Personal Essay
Introduction:
Growing up with multiple tongues at the tip of my own, my culture was diverse from the start. Coming into the ACLC community was a full immersion of a new community unlike any other, unified. Here, is where I first experienced independence and control of my academic path, and felt empowered through my voice and the changes it could make. As a senior, and a member of the community for my 6th year, I am taking my time to reflect on the impact I’ve made on this school, and how my knowledge could potentially shape others experience within our democratic process.
Personal Qualities, Work Habits, and Attitudes:
Culture shock is defined as, “the feeling of disorientation experienced by someone who is suddenly subjected to an unfamiliar culture, way of life, or set of attitudes”; this term tends to have negative connotation, but for me it became an asset. Aclc’s academic structure has an amount of freedom that may be difficult for many to become familiarized with, but as a person who craves independence, my culture shock became my oasis. With this new found freedom, I set goals for myself, and created my own checklist of how I’d accomplish the most I could in this school. Going into highschool, the freedom ACLC gives their learners became alarming, but with the aid of wonderful educators, and peers, each learner creates their own support team and become the leaders of their own path. My own path allowed me to: finish several general education courses at a community college level, finish Berkeley City College’s American Sign Language classes, hold a part-time job, all while being a decent student at ACLC. If it weren’t for the opportunities provided to me by this school, I would not have been able to achieve several of my academic goals, as well as becoming a part of the deaf community, which is now an influential part of my life.
New Basics:
Growing up, I became accustomed to listening to the different sounds each of my family members made every time they spoke. At the age of 5, I understood where the rhythms came from, English. Now a 17 year old woman who has been speaking English for 12 years of my life there are still many sounds my tongue won’t create. While being a young child, the amount of innocence one has simply led that accent to create one thing, embarrassment, but now it has created pride. Pride in being able to communicate with different groups of people in their native language, and pride in having kept my own. When I hear my accent come through, I hear the influence of my family come through. This is an accent that has helped me recognize and identify who I am; I am Latino, and I am proud. Having 3 languages circulate the surface of my brain at all times can be a struggle, but always an entertaining process; when attempting to search for a word I know in Portuguese and know a similar word in Spanish, but have no clue of an English replacement, I’ve truly gained an understanding of people and the way they express themselves. Having an almost unlimited supply of vocabulary racing through my head always makes describing emotions a very fun process, I have been privileged enough to naturally learn these languages simply through exposure, but it also came with its own fee, my grammar is awful. Not having one main language for my brain to focus on has taken a toll on the fluency of each language, but having the foundation for all 3 has made it significantly easier to adapt and communicate with the people I’m surrounded by. Yes, people can hear my accent, and yes I am foreign, but I love it.
Thinking and Reasoning Skills:
Coming into my 4th year of highschool, I have taken my fair share of college courses and psychology was not an exception. In psychology, I learned about an introspective self-reporting questionnaire called the “Myers-Briggs Type Indicator”. This is a test that categorizes people into what the test recognizes as the only 16 kinds of personalities people can have. Of course, after hearing that this personality “debunker” only has 16 possible personality types, the test lost most of its credibility for me, I simply could not wrap my head around the idea that from the millions of people living on Earth, ONLY 16 personalities have come to be. However, I decided to take the test anyways and see what this test that supposedly will enlighten me on how I perceive the world around me and how I make decisions lets me know. After taking this test, I was not surprised by the results, I was described as someone prone to logical reasoning over an emotional drive. At first, this made me feel like I lacked sensitivity and wasn’t in touch with one main human trait, empathy, but I have come to terms with knowing that yes I am a logical person, and its not wrong. I have learned to take this rationalizing way of thinking and use it to my most advantage, I can see things for what they are statistics. In any action you take there can always be negative or positive repercussions and the problem I think many people have is detaching their feelings from the possible results and see hard cold facts. To me, the hard cold facts are what keep me grounded, seeing numbers represent different possible outcomes to the things I’m doing can bring me a type of relief that the statistics are in my favor, or a motivation to turn the numbers into something that works to the best of my advantage. Being a logic based thinker, has helped me detach myself from my emotions and focus on real raw things I see, numbers.
Interpersonal Abilities
Part of the advantage of being a highschool student is being able to try different things and still have time to do more. With my high school experience, I chose to submerge myself within one of the core places of the city I live in, the movie theatre. Working at the movie theatre for 2 years has immensely helped me to grow as a person as well as a worker. In a work/business setting, I had to learn how to put my personal preferences to the side, the guest came first. Here, I became comfortable with a key trait I previously struggled with, patience. Patience helped me in many aspects of my job, in how to participate as a team member in the job and how to compromise with guests who could sometimes have somewhat unreasonable requests. While learning how to speak to guests to have their needs satisfied, I also had the opportunity to grow as a leader in the work space. To me, this was very different than any leadership roles I had in a school setting, because it felt like “the real world”, my decisions had an impact on other people's lives, even if it was as simple as watching a movie or how buttery their popcorn was. When I first began working at the theatre, I was the youngest on staff. By year 2 I was no longer the youngest or the oldest, but I was one of the employees with the most experience. Being an employee with more of a senior title gave me the opportunity to teach others as I had been taught. Teaching new employees skills I had been working on for months became a very rewarding feeling, because I knew that I was helping each person become better in some things that I had struggled as well. Aside from high school leadership experiences, I think having a formal job helped me speed up the process of maturity and responsibility.
Technology
As time progresses, so will the technology that advances with the people beside them. Because of the growing role technology has in our society, it is incredibly important to become aware of how the technology works. Summer of 2017 I had the privilege of working with Girls Who Code through Adobe Systems. In this program I submerged myself in technology and the work that it takes to program it. Here I became proficient in 3 coding languages and gained a better understanding of the work it takes to have technology work accordingly. One skill I gained was learning how to work with HTML and CSS. HTML and CSS are the coding languages used to program websites; within the tech world this is a more basic skill, but it's a skill that can be used multiple times along your career. In today's modern age everything has a website, and having the knowledge to create my own gives me a better grip of how I want my work to look like and understanding the process in order to create it, as opposed to paying someone to do it for me and them not understanding my vision. After working with Adobe, my passion for computer science grew, and I am now an intern with a Cheeseburger Therapy, a 24 hour online therapy service. Through this internship I first hand experience how much trust people put in technology to help them in their daily lives, this gave me more reason to stay up to date on my technology knowledge. Technology isn't going anywhere, people are moving forward and to stay up to date with our society one must stay up with its tech as well.
Conclusion
Overall, these past 3 years of high school have allowed me to gain an immense amount of experience in time management, dedication and responsibility along with gaining a better understanding of who I am as a person and who I strive to be. Being a part of the ACLC community has allowed me to take on projects that many others schools wouldn’t facilitate as easily. The rich culture that I’m surrounded by has encouraged me to progress and to aim for a better version of myself, not just for me, but how it can also affect the community.