So I bumped into this little snippet of writing tonight while looking at files on my computer that had been collecting digital dust. It’s the very first shot I took at writing my Statement of Purpose for grad school. I ended up not following through with this one as the direction it was headed just didn’t feel right. However, it does stand on it’s own two feet as something else entirely. Perhaps this short paragraph could offer today’s reader a momentary rest from other important affairs:
By the time winter term rolled around back in my freshman year of college, I had learned how to count to ten in ten different languages. Though that only equates to one hundred remembered words (some so close in sound they could hardly be counted as two unique numbers at all), the potential noteworthiness of my accomplishment lies not in the numbers but, rather, in the peculiarity of why I committed them to memory in the first place. Is it a wonder that I would recite them while in line for a chicken burger and mozzarella sticks at the downstairs student dining center? And strange perhaps it may seem that during a brief stroll between buildings between classes I would recall my memorized numerical lists for simple pleasure and enjoyment. Moreover, if chance would have it that on any given day I might run into an exchange student who hid under their delightful foreign accent a hitherto unexplored mother tongue, then atop what was doubtlessly an already troublesome homework load I wouldn’t hesitated to add the friendship-building task of teaching me one-through-ten in the language into which they were born. The reason for my forwardness and dedication to the pursuit, albeit in baby-step form, of so many of the world’s languages, is that I was operating under and driven by one simple precept–something less like a mantra and more like a hard-wired instinct: I love languages. The peculiarity here emerges when the simple truth of that statement collides with the hitherto unrevealed fact that I was at Oregon State University to study electrical engineering, not languages.
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