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
Pre-Medical students at Baylor University. The camp allowed me to enroll in Greek and Latin
Terminology, Philosophy, and Christian Bioethics courses for five days with different people all
over the country. Throughout the course of the camp it became exceedingly clear that although
we were all Christian students, we all had key differences based on our different upbringings and
the subcategories of Christianity that we came from. 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 are 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 we do not have a scientific definition of what a soul actually is, that
my side of the classs definition was invalid as far as science and medicine are 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.
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 rather only conclusions
based on evidence or the lack thereof. This line of thought led to discuss the theory of special
creation which 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.
The initial conflict in both of these classes gave me a vague sense of unease. I thought
that the disagreement would be too much for a group of teenagers to overcome because too often
in my own school my classmates cant cooperate if they dont wholly agree on every single
aspect of whatever is being discussed. But at this camp with people whom Ive never met, I
realized that disagreement must be an integral part of collaboration because it is only through
these disagreements that we see the flaws in our own thinking and that of those around us.