Application Answer
Last summer at Camp Michael, I was a counselor
for CIT’s, or counselors in training. The girls ranged from 7th
grade to 9th grade. I’ve always known that a large amount of kids
that attend the camp come from hard backgrounds and have experienced some
really terrible things, and that often this camp is the one week in the year
that provides loving, caring, support. I had always known this, but it didn’t
really become real in my mind until I was pulling one of the girls aside for a
forth or fifth time to talk to her about being a role model. She began to break
down and started telling me about why she had trouble being a leader in the
small group settings. I heard her whole life story, and it was terrible,
horrible things that I had never even thought possible for anyone to go through
let alone a 12 year old. She was in a foster home and told me things about the
family she was with that made me immediately worry about her home situation, so
after talking to her I went to the camp director. I started crying when I got
there, and she knew why I had come. The directors had known about the situation
and were doing everything they could to get her the help and support she
needed. Granted that part of the problem was that she has already gone through
so much hardship that some of the whole story was probably just wanting some
attention, but I thought that something had to be done right away. Upon hearing
that everything that could be done was already underway and had been for a
while I had a feeling of hopelessness that I had never felt before; this was
someone’s life, already hard enough, that couldn’t be fixed that second. The
next day, the director, the girl and I sat down and talked about the whole
situation. We went over everything that was going on and I realized that some
things just aren’t how they should be. Kids should never go through anything
that bad, but some do and sometimes the best anyone can do is to be a loving,
approachable supportive person in their lives. I learned that sometimes that’s
all you can be to a person and that that’s okay.
As I spoke about in my RP essay and in most of my other analyses, one of the things I really liked with this course was the idea of conversing with both the sources and the reader. So, when the time came about halfway through the quarter for me to apply to the Peer Health Educator program, I applied this conversational tone to my question answers to more tell a story rather than just state why I should get in.
ReplyDeleteThe question for this response was something along the lines of “Describe a time where your personal beliefs or values were challenged and how did you resolve this?” I answered with a recounting of an experience I had last summer, and told it in a story form. This is something I would not have been very comfortable doing before this class and I am grateful that I now feel comfortable enough to write with a more prominent voice coming out. This applies to many areas in my life when it comes to writing, I have always been told to stay away from personal stories and the use of “I” when writing in academic writing, and so with this I never really learned how to do it effectively. Reader Sommers and also Heilker it was easy to see how personal stories could be very effective to get an idea and point across to a reader and has made me immensely more confident in this area of writing.