My Academic Journey

My journey as a student has always been focused on the path to college and success. Before I even set foot in kindergarten my mother, a college dropout, always told me that “honor roll wasn’t an option” and that I would be attending college in the future and achieving a degree. Most of the time I made these requirements. Most of the time I was awarded honor roll or had a newly edited list of colleges to attend, but sometimes life got in the way of my dreams of achieving success.
I attended Seminole elementary school from first grade to the first half of my fifth grade year. Seminole elementary is located in Mt. Clemens, a small town just south of Detroit, Michigan. This is where my home was for most of my childhood and where my dreams of

Living up to my resolution, I joined several clubs, both in and out of school and academic and recreational. I also met some of my very best friends in high school. Achieving all of this, friends, memberships to academic clubs and good grades, made up my first successful experience in high school. I was driven by the years in middle school and the promise that I made to myself at the end of eighth grade. Throughout my under classmen years I exceled in all subjects and thoroughly enjoyed the clubs I had joined. I think my downfall for the last two years of school was that I took for granted my good grades and as my classes got more rigorous I didn’t change the way I learned the material, but continued on the same path that I had been following my entire academic career, even when my grades were slipping slightly. Halfway through my senior year, I realized I needed to change the way I was learning the curriculum my instructors were teaching. I’ve always been the type of student to take good notes or listen to a lecture and understand everything the first time around, as was the case in elementary school and middle school. But my more rigorous classes proved to be a challenge for me and I did not know the proper way of learning the material on my own. I started by asking more questions in class and then going to my friends for help on subjects I didn’t understand. After many questions and after school tutor

So far, I’ve done well here at the university. I enjoy all of my classes and look forward to them as well. My biggest challenge in the week that I’ve been at UCF has been navigating the considerably bigger campus. I’m sure the more I explore the campus, the more comfortable I will become with navigating it. Once I learn the lay out of the campus I’ll be able to locate the various campus resources, the main feature of UCF that I’m looking forward too. I would like to utilize the various campus resources, like the writing lab and the S.A.R.C to better myself as a