...Freshman year at Trimble Tech High School was nothing short of a liminal year. High school basically swallowed me whole as a freshman, and spit me out as an unrecognizable senior. In this sense, I’ve become a completely different person. In my four years at Trimble Tech, I had a metamorphosis with my outlook on life and mentality. As a sophomore, my AP World History class enlightened me to the vast number of religions in the world. Prior to this, I was religiously ignorant because the concept of religion could not be discussed in public school. By the end of sophomore year, my brain was occupied with the various teachings of the diverse religions of the world. As a result, I’ve learned to look at things from a number of varying perspectives...
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...The event that marked my transition from childhood to adulthood within my family was not easy nor tranquil, yet a long journey that was extremely challenging. During the time span from 2012-2013 I was submerged in the experience of my sophomore year of high school. Looking back on my sophomore year, I remember being carefree, still just a kid. Likewise, the only worries I had to fret over was finding my place in the large social scene of my high school and what time softball practice was. However, all that began to change a few weeks into the New Year of 2013, where my life was turned upside down. In January, my father underwent a L4-L5 spinal fusion. He was a paramedic. My father has such a beautiful and inspiring passion for helping others and our community. Unfortunately, his passion was put to a halt due to his tragic injury. In addition, post-operation left my dad in a state of complete dependency because he was left unable to walk for a large portion of the recovery process, as well as the indescribable pain he had to endure every single day. Without any source of immediate income, with my father unable to work, my family soon ourselves in financial catastrophe. Soon after, my mother served my father divorce papers and quickly moved out; leaving my dad, my younger sister, and I to in simplest form, fend for ourselves. Consequently, the absence of my mother, shook the roles of the family, and left a scar on all of our hearts. The result of her decision, was equivalent...
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...Sophomore year was my favorite year of high school. It started out slow but ended with a rush. It seem like it flew past me. I would redo sophomore year all over again just for the fun of it. Being a 10th grader is often looked at as the beginning of our teenage independence. It’s not like that for everyone. At the time I was going through some family issues that held me back from experiencing my own independence. I had just started living with my aunt, my dad’s sister, at the end of 9th grade year. I started 10th grade at John Adams High School. Even though I ended 9th grade year there, I told myself that I wasn’t going to try to make any friends there at the time because I’d probably be at another school next year, but I wasn’t. Going there was a bit awkward; I had told some students that I wouldn’t be attending the school 10th grade year but there I was....
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...Around my sophomore year of high school, I began joining a numerous amount of clubs thinking it would benefit me when I would have to apply to college. However, as many would expect, I stopped attending the meetings of all but about three clubs. One club that favored over all others is High-Q. This club involved competing against other high schools in a quiz bowl style format similar to the Jeopardy. The most memorable moment occurred senior year as four other members, two advisors, and myself traveled to Washington D.C. to compete for the National Academic Championship. The journey to D.C. began after a school day as we all crowded in a small minivan for the seven-hour ride ahead of us. Most of the time in the car was spent sleeping;...
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...I remember being 12 years old, stepping on to the lacrosse field for the first, my white Nike cleats strung tight, and my light blue stick gripped firmly in my hands. I had little knowledge of how the game worked except I felt like I belonged on the large field of dried grass. I belonged in between the two orange poles of the goalie net. I had such a homey feeling since I am kinesthetic learner. I learn best when I am moving my body. Therefore, the drills would come naturally to me just by trying them out. For the first few years I played lacrosse I considered it to be only an after school activity at which I accelerated. It was not until my sophomore year in high school, when I began to struggle in math that I realized lacrosse means so much to me....
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...Omar Gonzalez AP Language Mrs. Edwards “Connect the dots” Essay 15, December 2011 Today, I am an artist sponsored by Roseta Santiago, who is also an artist.It has been quite a journey full of surprises, mistakes, success, and disappointments. I never expected to make it this far, I could only dream of this to happen to me. Now that my dream is a reality, I am just going to live it and hopefully one day, I’ll make it to the top! As a kid in elementary school, I always loved to doodle on my notes and I would enjoy going to art class and making little clay pots and whatnot. I was just always drawing at home, school, and wherever I was. Even though I would draw a lot, I never thought or believed that it would get me somewhere in life, because you would never think of asking a kid what he or she want to be in life and getting the response: “I want to be an artist”. Once I got into middle school, I had this sudden interest in art because I was alright at it and I really didn’t like anything else. Although I liked it so much, I would still never think of telling people my interest in it. I always thought for the longest time that art was just a hobby, that it wouldn’t get me anywhere. As I went through seventh and eighth grade, my passion and interest in art grew even more. Still, I didn’t like art enough to think of it as an occupation because everyone else would always think to be a doctor or lawyer, I was still “exploring” my options. I got the opportunity to take art...
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...of the main reasons I chose Mark Zuckerberg is because he took an existing idea and decided to make it a global enterprise. Some answers I will be looking for while researching for my course project include what type of mainframe Facebook utilizes, the system security Facebook implements, and how they plan for future growth within their network. Additionally, I’ve compiled a list of questions more in line with Mark Zuckerbergs journey to where he is now. 1. What kind of life did Mark Zuckerberg have? 2. What made him so confident in his journey to becoming the owner of Facebook? 3. How did he do it? 4. Where did he start? 5. How did he succeed? 6. What were his biggest fears? 7. Did he ever feel overwhelmed or like he wasn’t going to succeed? A quick summary of what I have found is that Mark got started into computer programming at the early of twelve. He had networked all of his home computers so that a family member could log into a computer remotely and leave a message for another family member. While a sophomore at Harvard University, he created a program called Facemash that would compare to different pictures and people could decide who was more attractive. Throughout the rest of this course, I plan to work with my group to complete the assignment in these steps; complete the research, write out a detailed summary of what we have learned,...
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...multitude of challenges that I went through. I went to high school and I had the choice to choose between going to junior year or sophomore year. Since the first day I moved to America, I have dreamt to be a student at UCR. It is a great school, and I knew it would be very hard to achieve in two years because I needed to cover more credits and finish specific classes in a specific amount of time. Therefore, I started my high school challenge journey as a sophomore and there I met my first challenge: I started as an ELD (English language development) student and I exited the program after one semester. Afterwards, I passed the CAHSEE exam and I became a regular English student. " I passed the first challenge" . While this challenge was being accomplished, another big challenge had been waiting for me: learning how to deal and communicate with people from many different cultures and making friends. The church became my social attet. There. I met new people who served the community working many hours, and participating in many fundraisers. From those experiences, I became more social and formed a core group of friends. Trying to find my niche in school. I became a member of the FNHS (French national honor society) club that opened for me the door to make new friends, not just the club members who helped me with my studies. I could finish my sophomore year with a 4.0 GPA. Thus, " I passed my second challenge " that made my parents so proud of me and I felt glad and confident...
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...seven siblings drove a one week trip from Ohio to Anchorage, Alaska. They drove to Alaska midway through winter, and was required to remain there until summer. Once summer came around, Vicki and her family drove to a remote native Alaskan village called Nenana. Her family were unable to drive the last 400 miles of their voyage, so they abandoned their car and started walking to a ferry that could take her family to Nenana. They then crossed an enormous river to finish off their long expedition. Vicki and her family took the ferry across the river for many numerous until they reached Nenana. Once Vicki got to Nenana her family moved to a compact cabin within the village. My grandma states, “It was an extremely exhausting and long-lasting journey to arrive in Nenana, and once we finally did my first impression was that it was so unusual.” My grandma lived in a remote native Alaskan village, which means life in the village was immensely unalike the ordinary life of a 1950’s child. In the remote village Vicki lived in, her and her family had to hunt, fish, and harvest nearly all of their food. Vicki proclaims, “Throughout most of my childhood I was assisting my mom and dad by hunting for animals, fishing, and picking berries.” Inside the village where my grandma lived, there was only one miniature store where food was provided, and all they had was powdered milk, bread, and other canned foods. Although Nenana obtained some food, none of it was fresh because it was all shipped and...
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...Finding Truths In my life, I have taken many journeys without which I would not have experienced important truths. My father started us off early, taking us on many journeys to help us understand that true knowledge comes only from experience. We took trips every winter break to Madrid, Mexico, Costa Rica, and to Jamaica and Trinidad, my parents’ homeland for Christmas. Silly things I remember from those trips include the mango chili sauce on the pork in Maui, the names of the women who gave out the towels by the pools in Selva Verde, Costa Rica, eating dinner at 10 p.m. in Spain. These were all tourist experiences that I, at first, found spellbinding. My truths were the truths of the tourist brochures: beautiful hotels, beaches, and cities. I did not see the blindfolds. I did not appreciate how being held hostage by the beauty of the surface—the beaches and cities—blinded me to the absence of Puerto Rican natives on the streets of San Juan; I did not understand how the prevalence and familiarity of English conspired to veil the beauty of the Spanish language beneath volumes of English translations. I learned more about these truths in my sophomore year of high school, when I was among a group of students selected to visit Cuba. My grandmother was born in Cuba, yet I had never thought to research my own heritage. I have remained the naïve American who saw Castro as some distant enemy of my country, accepting this as fact because this seemed to be the accepted wisdom. I soon...
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...In my life, I have taken many journeys without which I would not have experienced important truths. My father started us off early, taking us on many journeys to help us understand that true knowledge comes only from experience. We took trips every winter break to Madrid, Mexico, Costa Rica, and to Jamaica and Trinidad, my parents’ homeland for Christmas. Silly things I remember from those trips include the mango chili sauce on the pork in Maui, the names of the women who gave out the towels by the pools in Selva Verde, Costa Rica, eating dinner at 10 p.m. in Spain. These were all tourist experiences that I, at first, found spellbinding. My truths were the truths of the tourist brochures: beautiful hotels, beaches, and cities. I did not see the blindfolds. I did not appreciate how being held hostage by the beauty of the surface—the beaches and cities—blinded me to the absence of Puerto Rican natives on the streets of San Juan; I did not understand how the prevalence and familiarity of English conspired to veil the beauty of the Spanish language beneath volumes of English translations. I learned more about these truths in my sophomore year of high school, when I was among a group of students selected to visit Cuba. My grandmother was born in Cuba, yet I had never thought to research my own heritage. I have remained the naïve American who saw Castro as some distant enemy of my country, accepting this as fact because this seemed to be the accepted wisdom. I soon became intrigued...
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...The Day My Life Changed Susan Cotton Eng 121 English Composition 1 Kristin DeMarr August 25, 2015 The Day My Life Changed This story is about a quiet choirgirl, Susan Cotton and a loud bad boy, Travis Cotton. The day these two met was a warm summer day in August 1994. This was my sophomore year in high school and the day I finally came out of my shell. I remember this day as if it was yesterday. I had just got back from a summer trip to Florida and was at the school for orientation. After I took care of my schedule, I decided to see who was hanging around. Outside was my friend Reannan and her friend Travis who invited me over to visit for a few. I went over to visit for a few minutes before I had to be home to finish getting ready for school. That is when Travis asked, “Do you want to sit down?” He then pushed Reannan to his other leg, offering me the lap she was sitting on. It was during our visit I realized this was going to be a memorable day. It was at that moment I was introduced to who would eventually become the love of my life! It took us nearly a year to become a couple even after being told we would not make it a year, we have been each other’s saviors for the last twenty- one years. In order to understand how my life changed, I am going to take you on a trip down memory lane. I was the quiet choirgirl who did no wrong. Travis was the loud bad boy who did everything wrong. I was raised by a Southern Baptist family and was sheltered from most worldly happenings...
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...the proper guidance. We moved around a lot and I didn’t have any type of stability. She was a single parent and I was a child that demanded attention. It got to the point where I didn’t bother to do much of my school work and eventually started acting out by under-performing academically. By sophomore year I came to realize that I needed to take control of my life and take action to fix the mess that I had created. Problems at home continued to persist, while I began to strive towards a more beneficial lifestyle. I realized that I wanted more out of life and that if I was ever to get anywhere I had to take full control now. My first course of action was speaking with my counselor to weigh out my options. Basically, in order for me to graduate with my class and on time, I needed to go through a home studies program. This would allow to me to make up for lost time and complete all of my assignments on time to meet the graduating credits. Although getting back into doing school work was a little challenging for me, I continued to stick through finishing my responsibilities. Eventually, I decided to move out and live a life on my own by junior year, which made my journey even more difficult. Trying to...
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...and what sport you play. Now imagine yourself as a freshman going into high school with only one leg. Anthony's first year in high school as a freshman was not the idle dream he had planned. He was a scrany boy who joined the wrestling team, " he was willful and assures by nature, his childhood" was a nightmare he was taunted which made him self-conscious. It was just a way for him to come out of his shell, he didn't really focus on being the best wrestler. Going on to sophomore year in high school he started to improve. His junior and senior year he decated hard time mentally and physically because he had won "96 games and lost zero." Anthony was the "national champion of the nation", this was miraculous. Adjusting to the title of being champion he decided to go to Arizonia state. He had accomplished more than everyone expected him to. Anthony says " His goal was never to win a gold metal. " During his journey he says he just water to "inspire...
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...It’s been 2 years since I came to Texas A&M. I am now an electrical engineering major in the second semester of my sophomore year. My original plans to support my journey through Texas A&M involved income sources from my family coupled with loans and participation in a couple of investment schemes. I was also very hopeful of a future scholarship that would greatly alleviate my financial burden. Unfortunately, present conditions have marred these plans and have gravely necessitated my need for financial assistance. At the time of my coming to the US, my country, Nigeria, maintained a slightly stable economy with an exchange rate of about 199 Naira to 1 Dollar. Over the course of my 2-year stay at A&M, the Naira has experienced a massive recession...
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