Lucky By Alice Sebold

Education is important and plays a vital role in everyday life. Educating begins at birth. The demand for a higher education today is under demand and is always increasing. Self-improvement, endless job opportunities, and character development are all

After reading Frank Conroy's "Think About It", it is clear that education play vital role in our life. It is the main tool for us to succeed in life and achieve something different in a competitive world. Education is what help us to know the meaning of difficulty in our life. Whether in a good sense or bad; it helps us to understand why we are in this world. Education not only helps to understand but aware what is it value in our life and why we need it.

A quote from the Washington Post Book World states “Education was the miracle that saved Murray’s life...Her story is inspirational, and her description of [her high school] and its role in her life, should be read by everyone concerned about education.” Liz Murray endured several hardships throughout her life. She knew how to properly mainline drugs before she could walk. She became a mother to her own mother. At the age of 16 she was living on the streets with one credit on her transcript. After taking a good look at her life and realizing that this was not how she wanted to live Liz applied to any high school she could think of until someone accepted her and began to turn her life around. In the memoir Breaking Night, the author, Liz Murray paints a picture of how education can drastically improve somebody’s life by explaining how an alternative high school and its community helped her transition from sleeping on the couches of friends in secret to living four years in an Ivy League dorm.

At some point in their life, every person has been told to “walk in somebody else’s shoes” because they need to be aware of the struggles that other people face, but it is often tough for people to understand things outside of the scope of their own practical knowledge. In her memoir, Lucky, Alice Sebold suffers from this same problem. Throughout the course of her narrative, Sebold thinks of her experience as something that is accessible to be understood by outsiders; in addition to this, Sebold paints her reactions and experiences as a model that she can apply to other victims of sexual assault. Even though Sebold’s story is one of strength in the face of horrible occurrences, her lack of acknowledgement in regards the ways in which other people’s consciousness and coping mechanisms differ from her own makes it far more difficult to sympathize with her than it should be considering the content of her memoir. Evidence of her closed world understanding can be seen from the beginning of the memoir, when she reports her sexual assault to the police (Sebold, 3), later in the narrative, when other people react to her experiences and related feelings (Sebold 146), and finally, and perhaps most significantly, when her close friend Lila undergoes a sexual assault (Sebold 220).

Education has been one of the ways I have been able to add competititive advantage in my personal life. Although there are other components critical to my personal success. These include: determination, willingness to learn, and dedication. Having a great job that reaps monetary rewards is great, however, there are other factors necessary to be successful. These include my value as a human being, what do I do for others, how I am with my family, who I am as a fiancé and

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan follows multiple Chinese-American women who struggle with their self-identity and creating a balance between American and Chinese culture. Because of their immigration and many hardships in life, many of the women feel like they cannot truly tell who they are anymore, and throughout the novel these women are portrayed as ghosts. Ghosts are used to symbolize these women because they share many parallels including being only a remnant of who they once were, or who they could be. Ying-ying St. Clair is one of the women, who has a daughter named Lena St. Clair, she has had a troubled past in China, which has made her lose her fighting spirit, and her spirit in general. Ying-ying is fully aware of her loss of spirit and is embarrassed because she considers ghosts to be shameful and weak, and wants to save her daughter, Lena, from her fate.

When I was growing up, my parents expected me to do great in school and they taught me that getting a good education was your ticket to living a nice and successful life and career, and in order to do well in school I would have to study and get good grades. I actually enjoyed school for the most part. I was that kind of person that actually studied and did homework to the best of my ability. Getting a good education is very important to get a successful career and life.

Many people find themselves questioning the importance of a college education. They ask themselves, “Why is College important to me?” One answer is extremely crucial in todays economy. In order to succeed and have little or no struggle financially, you must have a education that will end up being a career of your choice. Not just something that you have to settle for.

Of course, education is the main thing in achieving success. The way we are taught by our parents our peers and other surroundings also contributes to our success. We would carry impressions in mind of the environment in which we grow up. Achieving success does not only come through education it also depends on how we behave or how we treat others and all these things depends on the culture in which we grow up. It could also be said that education and culture go hand in hand when it comes to success.

In Lucky, Alice Sebold shows how her life was utterly changed when she was brutally raped and beaten in a park near campus as a college freshman when she was eighteen-year-old, how she struggled to be understood by the people around, from family to her friends, and how she tried to recover from the physical and psychological trauma and finally triumphed, getting the attacker arrested and convicted. Just as written in the book, "You save yourself or you remain unsaved."(Sebold, 54)

Education is seen as a vital entry for future success. As an education major, I find this to be interesting because I value education since it trickles into many opportunities in the future. Although education may be a gateway to success, there are obstacles that can affect the outcome of a persons’ future. One main attribute that disturbs the future success of a person is the lack of support held at educational institutions. The success of a students’ attainment of education is not held without support.

Source D states that “education seems to make people happier and healthier,” so it could help the college student do better in college for higher degrees for a career that earns more money. College also prepares young adults to be more mature after graduating, so they can be wiser about having a successful future. Smart choices in an adult’s career or life can be beneficial because their decisions could open up better opportunities for themselves, and their skills in life and career could be improved to become more successful. College graduates said that “their education was very useful in growing intellectually, helping them grow and mature as a person, and helping them prepare for a job or career” (Source

Education teaches one everything such as better knowledge, what is right and what is wrong and gives one the opportunity to learn new stuff. When students start going to school, they start learning basic studies and then at the college level, they are ready for a job. College is the last stage in students’ life where they get ready for a job or career. Bird suggests right, college education should enhance student’s chances for a good job because after many students get a degree in whichever field they like; however, they sometimes don’t get a good job or get a low paying job. “Other field most popular with college graduate are also pathetically small (Bird 128).”

Some of the greatest minds in history became successful without having more than an eighth-grade education. Some of the greatest minds in history became successful after achieving a doctorate level education. So, is receiving an education a requirement for a successful career? The answer is no. Being successful is not determined by the person’s intelligence level after completing their education; it is judged by their determination, creativity and natural intelligence.

After high school, a choice that many students have to make is whether to go to college or not. There are many factors that go into one’s decision. There are pros and cons to going to college and also there are pros and cons for not going to college. But the decision that will give someone the better opportunity to have a more successful life is to go to college. The money that one will earn after getting a college degree will be more than the money a person will make without getting a college degree. As our society has continued to evolve, education has become the optimal route to professional success: pursuing a degree is the best way to receive training, to gain expertise in a given field, and even to guide you and help you make choices