four to five paragraph personal introduction that highlights your own childhood interests and school experiences, especially your reading, writing, and thinking skills. Indicate how these interests and experiences influence your life today and your choice
...ks. Great books, small books, big books, little books, it didn't matter. They were all devoured and enjoyed, not just for the facts they could impart, but for the glimpses of other worlds and other lives they could impart and for the sheer pleasure of opening a cover and stepping into another place and time. The youngest child was easy for him to deal with. Children this age only need love and attention to thrive and be happy, and Robert had love in plenty to give. Older children, especially children with a background of broken homes and relationships, can be more of a challenge. Unsure of how to deal with the two, older, miserable, transplanted American kids, Robert turned to books. "Go sit in your room and read" I'd hear on the cold, rainy English afternoons when I would whine to my mother there was nothing to do. "What should I read" I'd reply sullenly. Read a book, what a novel concept. My mother, who had barely obtained her high school diploma, and then only after having borne two children and endured two marriages, read enough to get through life. The signs on the highways, the labels in the grocery store. But to read a book for pleasure! Unheard of in my house, until now. And so Robert would hand me a book and tell me to go occupy myself. And what books. Bronte, Dickens and Twain were all inhaled in my small, cramped, damp English bedroom. And the places these books could take me. Out of an unhappy childhood, in an unfamiliar country, where I was the odd one out (different clothes, different accent, different child), and into far off, wondrous places where being different was something to be embraced, something that made you special, with a great destiny waiting just around the corner. One particular afternoon, having been sent to my room for some infraction too small to remember, I was sitting on my bed, staring at the wall, brooding about how unjust life was. I hadn't asked my mother to get married and move half way around the world, had I? Having been raised in warm, friendly Southern Texas, I despised this cold, miserable, unfriendly country, where the sun never seemed to shine. And then very quietly, the bedroom door opened, and in slipped a large, male hand through the crack and laid a book and a package of chocolates just inside door. I sat there and stared while the hand withdrew and the footsteps went softly down the hall. For five minutes, I resisted the temptation. I wouldn't be bought, not even by the prospect of a new book and candy. But finally, the temptation proved too great, and I walked over to the door and picked up both items. Turning the book over, I read the spine "The Lord of the Rings". "Oh well" I thought, "It's not as if I have anything else to do." And so I began to read. All afternoon, into the night, and again the next morning. I read and read and read. And final...