Why I Want To Pursue A Scholarship

I was born in the city of Sao Paulo, Brazil, but lived the first ten years of my life in San Bernardo, a small town in the suburbs of the metropolitan area. To support the family, my father worked as a forklift driver, and my mother has a janitor. Early in my education, my dad seeking for better job opportunities moved back to Sao Paulo. However, living in the big city was far more expensive, and we end up in a poor neighborhood located fifteen miles from the downtown. I finished the high school in 1999 but instead applied for a college; I started working in one factory exactly like my father. In 2006, seven years after finished the high school, I realized that investing in my education would be the only way to climb out to succeed. To complete

Then, after graduated, I started an international student exchange in the United States to learn English as a second language, and now I have returned taking classes at a community college.

In 2006, I was accepted as a student in the Universidad Sao Judas, a small private university located 10 miles from my house in Sao Paulo. I receive a scholarship through a federal program of inclusion that offered scholarships to low-income students graduated from public schools. The selection method used by the scholarship program for accepting new students was based on one single score that the students get from the national high school examination. The college system in Brazil is organized in a way that when the student selects one major, they should follow all the class in order from beginning to end in a four years block. Because my Enem score was the lowest allowed by the scholarship program, only three program majors options that had not yet been filled was available to me: accounting, nursing, and journalism. I select the last option only because at

The classes started, and I realized that the education system foreign is far more complex compared to the one I faced back in my home country. The lectures are fastening and more thoughtful, and the professors follow the syllabus like clock-work. They introduce the topics, and it is up to students be ready to find out more about the subjects during the homework. But there is a gap created by the early years of my education that I have been trying to fill. For every new topic presented in the classroom, I need take some steps back to remember and achieve the foundations. This back and forth is relatively time-consuming, and when I start getting comfortable with one topic the professor already is presenting the next chapter from the book. In some moments, I shared the same feeling that the Chilean writer Marjorie Agosin, highlights in her article "Always Living in Spanish" when "Sometimes the austere sound of English helps me bear the solitude of knowing that I am foreign so far away from those about whom I write.". Living in a loop where I am most of the time behind other students brings up situations where I am facing challenges to follow the group activities. Another issue that I am working on is to create new friendships