New York Times catches a sight of a college interview process of Maimuna Abdi Yussuf, a Somali student at African Leadership Academy in Johannesburg in its "Demystifying College Admissions and Aid" section. According to her experience, she encountered some expected questions such as "why are you interested in the program?" and "how will you contribute to the program"; and she also was questioned "why do you want to use social entrepreneurship as a factor for change? why not just go to your country, be the president, and change things from the top to the bottom?"
After all this process, Maimuna concludes one does not need to be someone else than oneself, but true to himself/herself. She tried to "create a holistic picture of who [she is] and who [she] intend[s] to be." Here are "some definitions of who [she is]":
- I am an eccentric person with a recalcitrant will.
- I am a secret admirer of entrepreneurship. My entrepreneurial heroes are my parents and they don’t even know it.
- I am the founder of The New Identity, a social enterprise that I started when I was 15. It was fun and its failure was a lesson well learned.
- I am a young woman who did not know my name until I was 13, when I was registering for my Kenya certificate of primary education. For the first decade of my life, I lived by my nickname, Muna.
- I am a former stay-at-home librarian. As a child, I ran a library from my room.
- I am a former Somali delegate of the One Young World Forum, and slowly, I’m trying to figure out what exactly I want to stand for.
- I am an evolving multilingual speaker. Thanks to my multilingual Cape Verdean and Moroccan friends Alyne and Imane, I am improving on my French and Portuguese by placing written sticky notes on my door.
- I am a biographer. I have two biographies that were co-written by 69 former classmates back in Kenya. (The biographies contain ridiculous stories of high school in Kenya.)
- I am a collaborative innovator. I helped my friend Goodman start the student-run media platform, ALAians Media. Let’s establish the Silicon Valley for Africa. Any volunteers?
- I am an energy scientist (or, at least, I was). As a science project at my old high school for the Science Congress, I created an alternative source of energy that produces less carbon emissions. (That was the end of my science-related studies.)
- I am an auditor. I run an auditing process for 17 student-run enterprises.
- I am a firm believer that two beings shape my existence: God and me.
- I am a recent attendee of the Wharton Sports Business Academy at the University of Pennsylvania. My first initiative in the sports industry, The Sports Peace Project will inspire the slogan of “playing peace forward” and I consider my Moroccan, Nigerian and Ivorian co-founders as world leaders in the sports industry.
- I’m a dreamer.
- I am a college applicant who has yet to get into … (any on my list would do). I await my rejection, acceptance and waitlist decisions.
Her college list and admission decisions are as follows:
Updated Jan. 7, 2013
Regular Decision:
Barnard College - Waiting
Dartmouth College - Waiting
Duke University - Waiting
Harvard University - Waiting
Middlebury College - Waiting
University of North Carolina -Chapel Hill - Waiting
University of Pennsylvania - Waiting
Williams College - Waiting
Yale University -Waiting
To read the whole article, please follow the link in New York Times website: http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/11/putting-myself-out-there-and-waiting-for-a-college-to-accept/#more-49879
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