College Admissions Essay: How My Father Changed My Life

My father inspired me to step into a world outside of my comfort zone. During high school, I was known as an introverted person who did not get along with others as much. I was afraid of being a part of a large crowd simply because I knew that fitting in would be impossible. However, by the time I became a junior, the daily life that I had lived routinely suddenly began to change. With the recent news about racial violence, such as the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, I started to feel discomfort about the people who were around me. My uneasiness eventually had gotten to a point where my father tried his best to push me towards being a person who is a keen listener and great conversationalist. From that moment on, my father encouraged me to realize that the world was
Because of those startling events, I did not want to interact with other people physically or verbally. However, my father – although I hid my deepest fear from him – constantly exposed me to those stories anyway by turning on the world news on our television every evening that I came home from school. The effects that racism had on our nation was starting to become devastating for me to process. My father usually lectured me about how racism is everywhere, but people who can speak up against it can make others reconsider what they are doing about it. He would sometimes have me sit in his truck after school and discuss with me about what it meant to him to be a black man living in a world before I was born. The events of his past that he shared with me vividly were about how he dealt with racism. Even though those struggles in his life were disheartening, I never saw him cry or become frustrated at least once. What I saw from my father was pure content as he wanted me to learn that living outside my comfort zone is not a horrible