Practice Personal Statement

Matthew John Escamilla

A Calm Upbringing

To many an analytical person might be a nuisance or hard to get along with. Despite those statements, many people whom I have come across have not coined me as a nuisance. Growing up with a family of intellectuals allowed me to converse with adults the majority of my time. To be frank, I did not have many others to converse with due to my meek nature as a child. Also, I am the eldest of the great-grandchildren on my father’s side of the family, save for my older cousins Brandon and Taylor from Arizona. This limited my ability to converse with others, in which I resorted to learning. Rather than playing with other kids, my intrigue was learning from television shows on Animal Planet that I watched at my great-grandfather’s house. The library was a common place for me, whether it was finding different species of snakes on the computer or looking at a list of battles between Britain and France. It was truly my great-grandfather that spurred my curiosity and will to learn from our conversations regarding life science and his times growing up as a San Jose State graduate and World War II veteran. It was through conversations with adults and my will to learn that I developed my analytical nature.

It has been this analytical nature that has carried me through some of the hardest classes that I have ever taken. In that regard, my largest hurdle that I applied my analytical skills was going through AP Physics B. Despite it being one of my favorite classes in high school, the mental stress induced by applying mathematics to science left me with stress wrinkles and many hours sacrificed towards work. It was through the strain of AP Physics that I found out that I excel at applying mathematics to science, but am very weak when dealing with mathematics alone. In junior year I would study in Mr. Jorgensen’s classroom at lunch every day of the week, except for Friday. The ultimate reward of the class was seeing a B- on my report card....