Reflective Essay About My Educational Journey

From time to time I like to look back at my life and see what I have accomplished and how meaningful my very existence is to both my family and others. When I ponder this I often look at my father’s past and see how he aspired to the great man he is now. I see how he has made his fair share of mistakes and how he took it and kept moving. He has told me many times about how he never thought he would be anything important because of his intellectual capabilities and how he managed to squabble his way into medical school than the Naval Academy which changed his life for forever. I look at my father now and see the man he is now and see how he let his dreams become realities and how he worked for them instead of giving up and feeling sorry for himself like many people often act.

Raised all my life in Puerto Rico and then transferring to America was a great challenge. I had to overcome various difficulties in order to adapt to new ideas, cultures, and lifestyles. One of the obstacles I encountered was adapting to school. Since I was five my parents wanted me to imbibe the English language in order to have an exceptional future filled with opportunities, but when I arrived all my hard work in learning English did not seem to matter at my middle school. I arrived in this country thinking I was going to be in the most challenging classes and be at the top but reality smacked me in the face the first day I entered eighth grade. To my disadvantage the counselors did not care about my previous grades in Puerto Rico. Seeing that my parents were only able to speak Spanish, the school deduced my English was not well-developed enough and consequently I was placed in English-language learner (ELL) classes. After testing me in reading, writing, and hearing I was

In the podcast “Lower Income, Higher Ed” NPR reporter Cuvvy Perpaterson ( I believe that’s what she said) discussed the issues high school students in D.C. face while applying and attending University. Perpaterson describes her interaction with one teenager; Christopher. He is a first-generation college student. “Christopher grew up in one of the poorest parts of Washington, D.C. He and his mother went through frequent bouts of homelessness when he went to high school — often staying in shelters.” Christopher illustrates his feelings about how attending University affected him. He speaks of how the first time he stepped into his dorm he couldn’t believe he has a space to call his own. He also expresses his fears of being alone and worries for

When I was in MacCracken middle school, I always wondered what it would be like when I went to Spartanburg high. I kind of wished someone would have told me what high school would be like. Now that I have been here for a year and a half, it is not that hard. I have managed to learn not only a lot in class but also a lot about Spartanburg High School and its people. Friendships and reasonability are areas that I think students in the eighth- grade student should know before they arrive.

I was born in China and came to the United States when I was young. Our family was fortunate to have the opportunity to come to America due to my uncle. He sponsored us to come here so we can all have a better life. I don’t remember much of China and only have memories of my childhood in Sacramento. Sometimes I wonder how my life would be like if I never came to the United States but overall I am very blessed to be here. I’ve always remembered that I had a good life up until high school. I didn’t know then, but I found out five years ago that I had depression in high school. I really wished that my teachers would’ve known and helped me. Yet nobody knew including my family members.

One problem that I have faced personally was that I was a bit of an introvert. It was a significant problem for me considering I was not entirely confident in social situations. This all began to change through events that transpired during my freshman year. My family moved to Bentonville, Arkansas, where I attended Bentonville High School for the majority of ninth grade. In an instant, I had transferred from a school with a class size of 250 students to a school that was six times larger, consisting of 1500 freshmen. This was a tremendous transition for me. I was required to leave my friends and classmates that I had known for the previous seven years in Palmyra, Pennsylvania. Soon I realized that I needed to overcome my introversion

Baseball has impacted and influenced my way of life. It’s an honor and a privilege to play and how it has developed and strengthened me physically and mentally as a person will always play a part in my way of life.

I believe in the value of personal growth and learning for yourself. Personal growth is assessing my skills and aiming for my goals in life without the help from others. Similar to Siddhartha, he ventures off on his own to find Nirvana from his own experience because you cannot learn it on your own. I personally grow every summer when my parents send me away to camps or colleges and I must learn values like responsibility, independence, and to ‘find myself’, which is my Nirvana.

School has been an extensive journey with many ups and downs. Hard work mixed with focus allows doors to be open up that were once closed. Education has allowed me to understand the importance of allowing information to help me perform better in the world today. School has always been a focus of mine because of the education it gives and the fun it has provided me throughout all of my stages.

Before attending Northwest Catholic, I completed my freshman year at Renbrook School. This school not only prepared me for what was to come for my future high school years but helped shaped me into the better person I am today. As a thank you for all Renbrook had done for me, I wanted to finally become immersed in school-related activities. Prior to ninth grade year, I stayed away from any school activity, since I believed it was a waste of time, and I could just relax at home. This kind of thinking stopped me from actually becoming a part of the actual Renbrook community. When I decided that I would do something recognizable, it would be my final year at Renbrook and I didn’t want to be another face in the crowd I wanted to be someone who

Well let me start off by saying English is one of my toughest subjects, my writing process is still in process. I like to read material that catches my attention. If it does not catch my attention I will have a hard time trying to read the material. Also the same with writing. I am not a talker, so writing for me is straight to the point and then I’m done. Trying to generate ideas and other things to write about is a challenge for me. It will normally take me a couple of hours to write a good paper, and I’m only taking about a rough draft. The way I generate ideas is to just freestyle it until I have enough words typed or written down that I can so what play with and try to make sense out it. If I think about a subject

Academic success to me is achieving good grades and understanding the material to get good grades. Academic success also means to have an good attendance. I already get mostly A’s and B’s, but I am not good at staying on top of things. To improve my academic success I will attend class more often, be more organized, pay attention in class, and not procrastinate.

This internal practical internship offered me an opportunity to focus on using the knowledge and skills acquired during the related courses on behavior training with children and cognitive behavior therapy with adolescents to practice my therapeutic work as a child and adolescent psychologist and a chance to see how psychological therapies (behavior training and cognitive behavior therapy) could be delivered in different settings.

I check my watch as I race to catch my first ever Austin Metro bus home. My

The question posed in the title, “Who am I?” is very simple but the answers are never so. What defines me as who I am as a person today are relatively my attitude, my personal values and beliefs to life that developed throughout my life. “Values are constructs that we hold as important and beliefs are constructs that we hold to be true (Collins & Chippendale, 1995)”. Meanwhile, attitudes are relatively lasting clusters of emotions, beliefs, and behavior tendencies directed towards specific ideas, people or objects (Baron & Byrne, 1984). Generally, my family members, friends and the experiences I had contribute to my sense of who I am and how I view the world. With the aid of the two counseling theories, Roger’s personality theory and Adlerian personality theory, I managed to make a personal self-reflection on my values, attitudes, beliefs and how became who am I today.