Question:
Everyone has a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their life story would be incomplete without it. Share your story. I would say I am an adventure seeker and an escape artists, but not an escape artist in the sense most people think. I am not an escape artist who locks himself up and throws himself into a glass container of water and gets addicted to the sound of a cheering crowd. Instead I find myself trying to escape my home and my boring dismal routines. I am the type of person who longs to escape and go on an adventure. It can be anything, it can be just doing a three mile hike, a ten foot rock climb, or a fifty mile hike and a fifty foot rock climb or sailing or anything! I see my identity, myself, as the type of person who feels more at home in the wild. I feel at home when I’m miles and miles away from anybody, any restaurants, any freeways, or hospitals. Every year I try and do a one week backpacking trip away from civilization with the scouts or just my friends. During these long times away from our normal everyday life some people get extremely homesick but I am just the opposite I couldn’t be any happier because the meaning of homesick to me is being sick of home. When you are hiking for miles with only the bare essentials on your back, with nothing but clean fresh air, surrounded by beautiful views and wildlife, a small aching pain in your feet and numb fingers and toes in the cold mornings, everything seems to slip away, you don’t think of the embarrassing and hurtful things you’ve said and done in the past. Stressful thoughts of the far future, of finding your place in society, or the stresses of the near future, you don’t think of the unfinished homework or the classes you might not pass all disappear. Instead you are filled with a fire in your chest like no other and you find yourself in this sense of blissful productivity and something resembling happiness starts to emerge. That is the type of person I am and it is what makes me uniquely me. I love being out in nature because it is where I feel at home. I also want to help other people in my life. I feel it is everyone's duty to help others in anyway they can. Whether it is teaching a person how to write, fixing someone's car, or saving someone's life. I want to do the latter option. I want to become a Search and Rescue Park Ranger so I can spend all my time in beautiful parts of the world and save lives. It seems like a good fit for me because being a rescue ranger can be a little dangerous, it can take me to beautiful places in nature, it allows me to help other people, and most of all it’s adventurous. Calls will very and surprises are always around the corner and working with a goal brings back that blissful productivity that makes you feel something close to happiness.
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Question:
Every person has a creative side, and it can be expressed in many ways: problem solving, original and innovative thinking, and artistically, to name a few. Describe how you express your creative side. The way I express my creative side is by trying to make routines that I find myself trapped in more fun. The keyword in that last sentence is “try”. I haven’t found a fun creative way of doing my laundry, yet. I have found ways to make my ride home from school more fun. I mostly ride my bike home from school and I am always trying to figure out the best way to get home, what the fastest way is, what gears to use up and down certain hills, and so on. The fun part comes when trying to find the best jumps and banks on the commute home. The line I ride is constantly being sculpted and shaped into a more challenging and satisfying piece of artwork. I find myself going about thirty miles per hour (which on a bike is a pretty fair speed) down hills and up steep curbs to find myself flying in the air to which I land on my front suspension and then keep on rolling to a three foot box that I immediately air off of then up the side of forgotten flower beds and back down to earth. The things I do on my ride home are greatly influenced by the trails my friends and I ride in my mountain biking class. Some of the trails took a lot of time to make with flawlessly manicured jumps, doubles, curved doubles, banks and much more. The artists who came before us to create those lines are the creative minds that influence me and my ride home. They influenced me to break away from routine and make my ride home more fun. It allows me to demonstrate my creative side by tackling the struggle to mold my own line with immovable objects. Question:
What would you say is your greatest talent or skill? How have you developed and demonstrated that talent over time? I would say my greatest talent is being comfortable with heights. One could say I’m an acrophiliac: I love Climbing, Rappelling, standing next to cliff edges, being in high skyscrapers, and sky diving. This talent did not come naturally and I don’t think it does for anyone, having a fear of heights is what comes naturally not having a love for heights. I developed this sort of comfort level from my Dad who is an Iron worker and spends a lot of time up in the air. My Dad has taught me how to keep my balance physically and emotionally when high up in the air. He helped me practice my balance by teaching me how to walk on handrails and telling me if I can walk on something that small at three feet high then I can definitely walk on something wide and flat like a ledge at fifty feet high. He has taught me how to stay balanced emotionally by teaching me how to read a situation and tell if the risk for reward ratio is too high, how easy it is to be punished for failure, and what the punishment for failure is-- often times it’s death. I have demonstrated this talent by doing fun things that involve heights like skydiving and climbing and ziplining and what not. I recently became certified as a C.O.P.E. instructor which stands for Challenging Outdoor Personal Experience. I teach a wide variety of people from football teams to company employees to Boy Scout troops how to work work together and form a better team. A small part of how we reach that goal is by having each individual do an obstacle course thirty five feet in the air, the main obstacle is not letting that natural fear of heights overwhelm you and that's where I step in. Part of my job is to be way up in the air and let people know the risk for reward: that there is no risk, the coarse is safe and I’m up in the air just like they are and the reward is great. Having this talent is meaningful to me because I have fun up in the air and get quite the adrenaline rush (at least for now), and I get to help other people overcome their fear of heights. By having people overcome their fear of heights we show them that if they can overcome their mental barriers and they can do any task ahead of them and that they just had an experience doing just that. Question:
Describe how you have worked to overcome an educational barrier you have faced. I have had only one educational barrier as a student and I think it’s safe to say it may be the biggest barrier a student can face, themselves. Most of my life I wanted to join the military but after severe back pains and a trip to the doctor to find out I have scoliosis I found out that it wasn’t possible. Then I bounced around wondering what I wanted to pursue in life, maybe be a taste tester or a travel writer, but those ideas didn’t quite satisfy me and because of this my grades in school suffered. By the time I hit 9th grade I pretty much gave up, I mean what was the point? I didn’t have any goal, nothing to push for, no reason to go to get a higher education at a college, or any education for that matter. I was filled with stories about how my cousin who graduated a year before I started high school had a solid GPA of 3.7 for almost all his high school career and it amounted to nothing. He worked so hard in school only to become some sort of a repairman at a casino. I wasn’t going to let that happen to me, I was going to have fun in school and have as little stress as possible before meeting the same fate as my older cousin. I spent as much time in the outdoors as possible so I could be as far away from the beating drum of society singing the hymn “if you don’t go to college you won’t amount to anything”, the book and movie titled Into the Wild became my bible. Then 10th grade came and I failed a lot of classes but it was okay because it didn’t matter anyway, but towards the end of the year the school yearbook came out. In the book it highlighted a specific senior who was graduating and planned to go to college and it said his favorite book was Into the Wild and that he loved the mountains and desert and he was going to college in Colorado to double major in environmental science and Outdoor Adventure leadership. This kid was a reflection of me, the minute I read his story I knew I wanted the same thing; he gave me a goal, a reason to pay attention in class and listen to my school's message to go to college. Since then I have done a one hundred eighty degree turn for the better. I overcame my previous negative thoughts and I’am striving for a new goal, to become a Search and Rescue National Park Ranger. Question:
Describe the most significant challenge you have faced and the steps you have taken to overcome this challenge. How has this challenge affected your life and academic achievement? This is a difficult question for me because I normally don’t see problems in my life as challenges. I see them more as obstacles, things in the way but I can always either get over them, around them, or through them. My cousin became part of the most elite force in the world, the Green Berets, when asked about how tough the training was he said “There’s never going to be anything you can’t do”. I have since taken that same thought process and applied it to any problem that has stood in the way of what I have set my mind to and have overcome the main challenges in my life, so far. I would say the biggest goal I have tried to attain that had the most obstacles was becoming an Eagle Scout. It is the highest achievement in Boy Scouts and among the least awarded. Only three percent of all scouts achieve the goal. The biggest obstacle for me occurred when completing the Eagle Scout Service Project. The project has to benefit your community and has to be through an organization other than scouting. The obstacle wasn’t doing the project per se, it was being treated as a leader or an adult by my parents. My parents are divorced and seem to be polar opposites when it comes to everything; except when it comes to treating me like a child, that they both do so well it’s as if they were meant for eachother. It is difficult when being a leader of a project you have spent months planning and getting approved by adults of authority and experiencing those adults treat you with respect. Then expecting the same treatment from your parents only to get treated as a child. A child whose priorities are not even close to being equal to that of an adult. For example I would ask my Dad to arrive with the tools and help at a certain time only to have him be two hours late each weekend with the rest of my volunteers standing around with nothing to do because we had no tools. I feel that I will earn my parents respect and be treated as an adult once I am independent from them. That is the case with most children and their parents. The only problem is once you are independent from them you don’t rely on them and they don’t rely on you and in turn don’t need their respect. This idea of wanting to earn respect becomes a pointless battle, a pursuit of something worthless, something you won’t need once you get it. At least when it comes to parents and being independent from them. |