Essay A: Describe a setting in which you have collaborated or interacted with people whose experiences

and/or beliefs differ from yours. Address your initial feelings, and how those feelings were or were not
changed by this experience.
This summer I attended the Baylor Renaissance Scholar Program which was a camp for
prospective Pre-Medical students at Baylor University. The camp allowed me to explore Greek
and Latin Terminology, Philosophy, and Christian Bioethics courses for five days with different
people from all over the country. During the discussion we conducted throughout the course of
the camp it became exceedingly clear that although we were all Christian students, we all had
key differences in our beliefs because of the different upbringings and denominations of
Christianity from which we came. As I continued to observe these differences I found that they
were just as important in the collaborative process as the solutions at which we ultimately
arrived.
The first class we attended was the Christian bioethics course. Each day we spoke about
widely controversial topics such as the definition of humanity, abortion, in vitro fertilization,
misrepresentation of death in modern film, eugenics and, other such related topics. It was in this
class that the first disputes began. On the first day we critically thought about what makes us
human and the question arose, If we cut you open and showed you that you were completely
metal would you still be human? Half of the class including myself answered yes while the rest
of the class answered no. Our professor asked us all why we answered as we did and my side of
the class maintained that humanity is dependent on the soul. The other half of the class came to
the conclusion that because there isnt a scientific definition of what a soul actually is, that my
side of the classs definition was invalid as far as science and medicine were concerned. Toward
the end of the discussion we were asked how we would collectively respond to a robot that had
become self-aware. In spite of the argument above that went unresolved, the class as a whole
decided that we had to treat the robot as if it were a person because although we couldnt prove
that the robot had a soul, it became equally clear that we couldnt prove that it lacked a soul
either.
Once the class had ended and the heat of discussion had dissipated I thought to myself,
How could people with such different ideas have come together as seamlessly as I just
witnessed? As I continued to think about it more deeply, the answer became clear. While
everyone in the class had their own idea about what should occur, each person also chose to
listen and consider the others ideas carefully and thoroughly even though they may not have
agreed with them.
The initial conflict in our class discussion gave me an acute sense of unease because I
thought that the disagreement would be too much for a group of teenagers to overcome. Only too
often in my own school, my classmates are unable to cooperate if they dont wholly agree on
every single aspect of whatever is being discussed. But at this camp with people whom Id never
met, I realized that disagreements are an integral part of collaboration because it is only through
these disagreements that I can see the flaws in my own thinking and the good in the thoughts of
those around me.

Philosophy was our second class of the day for the week. Much of the class was centered on
establishing the realization that there is no certain knowledge, but there are conclusions based on
evidence or the lack thereof. This line of thought led us to discuss the Theory of Special Creation
which either challenged or stretched the beliefs of most of the students. The Theory of Special
Creation suggests that God created different species rather than everything evolving from a
single organism. This theory takes Creationism and evolutionary theory and creates a scenario in
which they could coexist. In response, many students immediately stated that evolution from a
single organism is all that makes sense while others maintained that relationships in genetic
makeup were either too close or diverse for evolution to be feasible. Still others tried to explain
that perhaps God chose special creation with similar makeup for the benefit of humanity to study
genes close to their own. In the Philosophy class the professor asked the class to decide whether
or not special creation was a possibility. We came to answer his question with a yes. After
debating the different viewpoints we collectively saw that the theory made sense in relation to all
of the expressed beliefs.