Hana Choi/subject 2014/Tuesday 11am~1pm

 A giant leap for me

 

201103628 Hana Choi

 

2014 is called horses' year in Korea. A horse has a meaning of 'activeness' and 'strength' in Korea. Thinking about how to be an energetic and powerful person like a horse in the future I made three resolutions for this year: learning French, having a knowledge of the world history, and studying economics.

I was always eager to learn any other languages except for English because English was the only foreign language I could speak. When I was in Quebec for a week last year there was an event I realized how important languages are and made me to learn French. I lost my way to a bus terminal. The departure time was approaching but I had no idea how to get to the bus station so I asked one of people on the street. But in Quebec many people use only French even though it is a part of Canada and the person also did not speak English. I used body language and succeeded to get to the station but if I had known how to speak basic French it would have been much easier to communicate with not only the person but other people there. This was the strong motivation for me to start to learn French so I have been going to French school for twice a week and try to spend as much time as I can on studying French.

I also began to have interests in world history. I had not thought it was important to know what occurred in the past. However, since I subscribed newspaper I found out how crucial world history is to understand current affairs around the world. So whenever I read an international part in newspaper I research online the background or find some materials in books. But there were still some curiosities about the articles I read and many of them couldn’t be clearly explained only by world history. This is the reason I have focused on economics.

Not only world history but also current issues cannot be explained without the understanding of economics because economics are used to interpret why the things happened. For instance if I want to conceive why a war is going on in the Middle East I need to know economic strategies of each country. So I read newspaper daily and try to find which economic rules people use to analyze incidents. Furthermore I study economics reading a text book to understand this field deeply.

Those three things I mentioned above are never be achieved in a short time. Though being fluent in French, knowing what happened in the past and studying economics are the things I have to improve on to become an influential person for the rest of my life. Even though it is not easy to work on them with school work I already feel how much I changed from who I used to be so I will keep doing my best.