Intend to Study Abroad :: College Admissions Essays

I Intend to Study Abroad   On one hot late-summer day when I was in high school, my parents came stick come in from a shopping trip with a surprise present for me the known board game, Diplomacy. At first I scoffed at such an outmoded game. Who would want to waste glorious sunny days moving armies round a map of pre-World War I Europe, pretending to be capital of North Dakota or Disraeli? But after compriseing the game once, I became suddenly riveted by the nuances of state contrivance, and soon began losing sleep as I tried to craft clever diplomatic gambits, hatch devious schemes, and better understand the games changing dynamics. As my friends and I dog-tired the second half of the summer clothed by the game, my parents grinned knowingly. How could I resist being fascinated with Diplomacy, they asked me, when I invariably read about international personal business, and liked nothing more than debating politics over dinner? How could I resist being fascinated, when I had spent close to of my summers in Greece (and, much more briefly, France and England), witnessing first-hand the ways in which countries resist socially, culturally, and politically?   Though my passion for foreign policy and international affairs undoubtedly dates back to high school, I never had the chance to full develop this interest before college. Once I arrived at Harvard, however, I discovered that I could learn about international relations through and through both my academics and my extracurricular activities. Academically, I decided to concentrate in Government, and, inwardly Government, to take classes that elucidated the forces underlying the relations of states on the world stage. Some of the most memorable of these classes included Human Rights, in which we discussed what role humanitarian concerns ought to play in international relations Politics of Western Europe, in which I learned about the social, economic, and political development of five major Eu ropean countries and Causes and Prevention of War, which focused on unearthing the roots of conflict and finding out how bloodshed could have been avoided. Currently, for my senior thesis, I am investigating the exotic pattern of American human rights-based intervention in the post-Cold War era, and essay to determine which explanatory variables are best able to account for it.   Interestingly, I think that I have learned at least as much about international relations through my extracurriculars in college as I have through my classes.