Life Decisions

I don’t think that a person can point to one specific event in their life and say that it solely results in making decisions on something as important as college. I believe that it takes a series of observations and learning moments that sculpts your future. Everybody has certain goals in life and the opinions we develop overtime shape those goals into what we achieve. For most young people, our goal is to go to college, graduate and then go get a great job. Ultimately, that is my goal for my future, however many circumstances and experiences have changed my method of achieving that goal overtime.
As a young child my parents, family, and every other influential person in my life stressed the importance of going to college. They would all tell me that the only way to be successful in my adult life is to go and to graduate from college. To be honest, all I cared about as a kid was who the Giants were playing that night and which house the pick-up basketball game was on the block. As a good child, I always tried my best in school because my parents always told me that was how I would get into a good college, but it never really hit me until my older sister was worrying about which school she was going to attend. Still, I felt like I had four years to worry about college, I wasn’t even a freshman in high school yet.
During my high school life, like almost everyone, I started to grow up and notice certain things. Deep down I only really cared about football, but that is beside the point. I have four parents and not a single one of them went to college and I started to notice how they weren’t living the life that I wanted to someday have. Not that they were unsuccessful in life but it was starting to become obvious that if I wanted to have a better adult life, I needed to start worry about college. All the pushing that my family had done over the years had sunk in and I started to really worrying about my future. I always had solid grades but I didn’t have the type of grades that would take me to a UC. My family always tried to put the idea of going to a Christian college in my head. I wasn’t sold at first because I wanted to live a typical college life for a while. Well after visiting and applying to many colleges, I decided to attend my freshman year of college at Simpson University in Redding, CA. My decision was based on my family’s approval and funding, as well as, scholarships and the beauty of the campus and community.
I loved my time at Simpson University, plain and simple. Everything about the campus and community was just as I expected. All the things that I was told about going to college were coming true. I had great classes and professors, great friends and roommates, and I developed a great relationship with my savior, Jesus Christ. I believed that the four years spent at Simpson University would be the best time of my life. While having all this fun at college, I had very average grades and after one semester of my academic career I had a GPA of 2.1. This was the worst GPA I have ever received in school, knowing that I had to step it up in the second semester to say at this school and keep my scholarships. Even with improving my GPA in the second semester I was quickly told that I would owe fifteen thousand dollars to the school if I wanted to attend my sophomore years at Simpson.
I quickly realized I needed to do something drastic fast to stay at the college I loved. I found my quick fix; I was going to join the Army ROTC program at the school. A perk of the ROTC program was that they paid for your schooling. I started working out with the Army, trying to join in the coming semester. I was told that there were only four more scholarships available through the ROTC program. The problem was that there were nine people in the running for those four spots. At the end of my second semester I was notified that I didn’t receive the scholarship and effectively ending my run at Simpson University.
I came back home to Fresno and started working at my families company and living at home with my parents. I went from living in dorms and attending the school of my dreams to working with hard manual labor out in the hot valley sun and living in my mom’s spare bedroom. No one at the pump company I work at as every stepped foot on a college campus and didn’t want to become stuck at this dead end job. Realizing that if I wanted a future for me and my girlfriend I had to start going to school. I then started working full time and going to night school full time at Fresno City College. After three semesters at City, I am enrolled in this class and should be transferring to Fresno State by next year. To be honest, my circumstances may change in that time period.
Like I stated previously, the future is not sculpted by one or two events. Your future is created from trial and error, missed opportunities, and the people around you. If one bad thing happens in your life, it doesn’t mean that the next events will be bad as well. The way people respond to misfortune is what makes them who they are. Using myself as an example, I went from not caring anything about college, to loving college, to being scared of losing college, to having the opportunity to join the Army through school, to leaving my dream school, to working a full time job, to where I am now, a night student at a community college. People may say that this journey has been a bumpy road but I couldn’t disagree more. Each one of these events has made me a better and stronger person and it shows that I will never stop trying to achieve success.