College Admissions Essay: If I Want To Go To College

“If I were you, I would go to UCLA. You may not realize it, but you will appreciate being close to home” my father told me as senior year of high school came to an end. 18 years living in the same house with my family made me want to get as far away from California as I could for college. UCLA, a 50-minute drive from my home in Irvine, did not seem as exciting as going off to the east coast by myself, which was always how I envisioned my college experience. As a naïve 18-year-old, I figured I no longer needed my parents’ help. I would go to Baltimore and be fine on my own, because after all, it was through my own hard work that I had been accepted to college.
My mom, having left her home in California to go study in Guadalajara, did not seem as eager to keep me close to home. I suppose it is due to my father’s upbringing in Iran, where life revolves around the family, and people rarely move far from their families. As Massoume Price, a social anthropologist from Iran, says in her piece for the Iran Chamber Society, “For Iranians family is the most important social institution and children are the focal point of
this institution; they are loved, adorned and sometimes spoiled. For many families, the relationship parents have with their children, is more important than the marital bound between the husband and wife. Many Iranian parents simply live for their children. Families stay together and are expected to be the priority for all members even long after they have left the nest.” As with most old customs, the emphasis placed on staying close to family has surely diminished, even in Iran, as more students travel far from home and women go to work. However, my father’s emphasis on family does reflect deep-rooted customs of Persian culture.
The importance placed on family leads me to wonder how difficult life was for my grandfather, who grew up in 1920’s Iran without a father.
This led to him living in poverty and put him at a severe disadvantage. Given the time period he grew up in, he became an outsider. He was born into a well-off family, but the death of his father put my grandfather and his mother into a much lower social class, in which he did not have as many benefits as he would have had had his father been alive. His perseverance despite these unfortunate circumstances and his journey to make a better life for his future family are inspirational to me and show me that with all of the opportunities I am afforded I have no excuse to not make the most of them. I do not have to worry about putting myself through school, much less putting food on the table for my family from a young
age. After speaking with my grandma, who has been widowed for over 20 years now, about her late husbands’ early life, she did not have as much information as I had expected. She told me that he did not like to talk about this time in his life. It was understandably a difficult situation. Growing up without a father made you an outcast in 1920’s Iran, even more so than in western societies. You were essentially born into whatever class your father belonged to, but if he were to pass away when you were young, you would likely become a peasant. At a time when many immigrants were coming to America for a better life and more jobs in cities were opening up during the Roaring Twenties, ability for social and economic mobility in Iran was very limited. My aunt, Christie Shary, who wrote a book about my grandfathers’ life, believes that this is the reason he was drawn to Western ideals. Fortunately, as he entered his teenage years, Iran started to become less opposed to Western culture and ideals.