Personal Narrative
Everybody knows that in order to have a story of your life, you need to have goals to live up to. You need to set your standards, know your limits, and meet them both head on. I have a few goals myself that I would like to share. I want to knowledgeable and educated in life as that is a prudent goal if I want to be a surgeon or engineer. I also want to be happy. That is the end goal for everybody, right? The ultimate goal. The last goal I have, is to be successful. Now I need to define what my version of successful is. My version of successful is to be happy, have my dream job, be financially stable, to be with the people I love, and to enjoy my time.
I consider myself to be mildly successful in life so far. Such as the fact that I seem to be a person who you can ask for help and not get mocked. People ask me for help on problems and I can usually answer them. In addition to that, I also consider it a success that I have the courage to ask for help from others. It takes a lot of courage to ask for help when you are considered, “the smart one” because others will look at you a certain way and when they help you, they question how your intellectual ability. That bothers me sometimes and that is because I hold that ability of mine very proudly and don’t want to let others diminish that and say that I am not what I say I am. I am pretty sure that is shared in others who ask for help, but it seems more prominent when it happens to people who possess a certain level of expectation Now I have set my intellectual ability to look like a curse, but I do think of it as a success. I keep my mind active in thinking and a lot of what I think about is intellectual or analytical. I might think of how something could be made or improved while in the car, waiting for something, or just eating. I find it to help me think of things to write about it my free time.
Another success that I think I have is my perseverance and ability to push through hard times. Lately, things have been changing in my house and it has not been the easiest transition. There has been a lot of tension and not as much of the things that I enjoyed doing with my family. Even through these harder times, I have managed to find the silver lining and push through it. Not only can I push through social issues, I can also push through academic problems. When I don’t understand something, I don’t give up. I might step away and go take a break and come back to it, but I don’t give up. I hold my successes not as my trophies, but as something that I have achieved, but can be rebuilt and improved. I don’t want to settle for, “good enough.”
I have always considered myself an intelligent person and so has my family around me. I know that every parent says that their kid is intelligent just because that's what parents do, but for me, it is more than that. It isn’t just blank statements, they are stating it because of what they observe. I have felt like I need to live up to those standards, so my first goal for high school is to take college classes in 9th grade. I would be taking them at Palomar College for my freshman year and then transitioning over to Mira Costa for the rest of my years. This is so that I can stay ahead and get ready for my future goals. My second goal is to try to enjoy my adolescent years as much as possible. I know I have been talking a lot about academic goals throughout this narrative, but I do enjoy more things than that. I do want to make more friends in high school, and I do want to try to enjoy my young life because I will not get it back. I don’t want to to turn into an academic fanatic. I do want to focus more on my future in college, but that shouldn’t be my entire life. Like I said in my second paragraph, all of these goals are ways that I envision improvement in myself. When I make goals I go in depth with them. I don’t stop at the next checkpoint, I go all in.
In my family, everybody has always known what they wanted. My mom always wanted to practice medicine, my dad always wanted to go into biology and my sister always wanted to be a veterinarian. As for me, I am a bit tied. I am conflicted between two fields of science. I either want to be an aerospace engineer, or a cardiothoracic surgeon. Now in order to do that, I need to go to college first. For both of my undergraduate and graduate years, I want to go to MIT. I know that MIT is very hard to get into, but I still want to try. The reasoning for me wanting to go to MIT is simple, I want to be an aerospace engineer. It has been the career that I have considered my number one choice and is only rivaled by cardiothoracic surgeon. If you don’t know what that is, a cardiothoracic surgeon is a type of surgeon that deals with the thoracic area. This generally consists of heart, lungs, esophagus, and other organs in the chest. If I were to end up wanting to be the surgeon, I would apply for Harvard, Johns Hopkins, or Stanford. I also want to end up being successful, which I have defined in an earlier paragraph as to be happy, have my dream job, be financially stable, to be with the people I love, and to enjoy my time. As it may seem, I have a lot of work ahead of me to reach my goal of success, but that does not mean that I will fight any less for it.
These goals seem that they are a lot to ask for and to be honest, they are. However, isn’t that the point of goals? To push yourself to be the best that you possibly can? Goals are not daydreams, they are are something for you to aspire to. They are something that can show who you really are. That is something that I will hold with myself for the rest of life. As Thomas Edison said, “Genius Is One Percent Inspiration, Ninety-Nine Percent Perspiration.”
My version of success is to be happy, have my dream job, be financially stable, to be with the people I love, and to enjoy my time while I have it.