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MBA INSIDER: SAMPLE APPLICATION ESSAYS Oxford (Saïd): Essay 1 QUESTION: What single event or achievement has been most significant in your life? What were the results of this event or achievement?
When my grandfather died in October 1998, I was a bit relieved.
I had been afraid of him for most of my life – not for anything he had ever done or said, but because he was a quiet man given to complete stillness or very measured actions that had no hesitancy or wasted motion to them. He didn't have the swagger of my American dad or the easy bravado of the kids I grew up with. He didn't thrill me. And I loved to be thrilled. He was so utterly foreign that even among the Greeks of his own community he seemed a kind of distant cousin. But there was an insistence in his presence. You could not be in a room with him and not feel the weight of his existence there with you. He was so different from other men, so singular in his manner, that he unnerved me. When he died, I realized that, despite a tentativeness on my part that had bordered on rudeness, he had always treated me with complete kindness. He never said a cruel word or had been, in any way, unjust to me. He was a man composed of subtle gestures – he would give a small hop when he first laid eyes on me during my visits, but never told me that he loved me. Since his death, I've stopped looking for grand gestures of personality in people. In a room, my eye seeks out the quiet, subtle, details of unassuming kindness – details so small that they can have no other source but a deep affection passing from one person to another. These are his actions, and they are what I aspire to now. Because I find that, like that revelation about my Papou's kindness, while in reverie my memories increasingly turn to moments of just such subtle kindnesses done for me and done by me for others, and I can scarcely recall the flitting, obvious, spectacles that once so easily caught my eye. 
BW MALL
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