My personal background provides me with a great deal of cultural understanding, primarily because I am a South Korean national who migrated to Canada in my early teens. The disparity between cultures provided me with insight and understanding into how different cultures not only perceive things differently but respond differently to the same things. One of the first cultural differences I noticed was that all individuals from the East are lumped together by most Canadians as "Asians." This created some challenges in interacting at first. In some instances I knew my Canadian peers were not being racist or prejudiced, but their comments still wounded when they would make gross mis-assumptions about South Koreans in seeing them as just one more group of "Asians." However, once I began interacting with Canadian peers on a deeper level, many were quite curious and inquisitive about my culture, its practices, customs and beliefs. This was a two-way-learning process. As they learned more about South Korean culture and beliefs, I discovered more about Canadian culture and perspectives. This led to great personal and social growth. The initial challenges multiculturalism created for me turned into stepping stones for greater learning and deeper understanding of my own and other cultures.
The experiences I had due to multiculturalism also made me recognize my ultimate passion was to study linguistics. Language is the primary means of all communication and this fascinated me as perhaps a key to discovering how we learn to process information as it relates to linguistics. I was disappointed while attending the University of Toronto that they did not offer cognitive-related courses of study in linguistics. This motivated my decision to transfer to the University of Washington where I hope to ultimately earn a PhD in the graduate linguistics program. I also seek a transfer to the University of Washington because, bei...