College Essay : A Life Changing Experience In College

I’m raised in an environment filled with negative stereotypes, high dropout rates, fewer resources, and low expectations. As a Mexican American from the San Fernando Valley, educational opportunities do not come often. In middle school it massed into my head that going to college is my way towards success. Soon it became the only option for me and as a result, I joined Project Grad to begin my journey towards college. They introduced me to the Chicano Youth Leadership Conference during my junior year. After applying and attending, the conference eliminated the label that Latinos are not college material. Subsequently, I grabbed as many opportunities as I could. In my junior my school did not put me in any AP classes. Therefore, I went to go

Midway into my sophomore year of high school is when I learned that my family will be moving to Massachusetts due to my father’s job relocation. At first, I was set to move to Massachusetts with my family, which meant transferring to my third high school in three years and having to switch to a different club soccer team during the most important year of recruiting for college soccer. Then, an opportunity was presented to me in which I would be able to stay at my current high school and my current soccer team. The opportunity being that I would stay with a close family friend who attended the same school and plays for the same soccer team, but in exchange I would have to leave my mother and father for the next two years of my life. My family and I thoroughly discussed the plan and after many heated arguments and fights, we finally decided that I would stay behind and stay with the Williams family for the next two years of my life. This life changing opportunity has slowly but surely helped me transition from a child into a young adult.

To many high school students, college seems like a far away land, a mysterious place where everyone wants to be yet not many know how to get there. As children, our parents tell us how much time we have to think about college, and that it is too far down the line to think about. The truth is it is never too early to think about your future. I, like many people, put little thought into my future career and now am lost in an unfortunate mix of indecision and anxiety. Not knowing where you want to be in the future is a hard burden to bear. Many of us tend to find out that we only know what we do not want, not what we actually do want. Do we want to be poor? Absolutely not. Do we want a boring job? Of course we don’t. We all want our

Many have experienced an encounter as a young child where they are asked what they want to be when they grow up. Answering that question may be easy as a kid because your mind is filled with thoughts of being the unimaginable. As you grow much older, those ideas begin to depart from the mind and you are suddenly more aware of what is and what is not possible in this world. When beginning the most important years of high school, you stop and rethink your career choice numerous times, stressing on who and what you want to be. Many adults such as teachers, counselors, and parents will emphasize the importance of knowing where you want to be in the future during high school, sometimes even middle school. It became imperative that one chose their

All throughout school, students are ask what we want to be when we grow up. Many of us know or have a pretty good idea, but others have no clue what they want to pursue as a career in life, whether it be furthering their education at a university or attending a technical school. There are other students that plan to start work right out of high school. Either way we all have a plan, and the purpose of this paper is to inform you of mine. I personally struggle in making big decisions like deciding what to do with my life, but then I realized I have been asking myself the wrong questions. Instead of asking what I want to be when I grow up, I asked myself what do I want out of life? what are some of my goals that I wish to achieve? This led

“What do you want to do with your life?”. In my senior year, I recall being asked that precise question by each person that I encountered: my family, teachers, strangers, and even myself. I would answer with a vague mention of my hope to attend college. However, inside I was clueless of exactly what I aspired to achieve in my professional life, and I was terrified at that fact.

Adults are always asking me what I want to do when I graduate high school or what I want to be. Not until the ending of my Junior year did I know the answer to that question. I’ve

Some people grow up knowing exactly what they want to do; I, on the other hand, do not know exactly what career path I am going to take, but I have learned that is okay. I went through most of high school presuming that I had to have my life planned out by my senior year and I recently realized that was an unrealistic expectation to put on myself.

A fork in the road only appears as such when both paths are seen as viable options; yet, once one path becomes seen as the only one, the other devolves into a deviation. Where the aberration would require justification to travel down, the perceived correct course would require justification to not travel down. This is precisely how the false question of attending college was presented to me: it was a matter of when not if. Upon inheriting white looking skin, a middle class family, and a pat on the back for bringing home white sheets of papers with little red “A”s written in the top right corner, it was ascertained that I was to be a productive and successful engineer after paying for college with hard-won scholarship money. In short, there were several socio-economic factors that contributed to my eventual position in college.

Moving away from home has been one of the biggest challenges that I have had to face so far in the eighteen years of my life. Moving from my home town to the collge dorm was a difficult transition that was necessary for growing up both mentally and physically as an individual. The little more than five hundred miles that separates me from my friends and family has allowed me to become the person I am today, and the distance allows me to grow and become more familiar with things that are a whole new experience for me. One of the many new things that I have had to deal with was making new friends in my environment.

College is a life changing experience for students. College is a new environment for most students and comes with lots of challenges. Things such as the increased difficulty of academic work and not being around the same social groups as a student was before college can make the transition very difficult. One of the best things a student can do to help with this transition is to live in a campus residence hall. Students should live in dorms because of the community that this creates. Students will gain many beneficial social interactions, will be able to better complete academic work, and will ease the adjustment to college life.

"Tomorrow is the first day of what I will become." I wrote this in my diary the night before my first day of college. I was anxious as I imagined the stereotypical college room: intellectual students, in-depth discussions about neat stuff, and of course, a casual professor sporting the tweed jacket with leather elbows. I was also ill as I foresaw myself drowning in a murky pool of reading assignments and finals, hearing a deep, depressing voice ask "What can you do with your life?" Since then, I've settled comfortably into the college "scene" and have treated myself to the myth that I'll hear my calling someday, and that my future will introduce itself to me with a hardy handshake. I can't completely rid my

College is a great opportunity that I am blessed to be going through today. I see it as an opportunity to grow as a person and set myself up for the future I want. The success I have in the future will be greatly affected by how I do in college.

What has my journey to graduation been like for me? My journey has been a crazy, fun-filled learning adventure. I met many goals and accomplishments I set for myself but I also faced some challenges on the way. For example, I finally met my goal of graduating with a 4.6 GPA and maintaining it. Also, I accomplished completing my last four years of grade school and now I am on the way to college. My last year has been interesting and there are many goals, accomplishments and challenges I can reflect on.

As I graduated high school, I thought college would just be yet another four years of high school, and I was wrong. College opens many new doors in a young man or woman’s life. There are new responsibilities and pressures that you will have to deal with, and with more freedom these responsibilities and pressures can be difficult to handle. College has changed a great deal over the years and these changes, such as more freedoms, make college a much more challenging experience. You need to start preparing for college now by making yourself more responsible and having more self-control. Although you think college is merely partying with easy classes on the side, I have experienced pressures and work loads that make the experience challenging