College Admissions Essay: I Am As A Global Citizen

Being a global citizen is a concept that I consider for most the foundation upon which I have been building myself as an individual. Given my dual citizenship, Italian, and Croatian, I have always felt the need to represent and embrace both of my homelands in a variety of ways; this has been something I have been, and still am, especially committed to doing. While being a global citizen certainly means traveling and representing your nationality, there is so much more to that. Being a global citizen means being able to completely submerge yourself in a foreign culture, and being able to make that culture your own. The ability to feel at home wherever you find yourself, being enthusiastic and excited to experience a different reality is all

A beautiful family accepted me, a 17-year old Italian child, into their home and made me feel like one of their own. The cultural immersion I went through was definitely a shock, I thought initially that there would be no adjustment needed since I had already been in the United States, but was I wrong. Being transplanted overnight to another country, away from your comfort zone and everything that I have been used to was an experience that cannot be described. It would be foolish for me to lie, the first month of my stay was among the hardest of my experience, I thought that my host family was not the right fit that Portland was the wrong city for my exchange that the school didn’t fit my standards, and that simply I was not an appropriate fit with the American culture and lifestyle. However, all of these were reasons to why my experience was so great, I was “forced” to come out of my shell, I started to realize that it was my attitude towards my surroundings that would have shaped whether my exchange year would have been successful or not. During my nine months I have made lifelong connections, been part of experiences and adventures that I will cherish for the rest of my life, mentally matured from all the mistakes I made, but most importantly, I made the American culture part of my own. The addition of