My Community & How It Shaped Me
Application Essay
Shadiomar McPharlene
December 10th, 2012
Topic: My Neighborhood and its effect on me.
D.O.B: December 24th, 1994
Unlike the suburbs yet a suburban mentality was instilled; the idea that how we appear to others and education is the key to social mobility, well, the legal key. Although I was born a child of the ghetto I learned that the ghetto is where I’m teenage mother in Kingston, Jamaica. I currently reside in Seaview Gardens a community that is said to be a ghetto, and don’t get me wrong, it is but it’s my suburb and it’s where I learnt everything I know. “What people think of a ghetto is dependent on how people in the ghetto think” – Shadiomar McPharlene; where I live although there’s distractions all around, we chose how to react to those distractions and we chose whether we let the distractions build or destroy us. I chose to make them my foundation to success.
As said before I was born to a teenage mother, like most children that live in the ghetto and just like most my mom was a single mother for sometime. That is expected though cause at 16 what young man would want the burden of a child, at that age some children can barely manage algebra. Growing up with my mom was extremely rough, not that I can remember most of it but from her tales of the past we moved around a couple times. I remember her telling me that one night she to attend this party and as she had her clothes on and was heading out her mother said, “Sheba! You forgetting yuh handbag!” and my grandmother held me out towards her. My mother never forgot that moment, it was just she and I for a while and then she was found. Against some incredible odds she ended up with a young man that would take her, even with extra baggage and at age 3 I had myself a step-dad and we moved into his family’s house. He was not my biological dad but you could never tell, he referred to me as his own and even when my little sister and little brother were born I was still his “big
Shadiomar McPharlene
December 10th, 2012
Topic: My Neighborhood and its effect on me.
D.O.B: December 24th, 1994
Unlike the suburbs yet a suburban mentality was instilled; the idea that how we appear to others and education is the key to social mobility, well, the legal key. Although I was born a child of the ghetto I learned that the ghetto is where I’m teenage mother in Kingston, Jamaica. I currently reside in Seaview Gardens a community that is said to be a ghetto, and don’t get me wrong, it is but it’s my suburb and it’s where I learnt everything I know. “What people think of a ghetto is dependent on how people in the ghetto think” – Shadiomar McPharlene; where I live although there’s distractions all around, we chose how to react to those distractions and we chose whether we let the distractions build or destroy us. I chose to make them my foundation to success.
As said before I was born to a teenage mother, like most children that live in the ghetto and just like most my mom was a single mother for sometime. That is expected though cause at 16 what young man would want the burden of a child, at that age some children can barely manage algebra. Growing up with my mom was extremely rough, not that I can remember most of it but from her tales of the past we moved around a couple times. I remember her telling me that one night she to attend this party and as she had her clothes on and was heading out her mother said, “Sheba! You forgetting yuh handbag!” and my grandmother held me out towards her. My mother never forgot that moment, it was just she and I for a while and then she was found. Against some incredible odds she ended up with a young man that would take her, even with extra baggage and at age 3 I had myself a step-dad and we moved into his family’s house. He was not my biological dad but you could never tell, he referred to me as his own and even when my little sister and little brother were born I was still his “big