2013. 6. 7.

에세이 샘플 5 (유학생, GPA 3.65, SAT 1620 (리딩 430), Syracuse, Penn State 합격, UC Davis/Irvine 대기자 명단)

이 에세이는 중위권 학교를 도전하는 영어실력이 약간 부족한 학생의 에세이다. 이렇듯, 학생의 실력에 맞게 에세이의 수준을 조절해줘야 한다. 무조건 잘 써준 에세이가 좋은 게 아니다. 주제도 평범한 요리 얘기다.

Since little, I’ve loved everything about food, both eating and cooking. Whenever my mother was in the kitchen cooking meals, I would stay by her side and ask every detail about the cooking procedure. At my home stay in the US, the food became an issue as I didn’t get easily accustomed to American food, on top of my home-stay guardian not being a gourmet chef (sometimes the food she provides makes me wonder what ingredients she could have possibly used). Especially on weekends, the home-stay kids had to take care of their own meals. Being in such situation, I was prompted to venture into being the weekend cook for my housemates. After acting as the weekend cook for a several times, one valuable thing I learned is how to make the most of resources available, no matter how scant they are.

One day, I had a craving for Korean-style fried rice. So I looked into the refrigerator; eggs, leftover spam, butter, and carrots were the only things I could find useful for my dish. I chopped up the carrots into little bite pieces while heating up the frying pan with a chunk of butter in it. I then poured everything in the pan, rice, spam, and egg and started stirring. I put the heat into medium in order not to burn the rice. If I think about it, there is not much into this fried rice. But given the situation, it was the best meal for that weekend.

On another occasion, I found eggs (there were always eggs, thank goodness!), zucchini, miso paste, and tofu. Again, I chopped up the zucchini into chunks, put on the beaten eggs with diced green onions, and then fried it in the pan until I got golden fried zucchini. Miso soup was really easy. I only had to boil the paste with chopped up tofu. Once again, with miso soup, fried zucchini, kimchi, and white rice, the weekend supper for the housemates were ready and it was a blast for kids who had been fed up with greasy cafeteria food throughout the week.

At first, I thought cooking itself was a joy in itself. The process itself, as well as the final output, was some form of art in my opinion. But as I started making meals more and more for my friends and family, cooking became less of an culinary art but more of service to the people around me. Cooking is no extraordinary merit, but I feel proud of myself when I see them enjoying my food. I could see now why my mother used to say with a tender smile, “I don’t have to eat. I get stuffed just by looking at you kids eating my food.”

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