Personal Experience : My Experience In High School

People tend to believe that high school is what defines your life. It is where you create who you are and what your future will be, but that isn’t the truth. In high school, I was a person that I didn’t want to be. I was the shy new girl that no one would talk to. On the first day of school I was lucky that someone invited me to lunch. By the end of my first year I had less friends than the fingers on my hands. The few people that knew me in the large school either thought I was mean and rude or they were my friend. I went through the first half of high school not knowing who I was. Eventually I had to move schools and I was tired of being the new girl. I wanted to make people know my name and not be just some face. Unfortunately, my hopes

When I was young, I did not do well in school and was not very social. I was the quiet person in the room that did not learn or understand anything. School and life was only about surviving and not failing, as I put minimal effort into everything I did. Only motivated to not be a complete failure. I was as bright as a muddy shoe. However, this shoe would soon be renewed, as my 8th grade Civics teacher, Mr. Caslavka, polished this shoe.

Walking into the Stem Academy I didn't know what to expect. I met my friends Olivia, Makaila, London, Rebecca, and Shya. I had Mr. Jain as my homeroom teacher, he was a very good teacher just hard to understand sometimes. This whole year I passed all of my classes, this year was kind of easy to me. My behavior was really good this year I got an E for conduct the second quarter and then the rest were S, but I didn't really get into much trouble this year. I liked the way that our schedules were set up because we got to kind of explore the school and if we knew some of the older kids we would be able to socialize with them. I also liked the fact that we were able to get Ipads instead of having books to carry around. It's really neat to be able to communicate with teachers and turn in work electronically. This is how my six grade school year went as far as the school work. With social and extracurricular activities I had a lot of fun with these. We had fights, party's, dress downs, and also more fights. I went to basketball tryouts but I was so bad at basketball, that I didn't make it. It didn't really matter that I didn't make the team because I still played AAU basketball. I went out for soccer but that wasn't really for me, I only tried because my friends did. The fights were really childish and stupid. The only fight we really had this year is when Kejuan body slammed Toriano onto the ground by his head. There wasn't really too many party’s but when there were some

When I opened my eyes, everything was spinning, the world, the things around me, and my head. Teammates grabbed me and helped me stand. I remembered the concerned looks on their faces, but I had no idea what had just happened and how it would completely alter the fall semester. It was my sophomore year of high school and I had gotten a concussion during cheerleading practice. My teammate was supposed to flip over my head, but the first time we tried this precarious maneuver, she got scared and stopped halfway. Boom! She kicked me hard in the back of my head. Fortunately, I was able to slow her fall with my head and shoulders, but unfortunately she knocked me out cold. After assessing me, the trainer said I had a concussion. The phone call to my mom isn’t very cleat in my memory, but the pain from the headache will be staccatoed in my mind forever. For the next couple days I stayed in bed unable to engage with the word. My memories of that first week are fuzzy, but eventually I had to go back to school. At first it was very challenging. Concentrating and remembering small things in class felt like an impossible task and I found myself struggling with the constant pain. I remember one day in my AP United States history class we were watching a movie and writing a summary on it. My head, like usual, was hurting that morning, but I decided to stay at school and push to avoid falling behind. It was not easy, but life isn’t east and sometime you need to push through pain - both

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.

When I was a freshman starting in Gladstone High School, all I thought my only goal was to actively participate in the classes that I needed to go to college. I was reluctant of high school since I did not know what to expect. I was not the athletic one but I was smart in academics. However, there was one event during the middle of my freshman year that presented a challenge I had to face.

The high school I attended was very different. The last two years- junior and senior year- I was allowed to choose the classes I wanted to take. Having this opportunity I always avoided taking an English class. I never enjoyed it and one thing I disliked was writing papers on why I don’t like writing papers. I envied the people who enjoyed writing because as we get older that is a crucial thing we need. In many of my papers I was unable to maintain focus, need to use more transitions words, and lacked the proper knowledge on how to do a correct works cited. I have learned to fix some of my mistakes, but on other things I still need improvement. On my first paper, I struggled with staying focus on my topic. Second essay I struggled with transitioning my ideas from one to another. Lastly, I improved on both my lack of focus on my papers and I included more transition words.

Before I truly began to walk with Jesus, I was under the impression that I always had been. I was baptized as a baby, attended the same church my entire childhood, and spouted off every Sunday school answer without missing a beat. I loved the Lord, and I understood that he was my Savior and Creator, but I did not fully understand to what capacity I had been saved and created. I was missing something, and at age thirteen I developed a serious case of perfectionism. I closely monitored what I ate, religiously worked out, and devotedly studied to obtain unbeatable grades. I practiced piano every day until my wrists hurt and would except no less than flawless performances. I was captain of the cheer squad, and often referred to as “little miss perfect.” At a young age, I had constructed an image of what I thought I should be. Behind the facade, I was extremely lonely and insecure, but assumed those feelings were just middle school angst that would subside when I entered high school.

Growing up I was a very shy person. I was the type of girl who hid her feelings because that's just what I was used too. My parents separated when I was only four years old. It was hard for me because I didn't have my parents together. It made me feel like it was my fault. They would argue about who was going to watch me when they went to work or how they couldn't afford somethings for me. I felt like like I couldn't talk to them about how I felt and that's why in school I would always shut people out when it came to my feelings. I remember teacher trying to talk to me but all I would do is shut them out, teacher after teacher. I knew that coming into Pritzker I was going to have a difficult time and I was going to have no one there to talk to.

The struggles of and the struggles people created for me during my high school years. Honor student, very quiet, ad never been apart of the crowd. The desire to fit in only resulted in a terrible experience and the devastation of the grades on my transcript. I became more into my social life then my education. It took self analyzing and the realization of the dreams that I want to achieve for a spark of change to come.

It seems like whenever people talk about high school they either bloomed into this incredible person or fell straight to the bottom and hated it. When I came to high school I knew I wouldn’t have that experience, in fact, I predicted it to go almost exactly as it has. My school career has been a bookshelf, and every grade has fit perfectly in the space provided. Why would high school be any different? Well it wasn’t.

I graduated highschool a year early. I was seventeen years old and it was in the year of 2015. I decided in January 2015 that I was ready to be done with my high scool career,so I went to talk to my counselor and expressed to her that I was ready to walk the stage as soon as possible. The counselor starred at her desktop and got to work for about five to ten mintes, then she looked at me and said "Well, alright the earliest you can graduate is August 2015." I think I may have just stared at her blankly for a second, but I snapped back to reality and became eager to know the steps I would need to take to make this happen. Fast forward to the end of the school year, while everyone is excited for summer break, I was excited to enroll in my summer courses and get the ball rolling for graduation. August approached very quickly and before I knew it I was walking across a stage with a navy blue, silver, and white cap and gown on. The smile on my face was as bright as the sun and I walked with my chest as high as Mount Everest; I was proud.

So far in life, my passion has been educating myself to the fullest extent. Ever since I was in middle school, though not as understanding, I knew that all I really wanted to do was take in as much information that the world had to offer for me. Starting with advanced math classes, to other challenging AP courses. I even took the Calculus one and two course at my high school, through PSU, and did everything I could in order to prepare for Calculus three and four at PSU. Yet no matter what boundaries I pushed in high school, nothing was comparable to a real college course. Calculus three and four was by far my most rigorous academic challenge I have ever faced. Through devoting the most time and effort I have ever put into anything, I

Growing up, before I entered high school, I always thought it was going to be like how they showed it in the movies. That was a lie as soon as I stepped foot in high school. Those shows and movies never really focused or talked about the actual education and grades and how important they are. They don’t mention the importance of being in a sport and how good of outcomes come from being involved. Now being in my last year in high school, I have learned a lot about myself and life throughout the years that I’ve been here. Not only has it helped me grow into the person I am today but taught me plenty of lessons. As well as accepting them and not giving up on myself or school. It was my junior year that I learned from all of my mistakes and focused on myself. As well as realizing that I needed to get my head back on track, especially since I was going to be a senior the following year. I would say that I was all over the place my sophomore year and so much was going on at home, friends, and myself. I would ignore any of these types of situations such as my mom losing her job, money problems, my house going up for sale, and worst of all at the moment, failing a class my sophomore year. When my grade in chemistry kept going down I thought to myself, “Oh it’s impossible for me to fail a class, I’ll pass it with a D,” or “I’m fine, it’ll go up with the next assignment.” Not in a million years would I have ever thought that I would fail a class. I was putting my school work aside. I procrastinated a lot by doing assignments last minute or turning them in late, I was also not involved in school one bit. I was in the car with my friend and it was the last day of exams, we were parked and on our phones.