Required Essay #1 – Discuss one of your significant challenges or accomplishments and its value to your life. Limit to one page, 250-350 words. Mail or hand-deliver to OSAC by the appropriate deadline (February 15 or March 1).

Life’s biggest challenge is to find purpose. I’ve looked many places. I built award winning robots. I studied the cello and classical music. I devoted myself to engineering numbers and figures. And then I took a course in Arabic.

Two years of studying Arabic brought me to North Africa. I flew to Tunisia not knowing why I went or what I would find. Over the course of nine months of linguistic and cultural immersion I was schooled about Tunisia. I traveled back and forth across the country meeting and talking with people about their lives, dreams, desires, and passions. I discussed America, Americans, and what it means to be an American and a Tunisian. I found myself a cultural emissary. I learned all I could in those brief months. I learned how to humanize.

When I returned to OSU, I searched in vain for an outlet to let Americans know that Tunisians are people. Religions, customs, and values may differ, but we are all humans. We are all citizens of this planet and live in an interconnected world. There is no “other, no “us,” no “them.” There is only “we.”

I searched long and hard for a sympathetic ear. I gave impassioned lectures in front of classes of twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, one hundred students. I talked with professors, people on the street, my extended family. Almost all of what I said fell on deaf ears. A great number of Americans don’t care about families in North Africa full of love and laughter. Many Americans don’t want to think of people in Arab lands as human. This must change. People must learn how to humanize.

I now have the power to change others. It will come slowly and one person at a time. My words will fall on deaf ears but I will persist until someone listens. I may not have found life’s absolute purpose, but I did find something that gives me a little purpose. I will tell the stories of “them.” I will show the citizens of the world that we are all people, that we are all human.