Sushi

 I love everything about cooking. I love to be in the hot kitchen filled with the smell of rosemary being crushed, the odor of the pastries Photo credit: LZ A., Grand Junction, CO coming out of the oven, the Béarnaise sauce simmering in a pot ready to be drizzled over fresh Alaskan king salmon, and all the entrees being plated for the customer. But most of all I love the atmosphere of the kitchen and am awed by the speed at which every dish is customized for each diner. I could talk all day about how the culinary arts are such a humbling, difficult, and rewarding profession. My passion for cooking is why I believe it would be a wise choice to accept my application for entry into the highly esteemed Culinary Institute of America. When it comes to citizenship and the ability to work with others, I excel. I am never too harsh nor too lenient toward others. I try to deal fairly with all and am open to others’ opinions. I follow directions very well and do what I am told while still trying to infuse my own creativity into the food I cook. My strongest point in the kitchen is my ability to use the equipment for its intended purposes. I work well with melon/cheeseballers, whisks, blenders, pans, and especially cutlery. I use only the finest Hitori Hanzo cutlery and take the utmost care in cutting, dicing, mincing, and chopping with speed and precision while maintaining a safe cutting environment. When it comes to the speed of productivity, you can find no one better. In my mind, my most profitable skill would have to be my enthusiasm and willingness to try new things. Cooking is a skill that can never be perfected no matter how hard you try but the knowledge I want to obtain will help me in the kitchen more than anything else. The CIA is such a prestigious school that I would be honored to attend. I promise to be a student who will live up to its high expectations. | A few months ago, I looked in the mirror and saw, as usual, a youngish face, which I perceived as about twelve, maybe thirteen years old. But this time I realized a deeper reason for that perception: I actually identified myself, my mind and personality, with the boy I was at that age. So, I struggled with the question, “ How do I differ from the seventh-grader? ” Distinguishing between my thoughts then and my thoughts now perplexed me: I recalled a similar way of working, intellectual capacity, and motivations. Yet the problem gnawed at me because I knew something fundamental had changed in me. After all, I was looking on that seventh-grader as a distinct personality. But why did I? What distinguished him from me? I realized eventually that the difference between the seventh-grader and me was that, since seventh-grade, I had gained an outlook, a way of examining the broader world I had never considered before. The separation was clear: before the spring of tenth grade, I had lived but had never really examined life. Nigel Calder’s Einstein’s Universe finally ignited my mind with ardent inquiry. Calder’s lucid but mentally taxing explanations of Einstein’s theories forced my perspective to dilate many times over. Instead of thinking in feet and miles, suddenly my fifteen-year-old mind was trying to consider millions of light years, curved space, hopping from star to black hole and back to Earth. Naturally, I was not entirely successful, but more important, the experience plunged me into a new realm of thought, visions of the vast universe floating in my mind. At first, thinking of the astronomical expanse, I delved into the obvious (and, as I quickly found, irresolvable) questions of ultimate meaning, an exceeding elusive goal. Yet because of this errant speculation, my mind was still churning with my new view, an extremely expanded perspective about life on earth which impelled me to find out about the universal principles of existence. Now, more than ever, I gravitated toward science. Before reading Einstein’s Universe and undertaking my mental voyage, I had been interested in science because it was tidy, neat. Suddenly, that interest was ablaze with a passion for truth, knowledge, and not just in science. The hazy ideas that history was a study in human failure and triumph, that literature laid bare the human experience, and that science, science would reveal unifying principles of our chaotic, swirling existence burst from mist into light. In eleventh grade, the logic of evolution, the wonder of genetics, the grand design of physiology all seemed the more magnificent because they were natural consequences of chemistry. That year, inspired by the potential of biology for finding truth about man, I made my career choice: genetic research, the area in which I think I could make the greatest strides in doing the highest good as a human being, contributing to society. My physics teacher this year has taught me an even greater principle: science merely describes the real world and cannot be mistaken for absolute truth. Ultimately, experiencing Einstein’s Universe incited me to contemplate truly for the first time, to reevaluate my fundamental beliefs and form those which have made me more confident and peaceful than ever. Recently, I looked in the mirror at a youngish face, still a boy’s, but now that face conceals a vision more expansive than the seventh-grader ever imagined | |