Personal Narrative: Seventh Grade Chemistry School

I was told in the 4th grade that school will get harder and harder, I was told that middle school and high school will get harder than elementry school.

School was exactly how I had imagined it to be while I was in grade school. I had the privilege of having recess, early lunch hours, and most importantly, naptime! The day I started sixth grade, my whole world seem as if it flipped upside down. I was no longer at the top of the “food chain”, school was way more stressful, and I had, in fact, found new talents within myself.

I have always played the same three sports in elementary school, baseball, soccer and basketball but the summer before 7th grade I wanted the try something new and play football but because I didn't know much about it I was having a hard time deciding if I was going to play or not. But When football season came around i signed up.

Days passed nobody noticed that I was actually a year younger than everyone else. The two boys that sat with me always asked me for help often and one day RJ (one of the boys) asked “how are you so smart?” I whispered

My AP Physics C classroom is filled with whiteboards. You can start writing a problem on one board, circle around the room, and find the answer right next to where you started. With a small class of just eight students, application of physics and calculus to real world scenarios is gripping. I remember contemplating during the MLB World Series fervor how long batters had to react to a pitch. My physics class and I were intrigued. We all grabbed Expo Markers and began solving for velocity, acceleration, impulse, all the while keeping in mind cross-sectional area of the ball, the stride of the pitcher, and other minor variables. I modified the problem by asking the class to use Aroldis Chapman (the fastest pitcher) as the pitcher. We spent hours

As a proud feminist, I was thrilled to discover that Columbia Engineering is a 47% women, and that the Dean of Engineering, Mary Boyce, is a woman. My AP Physics C class is heavily males and almost all the girls sit together in the back corner. When I sat front and center in the classroom, boys surrounded me because no other girls braved the front row. At Columbia, I know that I will be in an environment with enough women that we can all sit proudly wherever we feel comfortable, and if women are outnumbered, they will work together to have their voices heard just as loudly.

Science has become my favorite subject over the years, especially Chemistry. Taking AP Chemistry was the best decision I ever made because I instantly fell in love with chemistry. It was an interesting course that gave me insight on random things like why it rains. We did many cool labs, and I got to use tools and machines that I never would have used before in my life. For example, I got to use a spectrophotometer to record absorbtion of light in a solution. My favorite unit in chemistry was by far Intermolecular forces. They helped me understand the interactions between substances which explained why oil floats on water. Instead of getting an answer along the line of "it is denser", I understood that it was because the oil could not break

I walked into the loud building so scared and nervous. I couldn't believe today was the day. The day i'm finally in middle school. That day was the day that I could officially call myself a Vista Verde Middle School student. When I walked into the building the bell had rung for us to proceed to class. On my I spotted one of my very good friends, Esmeralda. After I said hi to her I walked to my first period class which is room 403 and my teacher is Ms. Blasnek.

This year felt different. I made real, good friends that I thought would last until at least until high school. They felt like family to me, and talking to them every single day in class was something I never thought would really end so soon. Of course, the world does not revolve around the lives of seventh graders and keeps on going.

It was a normal school day at Brookhurst Jr. High in 7th Period were my friends and I were talking and waiting for the bell to ring so we could all go home and the school day would be over. Before I left I needed to go to the bike racks to get my skateboard so I could ride it home.

One of the hardest and most influential days of my life was when I started middle school. It was my first time switching schools in six years and I wasn’t sure I was ready to. Some of my friends had known me for those six years and some even more. I had all sorts of questions running through my head on the day of the orientation. Like, what if I don’t fit in or what if I get lost on my first day? All of these questions disappeared when I stepped into what would soon be my new school.

Throughout high school, I always took more challenging courses, such as advanced placement chemistry. When our class took the Chemistry Olympiad Test I had the third highest score in the class and later passed the AP test which earned me college credits. I also took college night course to give me a head start in college. I was a member of The National Honor Society. When I graduated with honors from Oak Hill High School in 2015, I was in the top 10 percent of my class. Currently, I have, or taking now, upper-level classes such as statistics 211 and English 305. Since I am a student athlete I always strive to push myself to be better, both physically and academically. I am very involved in WVU Tech Biology Club, so I volunteer frequently. Recently,

As a seventh grader, I was extremely timid towards participating in class discussions or activities, and I would never seek help due to my incapacitating fear of judgement. I worried my teachers and peers would view me as unintelligent or incapable because I did not understand the information we were learning. This fear of judgement eventually transferred into my social life, and I became submissive and felt inclined to do whatever my peers instructed me to. For example, I would willingly help someone with a project or homework despite the fact that my own grades may suffer by doing so. This willingness to place the needs and wellbeing of my peers above my own ultimately led me to emotional and physical exasperation. I began to isolate myself

You never realize how much you can take until you can’t take it anymore. I came to this realization in the 7th grade at Penelope Middle School. Throughout my life, I’ve always been used in a way that seemed like friendship. In middle school, I was never the popular girl, but the popular girls did hang out with me and they made me feel as a part of their group. But all of me knew that they were using me for my knowledge and just school in general; they were bad influences on me. I took it, until one day I realized they were all bullies and I wanted better for myself before I became one too. I went about this in all the wrong ways. I was becoming the one thing I was trying to get away from.

I can think of few situations that are more frustrating than working with a group of people who are apathetic about the quality of work that they produce. I’m the type of person who tries to do my absolute best at everything I do but in my tenth grade chemistry class I was assigned to work with a group of my classmates who were the exact opposite of me. I quickly caught onto the kind of students that they were and I knew that when it came to labs, I would be the one doing most, if not all the work. We would always get good scores on our labs since I did most of the work but I felt a bit guilty because when it came to tests it was evident that my group mates didn’t know what to do. I was willing to help them but they never asked me to explain