun to come to the Cultural Center: Curtis. Immediately, we struck up a conversation. 

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Curtis shed light on my questions, explaining that as more Cajuns become integrated with the American mainstream by technology, their sense of Cajun identity is being eroded. Fewer people maintain traditions and speak the Cajun dialect of French. COVID-19 has only worsened this by killing elders who play an indispensable role in protecting Cajun culture.  

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It was only after we said au revoir that I realized how much I had learned in those two hours of chatting with Curtis. Continuing on, I sought out opportunities to converse with Cherokee people in Oklahoma, Mormons in Utah, the Amish in Nebraska, Haitian Refugees in Mexico, among others.

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These conversations were powerful precisely because they weren’t academic. Normal conversations and small talk revealed elements of everyday life that were crucial for understanding the ways in which different cultures have adapted to the modern world which are left out of academia, be it the Cherokee Nation's use of the internet to preserve its language, the Cajun community's “food diplomacy,” or the heavy use of Amtrak by the Amish to avoid religiously-forbidden airplanes. 

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Growing up in an immigrant family, a large emphasis was placed on preserving Chinese culture and traditions at home. This meant that my main exposure to other cultures came only at school, in the form of facts and figures, scattered through static texts and dreary lectures from overworked teachers. It has been through conversations that I learned communities are neither static nor dreary. They are very much alive and facing modern challenges. Through conversations, these communities were humanized to me.

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I took the Oregon trail back to Ohio, but didn’t forget the power of these conversations. Instead, I sought out more opportunities, especially in international programs, which I balanced with my travels, which spanned from Mexico and Wales to Malta and Estonia. These conversations ultimately led me to start my own organization, Concourse International, to give more students opportunities to meet people from other cultures.

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And it all started with a single conversation.

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