College Admissions Essay: My Pursuit Of Opportunity

Three years ago, I was asked to preside over an exceptionally diverse congregation of 450 people in New York City. The commitment was expected to be anywhere from 3 to 5 years, on a volunteer basis, and strictly secondary to my professional obligations. The assignment required considerable sacrifice; including placing my educational ambitions on hold as well as declining a contemporaneous professional offer to manage the insurance-linked securities portfolio of a large international pension fund. The latter sacrifice was particularly difficult because I am acutely aware of the value that many graduate business schools place on international experience. Even so, I feel convicted that accepting the challenge was the right decision and if

In my adolescence, I had the benefit of being raised in abject poverty and a drug riddled environment with 10 siblings living in a 100 year-old, 3 bed 1 bath, rented farmhouse. Naturally, I was oblivious to many of life’s luxuries and opportunities. Despite these less-than-copacetic circumstances, I have always been consciously aware of the simple and reassuring arithmetic of personal progression - even if the progression was fueled by necessity. I was convinced that socioeconomic designations were not automatically correlated to educational opportunities or individual goals. Consequently, for some time, I have observed the profound reality that opportunity exists in front of me through behavior and optimism. Nonetheless, that fact doesn't lessen the potential and corresponding opportunities that I am responsible for. I am well aware of many other peers that have outperformed their educational ambitions in prestigious and challenging schools throughout the world. I am inspired by all students who outperform academic expectations that society may have placed upon them. While navigating my undergraduate experience and for much of my adult life, I was faced with the responsibility of supporting my parents financially. This obligation resulted in tremendous character growth. I developed significant empathy for others who aspire to achieve goals well above societal expectations while tending to socioeconomic realities not of their own doing. After completion of my undergraduate degree, I was drawn to the broader financial services in New York. However, my profile at the time, both education and work experience, did not appear to be a preference for the firms I aimed for. Be that as it were, I flexed instincts I had learned as a child to persevere with creativity and optimism. Because my prior experience had been in a startup