Great Neck to Saint Peter's Prepartory High School
Jon Carlo Dominguez
Hometown
North Bergen, N.J.
High school
St. Peter's Preparatory School
cOLLEGE PLANS
Columbia University
Getting dressed each morning for school, I slip on my blazer, tighten my leather Oxfords, and pick a pair of glasses that match my outfit. Just a block away from my house, my town's high school is a two-minute walk to my left. However, I turn right and begin my hour-long commute to St. Peter's Prep. On my way to the bus stop, I always run into my childhood friends as we go in different directions. I wonder, "Why is my life so different from theirs? Do they think I'm pretentious, going to a prep school?" I don't live in a dystopian town where gunshots go off every day. However, many of my friends just don't care about school and use alcohol, drugs or sex to escape from their socioeconomic realities; the majority of my town is low-income and Latino.
I continue walking to the bus stop and run into a friend who went to my elementary school. "Those red pants make you look like one of those jerks from Prep, bruh. I work the register at a bank and I don't even wear that crap," he says while laughing in a sincere manner. He shakes my hand the same way we have since the second grade; we both smile at the fact that the gesture is alive after all these years.
Arriving at my high school, my favorite priest sketches the trinity on my torso and mentions something he wants me to do with the blessing of God that day: ace a test, inspire the freshmen with a motivational speech or simply be happy. Feeling loved, I move on to ethics class and analyze how the cycle of socialization comes into play with the same community I just tutored a weekend ago, Brooklyn Jesuit Prep. In my science class, I discuss how global warming relates to the research trip I recently attended in Alaska with my teacher.
To enjoy the weekend, I go to a football game between Prep and my neighborhood. During a play, my prep friends chant, "That's alright, that's okay, you'll be working for us someday." Having deep bonds of friendship on both sides, I'm shocked at the thoughtlessness of my classmates. Part of me feels ostracized, but another part of me wants to fix things; I fiercely lecture them on how wrong they are about my home. With my neighborhood friends, part of me wants to ignore what the football fans had to say, but a subtle fear that they may be right grows in my heart. I am moved and start tutoring my neighborhood friends with my used test-preparation books and showing them the social skills I learned from Dale Carnegie. I also start sharing books on body language and charisma, fascinating guides to lucid dreaming, and my favorite thrillers from Stephen King. I do this simply because it's what friends do. While I see college as an opportunity, many of my neighborhood friends see it as an obstacle keeping them from a paying job. I am trying to help this handful of friends realize that studying, reading, and learning can be rewarding.
Living two blocks away from me, my best friend, Eduardo, attends public school and wants to become a United States Marshal. Working out four hours every day and taking classes like public speaking, law and American literature, everything he does revolves around his goal. People like Eduardo give me hope among the football fans' chanting and make the fear in my heart subside.
The two worlds that comprise my being constantly play tug of war in my mind. My parents came from poverty in Ecuador, so I was raised believing that hard work and education can take you anywhere. Whether that work is in the classroom, at the gym or networking at a business event, persistence is what fosters success. Not your race. Not your native language. Not your ZIP code.
Rob Henderson
Hometown
Red Bluff, Calif.
high school
Red Bluff High School
college plans
Undecided*
For years, I've reflected on what qualities enable people to overcome adversity. I believe my journey exemplifies that one answer is a synthesis of initiative and resilience. From foster care, to a broken home, to military service, to two tours of duty in the Middle East, initiative and resilience have steered me to where I am today.
I was born into poverty to an immigrant mother. When I was 2, my mother's drug addiction caused me to be placed into the Los Angeles County foster care system. I lived in seven different homes over the next five years. Some homes had more than 10 foster children living in them. The families were of many ethnic backgrounds; I was compelled to develop social skills to receive care from distracted foster parents. I was a curious boy and enjoyed interacting with the people around me.
At age 7, I was adopted by a married couple and their daughter. I enjoyed calling my new parents "mom" and "dad" and saying "I have a sister." As a boy who hadn't had a family, it made me happy to finally be a part of one.
Two years later, my parents revealed they were ending their marriage. This was crushing. I observed as my parents argued and noticed they often mentioned my adoption. I found a sanctuary to escape: the school library. There I read Encyclopedia Brown and other favorites. My adoptive mother was granted custody of me; consequently my adoptive father severed ties with me because he knew it would hurt my mother. I was heartbroken and curious why a dispute with my mother resulted in my father not speaking to me. I asked adult relatives and they'd skirt the question. There was one adult who was truthful.
She was a coworker of my mother's named Shelly. She related that when adults are hurt, they can behave irresponsibly. I was grateful for her honesty and we became close. My mother soon entered a relationship with her. As a young boy, I was puzzled that my mother could now be in a relationship with Shelly. My mother explained that in our society young gay people are often socialized into believing they're heterosexual and then, as adults, embrace their attraction to the same sex. This blew my 9-year-old mind and intensified my interest in the complexities of human behavior. My mother and her partner Shelly raised me into adolescence.
Shelly was shot when I was 14. I was terrified that she wouldn't survive; I felt great affection for her. I was rejected by other parental figures, yet Shelly chose to help care for me. She survived after extensive surgery and received an insurance settlement which she and my mother used to buy a home. One year later, our home was foreclosed. I'd developed enough resilience to overcome the ordeal and I decided to take initiative.
After graduating high school, I decided to join the military during the Iraq surge in 2007. I understood the risks, and the structured image the Air Force evoked, combined with my desire to serve my country, gave me good reason to enlist.
While military life was demanding, my efforts paid off. A unification of resilience and initiative in an ordered environment has led me to success. I've accomplished much over the last seven years because the Air Force provides an organized setting that contrasts with the chaos of my upbringing. I developed leadership and collaboration skills by serving abroad alongside people of all backgrounds, from the Middle East to Europe. Moreover, I achieved fluency in another language, learned more about the human experience and gained awareness of my own potential.
My aim is to become a psychologist and further explore the themes of resilience and initiative to assist people who've endured traumatic situations. My trials as a youth along with my military service have inspired me to help others overcome adversity.
Rob has some college credit from correspondence courses, and he's considered a transfer applicant. He is still waiting to hear from some colleges.
Annabel La Riva
Hometown
Brooklyn
high school
Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and Performing Arts
college plans
Kenyon College
I have no pre-choir memories.
If it were not for my involvement in the choir, I would never have discovered my talent and love for singing that led me to apply to LaGuardia High School. My vocal training in school has opened up a whole new world of singing to me and has exposed me to others who are passionate and dedicated to their art.
At the age of 4, I began attending choir at St. James Church. My mother decided that joining choir would provide me with musical and religious instruction, in addition to supplying the stories and rituals that are essential to Western civilization, Christianity — whatever that means. I was initially joined by scads of my peers at St. James, making choir a fun, social task, but as I grew older, one by one, my friends began dropping out and I became entirely disenchanted with what I saw as the onerous chore of attending choir. They simply did not want to go anymore and their parents complied.
In addition to the dwindling choristers, Saint James was located on the Upper East Side, one of the fanciest ZIP codes in New York, while I was coming from my school in the pregentrified Brooklyn neighborhood of Bushwick. While the neighborhood is now known for its gourmet pizzerias and trendy clubs, the Bushwick of my childhood was known for shootings and public housing projects, if it was known at all. This discrepancy between my two lives made me more than a little uncomfortable. While the children at choir proudly donned the telltale signs of their elite education: tartan skirts and navy blazers encrusted with the logos of their private schools whose cost was nearly as much as my mother's yearly wage, I maintained my own uniform of jeans and a T-shirt. They all knew me as the girl from Brooklyn, the chorister who went to public school.
I begged and pleaded with my mom to let me follow the path of my friends and retire my choir robe, but she persisted, always replying with a curt "no". She believed that in the long run, going to choir would benefit me both educationally and socially.
As the years went on, I continued to badger my mother on the subject. Her answers began to lessen in severity. She showed compassion toward my dislike of choir and soon replied to my questions of discontinuing my involvement in chorus with answers like "Just do it for one more year" and the even more compassionate, "Are you sure?" Despite my mother's change of heart, I did not take advantage of her limbo-ed responses, and instead, I began to withdraw my constant requests. In spite of not having many friends in choir, I began to enjoy literally finding my voice every week in church. After years in choir, I let my voice become free and discovered that it was loud and powerful. It could be used to lead others in song. When I was younger, I had always followed the older, more experienced singers. I would wait for the right pitch, or follow the pros to figure out when to come in, but little by little, letting go of my reticence, I began to trust myself: starting the pitch and coming in when I knew we were supposed to sing. Eventually, other singers began to follow my lead. Parishioners started to acknowledge me for my voice rather than my address. I began to appreciate this music that I had heard throughout my youth, yet had always dismissed as boring and religious. Soon enough, my habitual complaints about choir completely stopped.
After being in the choir for nearly a decade, I was awarded the position of head chorister, which served as an affirmation of my musical abilities, since I was now expected to lead the younger choristers. The position of head chorister motivated me into applying to the highly competitive and prestigious LaGuardia High School.
Although I initially detested choir, I have come to love it, and more than that, it has become an intrinsic part of me. Choir allowed me to not only grow as a singer, but also as a person. Through choir, I learned that if you continue with something long enough, you will receive some sort of benefit from it and maybe even grow to love it. Because of choir I found my voice in a small church. Because of choir, I am willing to go wherever life takes me with an open mind, knowing that the effects of even the smallest things can be completely life-altering. As a song that I learned in choir and auditioned with for LaGuardia says: "Oh God, my heart is ready."
Martina Piñeiros
Hometown
Chicago
high school
Latin School of Chicago
college plans
Northwestern University
With fingers long and elegant, and nails always red, my mother's hands once held the magic power to soothe my woes. As a child these hands wiped my tears and pulled me close enough to her to smell her motherly scent — a mixture of Nivea lotion and achiote, evidence that she had spent her morning in the kitchen. Years later, these same hands incited my tears.
In Ecuador, my mother was invincible, but upon our arrival to the United States she became a shell of what she once was. I had grown accustomed to seeing her youthful hands well manicured, but melancholy and hours of hard labor had silently taken over them in a matter of months. Blisters and dark spots invaded her smooth brown skin, while thick and stubborn blue and green veins crept up from the backs of her hands to the tips of her fingers.
Fatigue and two jobs had ruined who both my parents used to be, and I began to value the little time I had with my mother more than ever before. This little time could not make up for the time I spent alone, however, nor could it assuage the envy I had of the little girl my mother looked after. She, though not my mother's daughter, had the privilege of having my mother and her delicious cooking all to herself; I would always get the leftovers. She also had the privilege of having my mother pin her silky blond hair into a pretty bun before ballet classes while my dad wrestled with the hairbrush to pull my thick brown hair into two lopsided ponytails before dropping me off at the bus stop. But I couldn't blame the girl for depriving me of my mother; her parents had also been consumed by their jobs.
My mother's hands caressed me less and less, and by the age of 12 I had become nearly indifferent to her cold and rare touch. My family had turned into a group of strangers that happened to be living under the same roof while chasing the American Dream.
At 4 a.m. on May 3, 2009, I woke to a soft and unfamiliar cry. Scared and confused, I put on my slippers and tiptoed to my parents' room.There, in the moonlit darkness, I found my mother, the woman of iron, once again defeated. Phone by her side, fists clenched, curled up like a child, she sobbed uncontrollably. I did not need an explanation; I knew right away that my abuelita had passed away. I pulled my mother close to my chest and wiped away her tears. And for the first time in several years, I uttered the words le quiero mucho Mami (I love you, Mom). She looked up at me with her big, brown, tear-filled eyes, and whispered, y yo a tí (I do, too). The distance that had silently emerged between us since we left Ecuador was suddenly erased. I had become my mother's protector, as she had once been for her mother. I held her callused hands between my own and realized that despite their smoothness, my hands were not much different from hers.
Carolina Sosa
Hometown
Centreville, Va.
high school
Westfield High School
college plans
Georgetown University
"Just another illegal looking for a job," the chubby cashier whispers to his coworker as my dad and I walk out of the convenience store. We had just driven up to buy lunch, and my dad was delighted to see a "Help Wanted" sign.
"Mi hija, por favor pregunta si puedo aplicar" he eagerly pleads to me. Despite my hesitations of seeing an army of white-faced workers, I reluctantly agreed to ask the chubby cashier for an application. The cashier, whose name tag said Dave, informed us that the first part of the application was a verbal interview. Dave would ask the questions, and my dad would do his best to respond. His English was broken and he frequently looked to me for translating. After a few questions Dave concluded the interview and looked over to me,
"Listen, girl. He's over 60 and speaks no English. There is no way we would hire him." His tone was rude, but I sadly understood why my dad wasn't hired. I faced my hopeful dad and watched his smile drop as I told him that Dave just remembered that they hired someone yesterday and that they really couldn't afford to hire anyone else. My dad was disappointed, but nonetheless he graciously shook Dave's hand and thanked him for his time.
Job searching is difficult for everyone, but in a world full of Daves, it's almost impossible. Daves are people who look at my family and immediately think less of us. They think illegal, poor and uneducated. Daves never allow my dad to pass the first round of job applications. Daves watch like hawks as my brother and I enter stores. Daves inconsiderately correct my mother's grammar. Because there are Daves in the world, I have become a protector for my family. I excuse their behavior as just being a "typical American." I convince my mother that they are only staring at her lovely new purse. I convince my dad they are only shouting about store sales to us. Aside from being a protector, I am also an advocate. As an advocate, I make sure my family is never taken advantage of. I am always looking out for scams and discrepancies. I am the one asking the questions when we buy or sell a car. I make sure all details are discussed and no specifics are left unanswered.
I have been committed to helping my parents since I was 8 years old. Although I didn't always enjoy acting like a mini-adult, I was always delighted to see my parents smile when I finished a task. I quickly came to a conclusion that I liked making other people happy. It felt good to do something for others that they couldn't do for themselves. My parents never shielded me from reality. I was very aware of their past struggles with poverty and I knew how lucky I was to have food on the table, a roof over my head and a school to attend, and after years of helping just my parents, I decided to expand my clientele: I began volunteering.
I have volunteered at soup kitchens, retirement homes, public libraries and parks. I have worked with inspiring leaders, traveled to unique locations and met with engaging people of all ages. I quickly developed a love for both service and my community, and after eight years the love still flourishes.
I am excited to widen my impact and hope to pursue a career in either public service, politics or diplomacy. I am so grateful for all the support I have received. From caring public school teachers to subsidized lunches, the United States has put me on a path to success. Undoubtedly this path wasn't always paved, but rugged and relentless feet have carried me along.
Adriane Tharp
Hometown
Adamsville, Ala.
HIGH School
Alabama School of Fine Arts
COLLEGE PLANS
Wesleyan University
Once, when I worked at Domino's, a mechanic jokingly asked me if I could put his order under the name Bill Gates. I told him yes, because why not? Why should a black mechanic who worked day after day for minimum wage not enjoy a few minutes as a millionaire? Whenever I donned my black visor and navy blue polo, customers didn't see an art school feminist who loved banned books, French films and protest songs. I was a face, a face who took orders and tossed pizzas. I could have been anyone.
My favorite thing about working at Domino's was interacting with the assortment of people that pizza unified. I felt so anonymous in uniform, confident enough to answer phones and talk to strangers. Eiad, our pizza chef from Pakistan, resembled Bob Dylan and sang folk songs from his homeland when business was smooth. One of the other insiders played guitar, managed a costume shop and once welded a statue for Marvel Enterprises in New York. Teenagers came in, grass-stained and sweaty, immediately after soccer practice. Men in flannel with babies in their arms and two kids trailing behind them allowed their children to choose what to order. Elderly women in floppy sunhats and fake pearls would call before Bible school and ask for 20 large cheese pizzas to satisfy everyone.
Domino's was like an Island of Misfit Toys floating in the middle of Alabama. My coworkers all joked about each other for what made us different: Richard was a walking Star Wars database, Mike was O.C.D. when it came to stacking pizza boxes, I was a vegetarian who often had to package the meat. Kristen, now 40, had worked at pizzerias since she was 14 and was currently filing applications to enroll in college. Terry preached to a small congregation when he wasn't delivering.
Ever since I moved here, I've felt like an outsider in my community. I live for the arts while my town prioritizes football and fishing. The general population is Caucasian, Christian, Republican, anti-gay, and pro-guns — or so I thought. At Domino's, three of my coworkers fasted for Ramadan, one of the drivers read novels while waiting for deliveries and both of my bosses were women. The people who came in were far from homogenous, as diverse as the pizzas they ordered: Caucasian, Asian, African-American, and Mexican lawyers, firemen, construction workers, stay-at-home mothers, house painters. Many were married, some were divorced and some were single. Many had kids. Many were still kids. I couldn't help but admire them. They made enduring irate customers, drunken phone calls and crying children worth minimum wage. All were just ordinary people trying to build lives in America. All were united and equivalent when in need of pizza.
Yorana Wu
Hometown
Great Neck, N.Y.
high school
Great Neck South High School
college plans
University of Chicago
Weekends growing up were spent hitting tennis balls with my coach, sketching still lives at a local art studio and practicing the violin with my private teacher. My parents endorsed my interests because we had financial security that most families in America didn't. I'm thankful that this wealth also allows me to live in one of the most affluent suburbs of New York and attend one of its best public schools, where it's not uncommon to see my peers driving to school in a Mercedes-Benz.
Even though I can buy glamorous things because of my family's wealth, I've never felt comfortable spending it. Some girls in my school frivolously spend their money – at the local Abercrombie, they'll point to a shirt they like and swipe their cards without batting an eyelash at the price. I use my money differently because of how I was raised. I make a beeline to the discount sections at higher-end retailers to find trendy garments and resell them on eBay to make a profit covering next semester's art supplies.
Many of my peers were fed since birth with a silver spoon, not giving a second thought to the family wealth at their disposal. I like to think I use my spoon sparingly, feeding myself only when necessary. I dislike spending my parents' money because I didn't earn any of it. I appreciate my parents endorsing my interests like violin because these hobbies are enriching, but I'm discomfited when they pay for superficial things like name-brand clothing. I'm fine just wearing thrifted shirts and discounted sneakers. I suppose it's because my mother raised me to embody a Chinese proverb that translates to "save when financially stable because the future is unknown."
At a young age, I was forced to understand what came at the price of that wealth: time with my father. When I was 8, he left to build his own canned fruits company in China. That was the first year a seat at the dinner table remained empty and a car in the garage sat untouched. Suddenly, our relationship became two five-minute phone calls per week. He'll see my brother and me only for a quarter of the year – just the equivalent of a season spent together. He couldn't come to my brother's high school graduation, and during school orchestra concerts I would take a hopeful glance at the audience to see only my mother's face in the crowd. However, he's the reason I have a silver spoon that allows me to scoop more than just canned peaches. If he hadn't followed his ambitions, we would still be a close-knit family living in a smaller home, but maybe then thrift shopping would be mandatory instead of voluntary.
My love and appreciation for my father makes me honor the money he provides me with – every dollar comes at the expense of his physical distance. When my father comes to visit, he offers to buy me the newest iPhone or drive me to Bloomingdale's because of the guilt he feels for not being with us. I accept his offer sparingly because I don't want him to think of me as someone who asks for more than what I need. While everyone in school has been toting the newest iPhone since ninth grade, I took his used phone, giving up 24/7 Internet access – I didn't need to check Facebook every minute. Although I enjoy the security afforded me by his success, it doesn't diminish my determination to build a future with my own bare hands. When I leave the silver spoon too long in my mouth, I feel this nagging itch telling me to remove it, as if I'm allergic to silver. If the spoon's used sparingly, I can avoid an outbreak. But I don't mind my allergy. I embrace it because it reminds me that everything comes at a price – even silver spoons.
Great Neck to Saint Peter's Prepartory High School
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/05/20/your-money/college-essays-on-money.html
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