Notes

Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story.
“There’s more to us than eating chapatis and samosas,” my grandmother jokingly said. I was in her house in Hyderabad, India, where most of my family lived. We were sitting on a bed because in her house, the bedroom was also the living room. The sounds of the city were too far away to intrude, but the omnipresent sound of local vendors could easily be heard outside.
My name is Rohit, and when I was three years old, I moved to the United States. I had always thought that my parents were, by fortuitous chance, given the opportunity to come to the States, but I hadn’t ever known the whole story. It was the day before my parents, brother and I would fly over to India. There I was  the rebellious fifteen-year old teenager who didn’t want to miss the whole summer when he could be spending time with his friends. “Why did you book a flight, mom?” Frustrated, I thought to myself that I was wasting my valuable summer. My parents would stress the importance of seeing that very distant “uncle” and “aunty” that I had never seen before. The next day, we boarded the flight.
Twenty hours later, we finally reached Hyderabad. My initial reaction was something unlike anything I had ever experienced ever before. I felt sensations of euphoria and oddly, nostalgia. On the way to my grandmother’s home, I was quite surprised by what I saw. A truck full of kids, beggars on the street with noticeable physical defects, and an unusually large amount of putrid roadkill were just some of the images that shaped my mind greatly. This was nothing like I had ever seen in America.
At my grandmother’s house, I noticed several oddities. She did not have running water. There were mice that were scurrying around the perimeter of the home. She did not have air conditioning, which is a luxury in many nations. We ate our dinner on the floor, with no electricity for large parts of the day. These were surreal sights for someone like me to see.
One night before we slept, my aunt turned and looked at my brother and me. What she told us the next few minutes was absolutely incredible. During childhood, my father was ridiculed for having alopecia, a form of patchy balding. He became a civil engineer, making low wages that alienated “friends” from him. He had suffered a major loss at the age of 24  his brother had committed suicide. My brother and I looked at each other in bewilderment, as we didn’t even know we had another uncle. With newfound determination, a couple years later he got married which led to my birth. I would never have imagined that I was one piece of a complex puzzle that I didn’t know existed. My father, tired of earning less than my grandfather did from his retirement pension, decided to pursue a new field at the time known as “computer science”. He’d venture twenty miles daily to the nearest library to learn computing languages. Surprisingly, one of his friends found a job opening overseas for him. My father had difficulty in obtaining a work visa, to the extent that my grandmother sold all her jewelry to pay for the visa funds. I was shocked to hear all this, having never heard this before!
My identity is shaped by my family’s obstacles. It is one of perseverance, but also one of risk-taking, illustrated through my grandmother’s jewelry sales. My family’s own version of rags to riches has given me a genuine purpose to succeeding in life, by not succumbing to anything. I have suffered from alopecia as well, but fought it successfully. Obstacles may occur throughout life, but as shown by my father, it is how you respond to them that matters. Resilience through risk-taking is the only way to realize aspirations and desires.



To help the reviewers get to know you, describe an experience you have had, a person who has influenced you, or an obstacle you have overcome.

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.” Mahatma Gandhi was a great man that shaped humanity with his virtues of nonviolence and perseverance that helped make him a role model for many in our present day world. But the aforementioned quote does not just apply to Mahatma Gandhi. The sayings also accurately depict my father’s life.
Born in Hyderabad, one of the largest cities in India, my father Seshagiri Rao was born into a poor family. His mother was a housemaker, and his father worked as a civil engineer, making paltry wages. Throughout his childhood, he went to a very rundown public school in Hyderabad. He also suffered a couple bouts of alopecia, which you can imagine caused him massive embarrassment and frustration upon going to school. Upon entering college, Seshagiri majored in civil engineering. Having seen my grandfather undertake civil engineering, he felt that he could manage that profession as well.
After graduation, he got married. My dad got a job offer to be a site engineer at a building project near Bangalore. Bangalore was 350 miles away from Hyderabad. My mother was back in Hyderabad, so she would get him to visit at least once a month. Meeting once a month is still very, very difficult to maintain close relations. My father, therefore, looked for a job closer to home. He found a job fifty miles away from Hyderabad. Amidst all of this, my parents could not afford a home, so they stayed at my grandmother’s humble abode. At his new job, he encountered a new issue: regular wages. The employer was unable to provide my dad with consistent wages on a scheduled basis. Instead, he would randomly pay the salary in increments of every two months or even every five months. My mother became an elementary school teacher during this time period. Still, together they earned just a little over 1600 rupees monthly, which is just around twenty-five dollars. To put this into perspective, my grandfather’s pension fund was twice as much as this. A lot of people, specifically my parents’ former friends and a number of relatives, would constantly chastise my father for still not having settled down five years into his marriage. The persons that my parents thought were friends turned their backs on them, perhaps due to the low income that they were earning.
One day, my father read an article on a local paper called Eenadu. The article talked about the emergence of a growing field known as computer science. It talked about how many jobs in the US and the UK were being created due to this. The United States and Britain were ‘promised lands’ for many at this time. Also around this time, I was born. Hooked onto this, my dad sought to learn this so-called ‘computer science’. Looking for sources of learning, he discovered that there was a library about 18 miles away from the house. Every day, he would board three buses and walk a mile to reach this library. Within seven months, he somehow had attained a thorough knowledge of several computing languages such as Java, Visual Basic, and the Oracle series. He then looked to search for jobs that were located in the US. Out of the numerous ‘friends’ who had turned their backs on him, one friend hadn’t. Bhuma had given an employer a solid recommendation of my father’s cognitive abilities based on what he saw from their childhood. The employer gave my dad a job offer, however now there were significant immigration issues to solve.
The customary time to wait for a work visa was supposedly five months. Five months had passed, and many of the same relatives who had earlier ridiculed my parents about their wages had now told my father to give up the prospect of a visa. They had claimed that a visa rejection was the eventual result. My father kept his head held high and waited day after day. Finally, the visa was approved two months later. My dad flew to the United States. Now, the anxiety was surrounding whether the job was actually legitimate. It had been established that a relative had attempted the same feat of trying to get a job in America, only to find that a job offer given was a hoax. This was also a waiting game, largely for my mother and grandparents. To their relief, my dad duly informed them that it was indeed a real job with real American dollars as wages. My mother and I flew over a year after my dad had arrived to the US, once again due to immigration issues. But we had made it. We have lived here and enjoyed it here, largely due to the successes of my father.
My father has been the definition of many virtues during this long journey to get to America. Hard work, courage, risk-taking, and the power of friendship are just a few of the many character traits that one can use to describe him after this. This is also a slightly altered version of the American dream, which I will call the ‘immigrant dream’. The immigrant dream is working hard in your native country to get a good job in America for the sole reason of providing for your family. My father worked hard in India, learning computing languages quickly. He was brave enough to take the plunge to go to America to get a salary that was around a hundred times the amount earned while in India. His one friend who did not turn his back on him helped him when the assistance was desperately needed. Why did he do this? He did this so that my mother, my brother (born in America) and I could live comfortably. He did not want us to go through the same struggle that he had to go through. I really look up to him in everything he does. Even today, his work ethic is phenomenal. He continues to stay up-to-date with all of the latest technologies and languages that the information technology world has to offer. Consequently, he has moved up the career ladder. He helps me with all of my homework, be it math or physics or literature. This man is the epitome of a dreamer. He taught me that if you work hard to realize your dreams, it can truly happen. His gamble of coming to America unsure of whether the job offer was legitimate was quite the risk, but it turned out to be a successful risk. “Ignorance is always afraid of change” – Jawaharlal Nehru.