Even though I did two sports, wrestling was always my favorite of the two. This is because I had grown up around the sport and had already been involved with the program before I entered high school. The most exciting and nerve racking part about this however was how I was able to make varsity my freshman year. This meant that my first match and duel meet was on varsity which sounded great until I walked out onto the mat with my team and realized the difficulty I was about to face. While scary at first, this turned out to be a pivotal moment in my wrestling career as I pinned the senior on the opposing team making my first match a win for me. From here, I was able to be league champion from sophomore through senior year and was able to place top 8 in master my junior and senior year. 

      These successes weren’t the most important aspect of the sport in my mind however, it was the team. Ever since my peers voted me to be their varsity captain my sophomore year I went on to learn the difficulty in leading a team where there were also people older than me. This ended up teaching me how to lead a team of people without being a dictator and if you earn your team’s respect then they’ll listen to what you have to say. Overall sports have not only helped me improve my leadership skills, but gave me lifelong memories that I will not soon forget.

I had been apart of performing arts ever since I was a little boy so choir wasn’t all too different from what I had already done. Mr. Infantino was very welcoming and eager to teach me and all the other newcomers the wonders of choir which helped me feel like I had been doing this all of high school. He also gave me the chance to once again perform on stage which was a really exciting thing to be doing again. It also got me closer to my friends as most of them did choir and was an awesome experience being able to sing on stage with them rather than just watching them from the crowd. If I was to look back on high school years from now and look at the best decisions that I made, doing choir would definitely be one of the top as it was one of my all time favorite classes. Overall, the experience is one that I’ll cherish forever and has even started to influence me into looking at what musical programs that I could maybe join while I am in college next year.

Starting in the fall of my junior year, I went to my first school dance and homecoming since I had helped plan it. It was the circus themed homecoming and was what ended up getting me to want to go to the other dances that the school offered. Later that year when winter formal came around, I was able to convince my friends to go with me which turned out to also be their first dance and they were just as enthusiastic about the dance afterwards as I was! Ever since these dances, me and my friends have gone to every event that we could go to and got us much more involved with the school than we ever thought we would be.

I’ve also had to chance t go on some pretty fantastic vacations over the past four year. The most memorable are the ones where I went to Cabo and when my family did our own version of an east coast tour. These vacations allowed me to experience and see things that I didn’t think I’d soon see and hold some of the best memories that I have had with my family. Overall, getting involved with my school and going on these vacations helped give me direction on how I want to live my life as I go on into college and into a career in the upcoming years.

My closest friends however I didn’t even know very well at the beginning of high school and certainly wasn’t best friends with them. These people like Sceptre, Jonathan, Paul, and Josh are friends that I got extremely close to over the years through sports and other various school activities. These are the people that I’d go out on hikes with or to fool around at a beach bonfire. These are the people who encouraged and pushed me to be my best and strive for the best whether is was a physical or an academic challenge. These are also the people who were able to bring me out of my shell and helped me be more social around others. Without them, I wouldn’t have been motivated to participate in programs around school and I definitely wouldn’t have been as good as a leader. In the end, these are the people who have shaped me into becoming the person I am today and who I will later become in the future. If I didn’t meet these people, I probably wouldn’t have been able to perform as well as I did in wrestling and most certainly would not have done as well in my academic courses.

That summer my parents planned a long trip up California where I got to visit several colleges along the way such as Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, UC Santa Barbara, and UCLA. These schools got me extremely excited of what was to come and got me motivated to perform well on my SAT and ACT so that I’d have a shot at maybe getting into one of them. One college that slipped my mind however was UC Irvine which has a very credible engineering program that was actually superior to UCSD’s. My parents visited this college once for me when I was unavailable to and they were ecstatic about whatever they had seen. We then planned a date for me to visit the college and when I got to see it for myself I could understand why they were so excited. This college had everything from being close to the beach to having one of the coolest looking engineering buildings that I had ever seen. When I later got the acceptance letter I was very pleased and almost immediately committed to spending my next four years there pursuing a major in mechanical engineering.

While exciting this new journey is also somewhat frightening. It’s not just a new beginning, but a new way of life and the start of becoming truly independent. While this is a lot to take on I realize that I’m not the only one and plan to take it one step at a time and to make the best of it while I can.