Entry 18: Your Attributes

Describing the person that influenced you will either show the attributes you value or the ones you don't value depending on if this person positively influenced you or negatively influenced you. Either way, this question will reveal a lot about your values and what you strive to become in your life. Some of the values that admissions officers are looking for are: ability to learn from mistakes, accountability, concern for others, creativity, defined goals, dignity, discipline, ethics, goal-orientation, honesty, humility, introspection, leadership, lucidity, maturity, positivity, self-awareness, team-orientation, uniqueness, and vision. Qualities that they aren't looking for are: anger, arrogance, bad writing, blind ambition, ego, entitlement, immaturity, mediocrity, perfectionism, poor judgment, prejudice against race/gender, and vanity. Look through the two lists and try to determine which attributes you have. Then decide whether you got any of them from your influential person. Write about these attributes and how you came about them. If you didn't get them through your influential person, where did you get them? Did your influential person give you any of them? If not, explain why you chose this person and how they DID influence you.

• I believe that the good attributes I have include characteristics such as the ability to learn from mistakes, concern for others, defined goals, ethics, goal-orientation, honesty, introspection, and leadership. I believe that I cannot decide for myself the other characteristics. How did I get these good attributes and characteristics? I would say that most of them did not come from my influential person. Instead, they are products of nature, results of my genes. I believe that the only trait I got from my influential person is the trait of introspection. This is because one of the actions of my influential person was the trigger or initiative to my introspection of me and my future. I began thinking, what would the future be like, and how would my future change depending on my efforts, both academically and non-academically. As for the bad attributed that I have, they include anger, immaturity, and perfectionism. Similar to the good attributes, I cannot decide by myself the other attributes and characteristics. All of these three traits are caused by nature, by my genes. I am quick to anger (I suffer from mood swings), I am sometimes very childish and immature, and I feel uncomfortable is something is not perfect (at least in my dictionary). Why would I choose this influential person if he only influenced only one trait? That is because the trait concerns my future, which is something that I value a lot.