| If you’d like, share any extracurricular activities, professional details, or personal experiences you would like TSN partners to know about you. Responses can be as brief or long as you’d like. | “Academically dismissed” words that will always follow me wherever I go. For six years, I lived with the feeling of being a failure, and that, in the end, ultimately defined me as a person. Throughout that time, I placed blame on anyone other than myself, and as I stood behind, I watched old friends graduate and go on to successful careers. From a young age, my parents, especially my father, pushed me to be the best and always be at the top. I tried my best to make him proud and be the role model for my siblings as the first to head off to college. So much was on my shoulders, but little did my family know of the inner turmoil I was going through. Before starting at City College of New York, I had applied to highly selective liberal arts colleges far from home. I wanted that independence and experience, and though I had the grades, I faced rejection after rejection. I cried, but in the end, I had to accept their decision, not realizing that deep down, I would harbor resentment.
I started on the right foot by majoring in political science and holding on to the belief that I wanted to become a lawyer. Yet as the assignments started to pile up, I stopped functioning and skipped the rest of the semester. At that point, I was numb and hoped that in the spring, I would recuperate. Sadly, history repeated itself with only one class passable. My father would ask for my grades, and though my excuses worked initially, he slowly started to lose trust in me. It was in the summer of 2015 when I began to work on a part-time basis at a hardware store. Through that job, I watched co-workers come and go and venture on to new things, yet I stayed. My father, my strongest critic, would lament losing his straight-A daughter and ask, “what happened to her?” Though I tuned him out, his words still took a hit to the point where I wondered, “what had happened to that girl?”
It was in the year 2020, at the height of the pandemic, when a co-worker of mine kept asking me the million-dollar question: “Why aren’t you in school?” I didn’t know how to answer him, and it wasn’t until the following year that I worked up the courage to evaluate my life and finally broke down. For so long, I deemed myself a disappointment, and at 24, I found the answer I had been seeking. I had to let go of all that resentment that I still harbored and come to terms with why it happened, and I still had the time to change my life. So, in December 2021, I took the first step in applying to LaGuardia Community College. Slowly I am gaining back my dad’s trust, especially after showing him my spring and fall 2022 semester grades. I felt joy at seeing him smile, and though it had taken me this long to realize that I could do it, I needed to go on this journey on my own. I accomplished a feat in just one year; no longer am I a failure.
|
|---|
