My Personal Experience : My Experience At Piqua High School

Getting the ability to interview one of my past teachers was an awesome experience. I had the luxury of talking to one of my former high school teachers and Student Council advisor Tessa Gargano. We have a great reputation together and basically know each other like the backs of our hands.

For my field placement, I had the chance to go to Hixson High School. I was in a business/computer application class and even learned some more shortcuts from some of the students! During my time at my field placement, I had the opportunity to interact with many different types of adolescents. It allowed me to understand that schools are a huge importance to an adolescents’ life. Even though it’s hard to wake up in the morning to go and learn, the students that I interacted with were very happy to be in a place where they are safe, get an education, have friends, and meet lifetime mentors. Adolescence is a time where each of these things are important because they are trying to figure out exactly who they are or who they want to become.

Currently, my academic journey has been filled with very difficult trials and tests of my resilience. During high school, I was not very motivated or responsible when it came to academics. I did not believe in my intellectual capabilities and did not consider college as an option for me. None of my friends or family had been to college; so I did not see it as a likely avenue for me as well. In my experience, graduating high school was a major accomplishment within my family and nothing more was expected of you. After graduation, I realized that I did not want to work at my physically intensive job anymore and discovered I should work with my brain instead of my back. Consequently, I enrolled at the local community college and took a full schedule. It was difficult, because I had very little guidance and had to figure everything out on my own. I had to motivate myself continue and not become despaired or frustrated by being unfamiliar with the process. I had to re-learn how to manage my time and study efficiently, since I worked full time and had to fit everything into a tight schedule. With the help of some very intelligent and caring professors, I found my academic potential and learned the necessary skills to compete in a university setting. Eventually, I received my Associate of Arts degree and immediately transferred to The University of Colorado Denver.

I didn’t always suffer from anxiety. My childhood was bright and vibrant and rarely was I seen upset or irritated. I’ve played sports my whole life from only 5 years old. Everything from T-ball, to gymnastics, to soccer between the ages of 5 and 12. After school, if I didn’t have practice, I loved to ride my bike or play with my border collie, Molly, on our 5-acre property. When middle school came around, I was the starting server on the volleyball team, I averaged a rough score of 60 for a 9-hole round of golf, and my tall thin build made me a great addition to the basketball team as well. The sky was the limit in my young eyes and I already knew I could achieve great things if I put my mind to it.

August 2009, in the dead heat of summer I awoke with excitement for the day to come. Shooting up out of my bed to look at my clock. It reads six o’clock in the morning. Going down my checklist in my head I start getting ready for the day. Today is the first day of band camp. Two weeks of sweating your ass off in the blazing Florida sun and enjoying every minute of it.

As I gain more experience through learning in situations I find myself in, my mind flashes back to memories I have gained. A native of inner city Charlotte, North Carolina, many of my memories inspire me to continue growing with knowledge, so that I can help those whose decisions have mentally hindered them from growing intellectually. My mother had me at the age of sixteen, so the first knowledge I obtained about the world was learned through her experience as a teenage mother with dark skin in America. My family lineage is rooted in environments of low-income communities. My mother, one out of six, was raised in a household with both parents who were employed. Her mother and father, my grandparents, strived to make ends meet for the family without obtaining a high school diploma. My mother did not receive her high school diploma neither. My grandparents felt it necessary to raise me while my mother enrolled into a housing voucher program and rented her own apartment. I was enrolled into a head start program at the age of four, which helped me prepare for public schooling.

Being in front of 100 people and performing, is like being in a movie when something exciting happens and everything goes in slow motion. The crowd cheering at a snail's pace, hair is frozen in the air, and it is as quiet as a mouse in church. This is how I felt on the gymnastics floor when I was trying out for All American. Me in my black and white uniform vs 60 girls to get a spot on the All American Cheerleading Team. That was the craziest week of my life.

When I spot palm trees appearing as I’m coming down south from the north, that’s when I know I’m in the Rio Grande Valley. The sight of the palm trees reassuring me that I’m close to home. Weslaco, Texas is a town close to the border that separates the United States and Mexico. The region where people fill the air with the Spanish language. The schools that I’ve attended from the Weslaco Independent School District has provided me great lessons academically and in the real world. Throughout my elementary, middle, and high school years, I've learned the importance of becoming successful.

This year, at the age of eighteen, I lost one of my good friends I have had for eight years. It was without a doubt, the most traumatic experience of my life. Braydon was a handsome, happy individual who brought light to the room. He lived three houses down from me in the small town of Ucon, Idaho, and throughout the years we attended church activities and school together. Through my personal trials, I have learned to listen to the promptings of the spirit, turn to my Savior Jesus Christ in faith, and obtained a greater testimony of the Savior’s ultimate sacrifice.

For the past twenty years of my life, I have traveled down a lonely road for a vast majority of my time on this planet. When I was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome at the age of eight, making friends in grade school and high school was a very different thing for me to do. I learned differently than other people and during my high school years and I was unfairly bullied and harassed by my peers because of it. However, their teases and insults only made me academically stronger, as it only made me strive to be a better student and a better person overall. There were only a handful of students who I really interacted with in high school, however I never hung out with them outside of school. Other than my family and these select few individuals in high school, I felt all alone in this world.

At a young age, I quickly learned that I was good with numbers; math always came easy to me. Along with math, science interested me as well and my favorite things to study were the systems of the body in biology. I remember once when I was around eleven years old, my parents took me to the body museum and I actually got to see, in real life, the individual systems of the body. Whenever I got to experience this, I knew that I wanted to learn so much more about the body. During school, my learning style has always been more visual and hands on than anything. I have to see and do in order to learn, and that is how I do well in my classes. When we have group projects it is difficult for me to work with people who are assigned to me, but I do enjoy working with the people I am used to. It is hard for me to meet new people, but once I get to know them, I get along very easily.

In middle school, I was a weird, chunky kid. Not that being chunky is weird, I just looked like a little bowling ball with really frizzy hair. Having never really been good at sports, I was never really cool, and neither were my friends. It wasn’t until I saw my friend drawing, that I decided to give it a shot. I knew I wasn’t very good when I started but I didn’t really care. Wanting to get better, so I practiced more and more. At this time I was only in second grade, so I was just grateful that I found something I enjoyed.

When others see me, they assume that i don't want to talk them because i'm shy but i just don't want to embarrass myself but when you get to know me more i am very energetic and happy person.

My junior year was the third and final year that I was enrolled in the business academy at my high school. Being in the business academy was just a sophisticated way of saying that I was taking an online business course through a local community college. It also meant that I was automatically a part of a career and technical student organization called Business Professionals of America. For the three previous years, I had participated in the Regional BPA Competition, however, I fell short one place of qualifying for the State Competition each year.

“Welcome to the secondary campus!” from a teacher I was unfamiliar with. It was the first day of sixth grade, and I was entering a brand new school for my middle school years. I was confidently wearing my new pink Hollister collared shirt and a pair of all white Nike kicks. It was the first time my mother had ever let me get shoes with white soles, because I was prone to getting sneakers dirty. I had a lesser likelihood of that this year, because unfortunately we no longer had recess, which previously had stained any shoe of mine from the mulch.