My college admission essay

Classical music has been a part of my life longer than I can remember. My mother began listening to Mozart, Mendelssohn and her favorite, Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, since I was in her womb. Even now my mother loves to listen to Spring, her favorite while she drives to work every morning. It’s because of her influences that I could never envision myself doing anything other than playing the violin.

I come from a family that has always been faced with great obstacles, even to this day. Both of my South Korean parents moved to the United States with 2 young children and without a means of communicating efficiently. This forced them to work in many different kinds of underpaying jobs with little opportunity for advancement. While we made enough to have a roof over our heads, it is now very clear to me how much they truly struggled for us to get by. Even today I recall those dreadful days when my father would argue that we could not afford the lessons after my mother had already paid for them, disregarding several bills completely in progress. I would shake in anger and fear as terror struck my heart to even imagine a future without my tiny violin. I realized after some time that I was taking my lessons for granted, unaware of how hard my parents had to work to be able to afford my lessons.

Although I loved being praised by the supportive people around me, I had little taste for practicing. While many people connected lack of practice to a lack of interest, my mother saw through this. She recognized more than anyone else that although I dreaded practice, playing the violin was one of the few things I truly enjoyed doing. She would pressure me to start practicing whenever I was loafing around the house wondering what to do. If that failed, she would threaten to stop my lessons as we both knew that I did not want to stop performing in front of people. If it was not for her determination to keep me practicing regularly, I may have never understood my true passion.

I have gained an enormous amount of support from my mother all throughout these years. I am still amazed that she agreed to help me in my endeavors to play music for the rest of my life as a career when she herself or none of the family on her side plays music. She would constantly fix my posture from the little she learned at my lessons whenever I was practicing. In addition to this, my mother never complained about the long distances she had to drive to get me to my lessons or rehearsals. She always came to every one of my concerts even when I told her the drive was exhausting.

Her support was a constant reminder of how important playing the violin really was to me. My mother understood me and my love for music more than anyone else. Through her efforts to keep me practicing and working hard, I discovered more and more with each passing year how much music would be an inevitable aspect of my life. It is because of her that I now have a means of perfectly communicating what words cannot.