World travel has shaped my heart, my soul and my mind since I was very young. I am not from a wealthy family, In fact, I will need loans to attend your college. But my father and mother have always been world travelers. My father creates photography books, mostly about foreign countries. My mother speaks four languages, and they met in Japan. So I guess it’s not entirely surprising, that when I was nine, my parents sold their house, cars and furniture, pulled my two brothers and me out of school and took us on a 16-month voyage around the world.

As a result of this long journey and many other family voyages, I have been  lucky enough to visit 25 countries on six continents - many way off the tourist track… and many for extended periods of time. I have been to places  where people ran out of their houses to gawk at me because they had never seen white children. I have lived in Australia for six months, India for two months, Laos for a month and various parts of France for more than three months. Because of these experiences, I believe that I bring an international perspective to my classroom discussions every day.

When we study ancient Greece, I can relate what I learn in the classroom to  the classical ruins I visited in Olympia and Ephesus. When we study French, I bring a cultural background based on five trips to France, including a month-long  language-immersion program in Provence. And I have a different point of view during classroom discussions about the current war in Iraq, because I have been to third world countries ravaged by war. I was in Cambodia, for example, when the brutal former dictator, Pol Pot, was captured and rocket battles raged in  the streets of Phnom Penh. I understand the international land mine issue more personally, because I’ve met hundreds of Cambodians with missing limbs. And I have a more personal interest in the Middle East conflict because I spent  a month in the Middle East meeting Israelis and Palestinians.

Of course, traveling for the sake of experience is wonderful, and I feel incredibly fortunate to have done that, but I also know that what counts most is what you learn from your experience and how you integrate that into your life.

I once traveled to India with my father, and worked with him at the Dazzling Stone orphanage in the slums of Chennai for a month. There, I witnessed the extreme poverty that plagues much of the world. I experienced 100-degree heat and the constant smell of raw sewage running through open sewers. I saw 2,000  poverty-stricken kids packed into a single school, and I spent every day with  100 orphans who had almost nothing - not even their own bed or a parent  or even a last name.

Some adult members of our Global Volunteers team had emotional breakdowns when they saw the conditions, and had to go home. But I experienced Dazzling Stone Orphanage in a different way. First, I saw it as part of my own heritage - I am part Indian. Second, I learned to overcome my natural shyness when I had to stand up every day in front of 60 Tamil-speaking children in a packed classroom with plywood walls and teach them English.

But most importantly, I found out that even though I was supposed to be the teacher, I could learn far more from my kids than they could ever learn from me. I learned that these desperately poor kids were, for the most part, much happier and kinder to each other than my friends at home. And when I really thought about it, I was forced to admit that they were (gulp!) happier than  I was. (Global Volunteers has since raised funds to help construct a new orphanage facility, and now pays the daily living costs of all 108 children in the orphanage.)

That made me question some basic assumptions about my life and about modern  American culture. Why were these kids in India with nothing but a cracked cricket  bat always laughing and smiling, while my friends and I, with our comfortable houses, video games and $150 sneakers always moping around because we “needed” more stuff? Why was there such a sense of community and family in a group of kids who actually had no family, while my friends and I often felt alienated  and alone? And what does it do to a society when its children see more than a million television commercials - all saying, “You Need More”- before they reach age 18? Is American consumer culture all about creating needs that can never be filled? These are issues I want to explore in college. They are issues of philosophy, psychology, culture and probably lots of other things I don’t understand yet. Traveling around the world is great, but maybe the value of traveling so far to so many places, is that, at the end, you can  better appreciate the value of an intellectual journey. And that’s a journey  I’m ready to make.