Personal Narrative: How Marching Band Changed My Life

I have always been a particularly musical person. When I was younger, I wanted to become a singer when I grew up, but upon joining the choir in elementary I realized I did not have the talent for singing that I thought I had. Continually singing off key and never sounding as good as my peers did, I decided to confine myself to singing at home where only my family could hear me. Despite this revelation that I was, in fact, a terrible singer, I still wanted to participate in some type of musical performance and decided to join the band in middle school. After trying out various different instruments, I settled on the flute and quickly fell in love.

Joining band had an immense and almost immediate impact on my life. Before being in band I had never had a talent that I felt completely confident in. I enjoyed practicing and spent many hours trying to improve my musical ability. In

I realized that the only way I could achieve the results I desired was to work harder, so I focused more energy into my schoolwork and it paid off. I continued to play the flute all through high school, and participating in marching band had an equally important impact on my life. Through marching band, I learned the importance of time management. Rehearsals every day after school, Friday night football games, and Saturday competitions that lasted all day greatly cut the amount of free time I had. In fact, the majority of my free time seemed to disappear, until I started working on my time management skills. If I knew that I would be away from home all day at a marching band competition on Saturday, then I would need to schedule time during the week and Sunday to work on projects or studying for tests. I could no longer procrastinate until the last minute, or I would end up getting only one or two hours of sleep. Because of marching band, I changed my habits of procrastination and transformed into a schedule-oriented