Sample preface

My name is Andrew Chu. Let me introduce myself …..

        I am an ABC (American-Born Chinese); my dad was a Ph.D student at Stanford University when I was born. I lived in the Stanford community for five years before we moved back to Taiwan (1997) and stayed in Hualien. I went to Tzu Chi nursery school and went to Stella Maris elementary school. By first grade, I had already shown potential in the field of math when I won fifth place in the Hualien math competition.

        In the summer of my first grade, my mom was accepted into the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She brought along my brother and I, so that we may also experience a different community. We lived in a special university campus for students with families, which grated us the chance to make friends with many other people from many different countries. By the end of third grade, my best friends were from Israel, Korea, India and many more countries. I learned and experienced a lot of different cultures from them and learned to broaden my view early on in life.

        When I was enrolled into Angell Elementary School, I was in ESL (English Second Language), a class for foreign students to speed up their English learning. I met most of my friends there and learned English at dashing speed. It was only a matter of months before I understood what my teacher was saying! After Angell Elementary School, I had attended Tappan Middle School in the U.S. Unlike schools in Taiwan, we had to run between classes. There was only five minutes each break, so running from class to class became an ordinary part of life. Being in U.S. also gave me more opportunities to discover my potentials. Instead of tests and exams, we were regularly given projects to do with other classmates. This often means building models, making presentations, and even performing a mock trial.

        At the start of middle school, I attended the test for math class advanced placement. With top scores, I successfully took 7^th grade math at 6^th grade, which made me find Taiwan’s math rather simple. In middle school I also attended the Tappan band, the Tappan choir and at summer, the advanced classical band and summer jazz band as a clarinetist. This gave me a lot of chances to perform as a group and work with my peers.

        What my biggest accomplishment was in my view is my performance at Academic Games. Academic Games is a nationwide competition in which students would square-off in games that concentrate in math, logic, history, social science, and linguistics. We used to train afterschool for 2 hours on every Tuesdays and Thursdays and then7 hours on Saturdays. I did superb in the monthly tournaments against regional schools. At the state championship my team of five people took home overall second as well as many other medals for different individual games. With that, we qualified for the national competition, which was held at North Virginia. At Nationals, our team claimed third place but lost at many individual games. As disappointing as it may be, there I learned the value of teamwork and hard work. We may not have won first, but we gave it our best shot and that was enough.

        I was sad when my parents had decided that we were moving back to Taiwan. I have a lot of friends here in the United States and I love the life and learning there. But under a different light, coming back to Taiwan is also a great chance to learn many things that I could not have in U.S.

        On January 28th, 2008, I came back to Taipei, Taiwan. I was partially sad about leaving Michigan but excited about going back to Taiwan. Learning Chinese becomes my first priority. I was enrolled into Tzu Chi Middle School on February 18^th. Although I had to catch up on several years of Chinese and other subjects, I also continued to play piano and clarinet.

I was also enrolled into Tzi Chi High School. And while studying for my usual academic subjects, I also studied more so that I can try to enroll in a college abroad. But studying for colleges in both Taiwan and the U.S. did not weaken my scores in either area. In fact, I was promoted to the best class after the first year in high school.

Because of my previous history, I had very good English skills compared to my classmates. This often results in me being entered into several English related competitions, which I always do well at. I had also displayed my English skills when I achieved 960 out of 990 in the TOEIC.