COLLEGE PERSONAL STATEMENT
Directions: Describe an experience that either demonstrates your character or helped to shape it.
It was my freshman year, preparatory SAT day at a college campus, and the exam had just ended. I got a free pizza slice from the school and made my way out of the campus building with not too much difficulty. Once I was outside, the side of the street that I was on looked unfamiliar, and I wasn't sure which way to go to make my way back to my mom's car. Looks like I was lost at a college campus.
It was so weird because I've been in that area of town before, but because I've never been on that side of the street before, the buildings on the side of the street that I was familiar with looked different. After all, I was quite literally looking at things from a different perspective. This made me second guess myself as to whether I was really looking at the buildings that I was so familiar with, and whether I should go in that direction or not. My mom was waiting on that side of the street in her car, but I thought it led to an unfamiliar side of town because it looked so different from my familiar surroundings. Thinking that it would be dangerous and left with no other options, I called my mom to tell her my situation.
Since my mom gauged that I was feeling iffy about walking to the other side of where the buildings were, she drove to one of the gates in front of the entrance to one of the campus buildings and directed me there over the phone. As she drove by the campus so that we could go home, we saw that the buildings I saw were in fact the familiar buildings that I had seen whenever I would go into that neighborhood. From that experience, I learned that I'm not very good with location and navigation, and that I need to get out more often and experience the outside world more often in order to be ready for college.
That day really taught me that you can't succeed in life if you quite literally don't know how to go where you need to go. Since my return to in-person school, I've learned multiple different ways to get to school so that I can learn to navigate the same area in more than one way. Riding with my mom in the car via different routes and taking different buses to school has allowed me to become more comfortable with different places in the same area, and navigating the world seems a little less scary now.
This made me realize that my tendency to stay in sheltered me from the outside world in a way. Now, I'm becoming more comfortable with the outside world, but there are still many places I've been to or want to go to that I need to familiarize myself with. This motivates me even more to go out and explore these places.
