Juan Martin Rivas
Doctor Laurie Hazard
GFCL
February 24th,2017
Academic Autobiography
The true nature and essence of a person lie within the environment in which it was nurtured, the
environment in which our stream of thought saw its genesis, this not only applies to human beings, but to
civilizations, generations, and societies. My genesis saw its bloom in Quito, Ecuador a small Latin
American capital situated 2850m above sea level. I’ve never been sedentary to one sector of my town per
say since I lived my first 10 years in the heart of the city and the other 10 years of my life in the suburban
part of Quito, called Cumbaya. I guess this transition had to do with the conception of my younger
brother and sister who are respectively 16 years old and 9 years old. The substructure of my intellectual
being was Colegio Menor San Francisco de Quito, an American private school. I think that if I got to pick
one adjective regarding my family it would be Diversity. Why diversity? Because of the spectrums and
the different incidences, each member of my family got to live and the coincidences that sparked to
connect it. I am a half French-Ecuadorian since my grandmother is a French citizen. My aunt lives in
Colombia and is married to an Italian, my uncle is married to an Argentinian/Swiss/ American citizen and
practically all of my father’s side family is Mexican. So since I was very little I had the fortune to a
tremendous ethnic and cultural diversity. Usually, when I am asked about my age I get extremely irritated
since I think that the determinism of age shouldn’t be counted as the number of times we have revolved
around the sun, but the moments that composed each step while revolving around the sun, but legally I’m
19 years old.
I find it extremely complex to communicate and encompass my life experience, my family history and
my culture in such a factual way, however, I will be as objective as possible. I was born in the breast of an
extremely traditional and conservative family and is little as I like to talk about monetary status and
economic welfare, I was born into an extremely accommodated family as well. My life through school,
what has been the biggest portion of my life until this moment has been full of ups and downs with some
repetitive patterns. I’ve always been a thoughtful and profound student, but since we are categorized as
statistics now a day more than human beings, I was a 3.45 GPA average. Even though my grades were
prosperous my discipline was the biggest upheaval I had throughout my scholar experience, and that is
just how I am, I tend to break rules, to refute what is pre-established sometimes I used this attribute in my
favor yet sometimes I used it in my favor simply with the wrong motives. I could say the part I am the
most and the least proud of regards my extracurricular activity. I Stated playing squash when I was about
8 years old and as much as my “Humility” restrains me from saying it I was outstanding. I won the
national championships in my country 3 times in every single category I played starting since I was 11
years old until I was 17 years old, I played the south American championships with my country 4 times
and in Paraguay 2014 I won the silver medal for my category which meant that I was ranked as the #2
player of the whole continent. I played the Colombian, Peruvian, Ecuadorian, Argentinean, British,
Scottish, Canadian and the US open’s reaching the last 8 in all of them. I was set to play squash for GW
university but suffered from a greatly delicate injury which basically cut off my whole squash career and
that is the part which I am the most embarrassed with, the fact that I never tried to rise back that I simply
preferred to stay in solitude and agony, even though I play as seed #1 for the Bryant squash team, I am far
away from my best level. In the first paragraph, I decided to use the adjective diverse to describe my
family, yet I feel that the essence of my ethnicity and how I define my ethnicity is much simpler than that.
The only flag in the world, the only landscapes in the world, the only atmosphere in the world that
