Personal Narrative Statement : Personal Experiences

It hurts. My bright red bruises under the light were buzzing from the pain. The yelling and arguing were muffled by my loud sobs. Why did this have to happen to me? I was just a kid, I didn’t do anything! Stomp stomp stomp. I heard footsteps coming up the stairs. He found me and yelled into my ears even more. I was called ugly, fat, disgusting, useless, girly, weak. The words ringed in my ears as I asked myself once again, why? I was like a slave, I couldn’t defend myself, I had to survive the beatings. I succumbed to the insults and descended into chaos.

Put the gun down! Put the gun down! Pow Pow Pow. The gun shots cracked into the air as loud as thunder. One after another. We live day by day not knowing our end. In the blink of an eye our lives can be changed forever. Its life, yet even in knowing this we never expect tragedy to find us. We never expect it to affect our lives and the people we know and love. I’m going to share with you the day tragedy found my life.

In my early career in human services, I worked at The Coalition for the Homeless Nonprofit agency. I was based off site in a local shelter and worked within the Bound for Success program, an afterschool setting for children and youth ages 5 through 14. I provided intake assessments and case management to the children and their families. I worked with these families to provide direct and indirect services designed to meet the individual needs of the child. These needs included behavioral needs, educational needs, and/ or emotional needs. Working with this age group provided me with deeper insight into the psychology of child development. This knowledge is basic for guiding and understanding young children because an enormous amount of growth and change occurs during these years.

During my time in youth theater, I have supervised groups of over thirty young children. Being much older than them, I found that I was in a strong leadership position to those kids. In just a few hours at a time I was able to befriend them and help them improve in our show, as well as passing on my own knowledge. Once, during a dress rehearsal, a group of children were being very noisy backstage, so I took it upon myself to teach them quiet breathing exercises. Experiences like that is just one of the many

Tim saw this and became inspired to become a mentor with the Helping Services For Northeast Iowa. In order to be a mentor “The ability and willingness to value the mentee as a person; Develop mutual trust and respect; Maintain confidentiality; Listen both to what is being said and how it is being said; Help the mentee solve his or her problems, rather than give directions; Focus on the mentee’s development and resist the urge to produce a clone.” (University of Washington). Since the start of the Youth Mentoring Services in Northeast Iowa, 1,137 youth have been connected to a role model (“Youth Mentoring Services”). Kids who are mentored have ”significantly more confident in their academic abilities and considerably less likely to display behavioral problems.”(Centre for Addiction and Mental Health). Through the mentoring experience, Tim has learned that the best part is guiding some fun into a child's life while educating them (Egemo). Tim has helped a few children become better human beings through this mentoring

Recently I was tasked with selecting two influential male mentors for my teenaged son to attend The Mississippi National Guard’s Youth Challenge Program. Within my selection process, I needed mentors who could help my son grow and develop into a prosperous young man, who would understand his purpose in life. Before I started my expedition of seeking a mentor, I had to seriously think about the qualities I needed my son’s mentors to possess as well as how he would benefit from the mentoring experience. Selecting a mentor was a new experience for me and there were a number of issues I had to consider in an effort for them to obtain a successful mentor / mentee relationship.

Through my experience with Building Bonds, Breaking B.A.R.S (Barriers Against Reaching Success), our campus’ first organization aimed towards minority youth in the juvenile justice system. I have had an opportunity to collaborate with Durham County Youth Home as a youth mentor, aiding as a positive role model to foster and nurture individual initiative. Volunteer sessions entailed topics such as job interviews, why education is important, tutorials in schoolwork and any other topics that would be beneficial. Mentoring under-represented

During my second year, I found SEEK, an organization that mentors kids in at-risk schools to foster a passion for learning and to promote a will to succeed. When I started, I mentored a child who was not initially comfortable participating in the project we were working on. I talked to him more and tried to be a friend and role model rather than let him become isolated from the group. He anxiously described his experiences back home with family; it was a new perspective to me to have serious stresses outside of school at such a young age. I offered advice when I could from my own experience in dealing with stress and hardship. Gradually, he started noticing my empathy for him, bringing reassurance to him with every new piece of advice. He helped

I assisted with supervising three and four-year-olds with various camp activities. I helped throughout the day by pushing them on the swings in the playground or building blocks with them. With support from three other camp counselors, I helped lead this group of children during this fun and innocent stage of their life. Although they may not remember my name or even my face in a few years, I know that I impacted them with my maturity by helping them accomplish their small, everyday goals.

The summer of 2016 was my first step in achieving that goal. I applied for Cross Roads’ Leader-in-Training (LIT) program and was admitted, staying for all 6 weeks of youth camp learning what it meant to be a counselor. It revealed a level of difficulty to the job I wasn’t aware of as a child. A super counselor makes sure he knows all of his camper’s names within an hour of meeting them; he understands how a group develops and how to guide a group in that process; he can help a child get over homesickness; most of all, he can give children the opportunity to grow as people and provide them the time of their lives.

A bit different from the work I did with the Youth Program, as a Program Coordinator for Bright Futures Charities, I have learned many invaluable skills such as dependability,

Being a youth mentor in direct mental health services afforded me the opportunity to transform the lives of hundreds of youth just like myself. Although, I must confess, being a public servant was not an easy task. After all, I did not have a degree in psychology, and I was still discovering myself. But when you are given the opportunity to inspire the hopeless, and prevent a young person from taking his or her own life, you soon realize that you are fighting for a worthwhile cause. I just was not aware of how much my life would be impacted by a youth who was just about to walk into my life and forever change who I was as a

You can fold anything into me and it’ll blend. I can write research papers and do group projects, not that I like either of them, but I can do them, without complaining. I can go watch Angus’s band play; I can play pick up ball with Dekalb. I can go to Target on Friday night with Brandy. I can live in Oak Prairie: I can live in the city. I can live here with you, Dad, in this wreck of a house, and I can live with Mom in her mansion that feels like a hotel. I can be your only son, and I can be a big brother. I can be with Angus; I can be with Brandy.

We have learned about a lot of material this semester, from babies, to parents, to aggression. Everything we have learned about this semester has been in a domain, either physical, cognitive or social-emotional. I quickly realized that each domain is somehow connected. All the material we learned about in class may not be directly related to each other, however, a topic from one domain likely has an impact on a topic from another. I have had a lot of awesome experiences at Tampa General Hospital throughout this semester and was able to connect material from class to real life situations. In the end, I figured out that many of the experiences I had all had some type of connection to this course.

1. When I was five years old I had lost my first tooth at the park. It was a sunny day and I was with my dad and we were going to fish. My tooth had been loose for a while and I had been wiggling it all day and my dad noticed instead of fishing I was messing with my tooth. We both stood up and he reached in my mouth and was able to pull it out, I heard a pop sound and fell down right after he pulled it out, so it looked like I fainted right after he did it. We laugh about it to this day but at the time I was scared when I first saw the blood but it’s still a funny story.