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Personal Narrative: The Fernandez Family

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The harsh smell of pig manure filled my nose while I walk through my great-grandfather’s farm. The chickens and roosters that surrounded me separated as I continued through them, like a river would on a rock. There is a barbed wire fence that stretches and loops back around to the gravel road. At the front of the farm, nearer to the house, there is the bright red slaughterhouse. There, my great-grandfather, or Bud as he likes us to call him, butchers the animals for the family to eat and sell like he has been doing for years. Bud was born in Spain, and came to the United States when he was only a baby. His parents bought the land and built the farm here in rural Bedico, and Bud was eventually given the farm. Today was the day that I butchered …show more content…
Unfortunately, the perception of success and happiness comes from parents’ own experiences. I am the oldest child of three from a Hispanic family that contains no college graduates in a town where majority of men work as farmers, or laborers in chemical plants over two hours away, including my father. My parents knew from a young age that I was “different.” I would spend much of my free time reading, rather than playing sports or roughhousing with the other boys. My mother once told me that I was doing math in the 5th grade that she could never do. Throughout grade school, there was no external pressure by my family to do well in school. They did not praise me when I got an A. When I was younger, I had to actively choose to try my hardest and put forth an effort into my academics. When the the idea of college was first brought up, I was in the 8th grade. It was met with indifference and doubt from most of my family. They did not understand why I would pursue college when I could “work in the plant” with my father and grandfather. My father told me that if I wanted to go to college, it would not be on his …show more content…
The mission of this program is to prepare students who come from underrepresented families for successful admission and completion of post-secondary degree programs. Their counsellors helped me navigate the college admissions process. They provided me with resources and knowledge that I, otherwise, would not have been able to have access to. Throughout my senior year of high school, I worked full-time at my minimum wage retail job and spent my lunch breaks in the Barnes and Noble reading ACT practice books. My family eventually saw my dedication to the pursuit of higher education, and hesitantly came around to the idea under one condition – I had to go to a school that was near Bedico. Around that same time, I got accepted into Southeastern Louisiana

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