English Composition 1-UA5E

Luciana Rojas Meza

U20221D411
“Round 360°”
Sometimes I think we must change our plans, give a 360 turn to our life. At the end of last
year, I applied to several universities in the United States. This year, before a complicated
process, I was accepted into approximately fifteen universities. Days pass and I must decide
if I will attend one of these universities or not, but finally the elevated costs made me give
up on the opportunity. I consider that the universities in Peru are quite good, but education
as a country can improve. That was one of the main reasons why I decided to look for
universities abroad, to be able to improve myself in the workplace and be a more
competitive professional in the future. Based on the skills I had and what options I could
look for with the knowledge I know, English was one of those, which is why I looked for
countries where they have that language as their mother tongue. I looked for the United
Kingdom, Canada, and the United States, and finally I chose to apply to the last country
because apart from having the best universities in the world and a high level of education,
job opportunities in this country are very good, specially for young people.
To attend a university abroad is quite difficult, especially for Latin people, the process is
thorough and demanding. In my point of view and of other students I talk to, we usually
conclude that the application process turns to stress. The school I attended does not have a
baccalaureate, normally the average students finish this extra year of school and apply to
universities abroad, since all the baccalaureate courses are in English, and you need to have
that good level to apply abroad. For which I had to take the school and a separate course to
take a very competitive exam. Despite all that, that was not the most difficult moment for
me. In my opinion the part of this process that was more complicated was the interviews
you must pass, which required a good command of English. I knew, could communicate and
express myself in English, but going through interviews with US citizens, was completely
different, and here starts this experience.
I remember that one of my calls to ask an advisor if all my documents had already arrived or
if any were missing. I was answered by a lady who asked me for my password, date of birth,
student code, among other things, and spoke to me very quickly that I did it answer nothing,
I asked her to repeat what he said again, but I didn't understand either. At that time, I
thought that I can’t communicate in English, despite having taken it as a course from a very
young age, I don’t understand nothing and it shocked me. At this point I started to focus on
the main goal which is to communicate more easily and naturally with these various
advisors. At that moment it crossed my mind to stop speaking English since I felt that I was
not good at it. I stopped answering calls, emails, etc. for a few days until I got one from a
super friendly advisor and just telling me that whatever I needed she had no problem
helping me, made me find motivation again and continue. I had to learn to see it as a
challenge, and as complicated as it seemed, it had a solution. Looking for some strategies to
deal with the situation, such as better preparing my dialogues, calling my friends and asking
them to have a conversation in English, I started calling more than one advisor to ask
questions that perhaps I already knew to practice English.
It got to a point that I didn't think about what I had to say, and the conversations just flowed
for me, that's when I realized that I wanted to continue practicing this language until it
became my second language. I have always particularly liked languages, and I believe that,
like everything in life, it has its difficulties, as it was presented to me in this case, however,
what we must do is try it even if we are afraid of making mistakes. I believe that the
important thing is to learn from our mistakes. Many times, the people with whom we speak
have also had problems of this type since nobody is born an expert in something, so they
understand that because of nerves or something similar you can get confused when
pronouncing a word and it is the most normal thing since never, we stop learning. Life is
learning and of course this is going to have its difficulties along the way, but the most
important thing is to know how to face them and never lose resilience.