<p>This is my essay, and I plan to apply to Duke, Johns Hopking, GA Tech, and a few others, what do you guys think? </p>
<pre><code> It was an unlikely start to one of the most tumultuous years of my still-short life, that frigid evening of late-February. My father and I sat immersed in the dim, ambient lighting of an upscale Chicago eatery, our hunger satiated as a light snow began to ease its way to a frosted pavement on the reverse side of the windows. He turned his gaze from the pedestrians to me, and mouthed a sentence nearly inaudibly.
“These are the good old days—savor them now, as the hard times start tomorrow.”
Darting my eyes between the Cuban cigar smoke and the claret goblets, the tuxedo-clad silhouettes that floated alacritously through the room and the stubborn morsels of filet that clung steadfastly to the bone that sat on my plate, I knew that a bitter truth existed in that statement.
Working in the business of radio, my father has moved me a total of eight times since I was born. We had been in our home in Cincinnati for five years (while I was in grades seven through eleven) so I, on some level, understood what was coming when he told me that he was being relocated to Atlanta the day after our return from Chicago. However, this move would come at the worst possible time for me in terms of both my academic and social development: though he was allowing me to live alone and finish my junior year where I was, transferring to another school in another state for my last year of high school seemed as though it would present a nearly insurmountable challenge on several fronts. First and foremost, in my extracurricular endeavors, I would lose my seniority and, as such, the leadership positions I was promised in the orchestra, the school newspaper, the literary magazine, the jazz band, and the creative writing department, which was a crushing blow to me, as I was quite passionate about all of them. Secondly, and equally important, due to the change in schools and districts, I would lose my chance at becoming valedictorian and, due to a tripling in class size and different grading system, my spot at the head of the class. On top of that, I would have to take lower level classes due to differing core requirements between the districts. Lastly, on a rather personal note, I’d be torn from my many very good friends with whom I had shared those five years with, the teachers I had grown to know so well, and the girl that I loved. Life is, of course, not without challenges, but it seemed as though fate had set me on a course counter to all that I cared about, save my father.
The months between that February evening and the end of my junior year, I spent living independently, as my father worked in Atlanta. Never before then did I wish for autonomy; so many teens thirst for it, but it is not something to be desired. I had to learn, teach myself, how to run the household in his absence, all the while working for all of my school-, music- and writing-related endeavors, all the while preparing to leave my girlfriend of a year and friends of five, all the while trying to cram all of my college preparations into my junior year—while I still had teachers who knew me to write recommendations and teachers who cared to walk me through the process. It is very difficult to go through all of this without missing an assignment or an appointment (not to say that I missed nothing--believe me, I did), but beyond all of the sweat and sleepless nights, these months were the start of a period of great personal growth, the kindling of a spark of responsibility in a formerly careless child.
As much as I knew that this experience was “good for me in the long term”, the reality was that I was faced with immediate loss, and on June twelfth, I moved down to Atlanta and joined my father. A summer, passing in an instant, gave me little time to fully contemplate the year ahead, and one morning, not unlike the others that I had let slip through my fingers, I was awoken and told to ready myself for school.
Those first days of school made the coming year seem fairly bleak. I had become something along the lines of a leper in the eyes of my classmates, an alien to be quarantined indefinitely, as though this were kindergarten and there was fear I might have “cooties” or something equally childish. I also, through my sporadic conversations with others, realized the breadth of the programs this new school had to offer, and how many of them I would be unable to avail myself of, with my late arrival and all. Of course, pessimism must always rear its ugly head; as ugly as its head is, one eventually gets tired of seeing it, and, ultimately, desires to rid oneself of it. Ultimately, optimism out of desperation is still optimism.
I decided that, perhaps, if I got involved with a plethora of activities, I could put out of mind that which made me unhappy—after all, “that which made me unhappy” was comparatively trivial. Over the next few weeks, I found myself becoming ever more immersed and involved in the school and the community, initially for rather self-serving reasons, admittedly. But it is amazing how quickly self-service can transform into the service of others, of that proverbial “greater good.” I don’t know how it happened, how a comparatively hopeless individual such as myself came to spend every afternoon at the meeting of some club or organization, trying to use the energy that would be wasted in lounging before a flickering television to better my new environment, but as the weeks became months, I became what I had longed to be: a productive leader in a position to change the world around me for the better
Stress can make an individual fold and acquiesce, or focus and grow, depending on the individual’s attitude and the effort he puts into making positives of his negatives. Learning how to do the latter is a rather important lesson in the course of life, and one that I was thankful to begin learning before I begin to tackle my ambitions in college. After all, in the world we live in, fairly or not, is anything less expected?
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<p>Thanks for your time!</p>