Reflection
Reflecting on what I’ve learned in Gateway to Honors and learning about my own strengths has led me to realize a lot about myself. I’ve been able to connect the dots between my personality, tendencies, and experiences, and how I can shape the rest of my life to come. My list of strengths was initially very strange for me to see, because it was like seeing a transcript of my own thoughts — but I believe that that’s a good thing because it made sense to me after years of not knowing how it all fit together.
For a long time in high school, I struggled to find balance. I took extra classes online to have time in school for more difficult courses, I piled on extracurriculars nearly every day of the week, and was a member of several leadership teams for band and smaller clubs. It does sound like a lot, but I loved all of it and couldn’t imagine not being so busy. With this in mind, it makes sense that my top strength is discipline; I crave predictability, planning, timelines, structure...everything that makes up the general “Type A” personality. That’s a term I’ve always associated with myself. Sometimes it stems from joking with my parents about how I wrote the exact time of day on papers in elementary school, or from more serious internal thoughts to justify that I was taking the right approach in my obsessive attention to detail. Additionally, being an achiever meant that I felt incredibly inadequate when a day passed without a task being completed. I needed to do more.
What this actually led to was a period of intense anxiety and pressure. I spent every waking moment working, even on Friday nights, because I knew that band would keep me busy through the weekend, and the process would repeat the next morning at 8 am so I could keep working ahead in calculus before a competition. Looking back on those times, I remember being happy because I was doing what I loved, but I was also extremely overworking myself. So instead of taking a step back, I isolated myself and put even more focus on being better, because I truly didn’t feel like I was. Even my hobbies of playing flute and drawing became competitions — not against others, but against what I thought would be “perfect.”
That time taught me a lot about myself. I learned to talk to people about how I felt. I learned to take a break every once in awhile to spend time with friends, go on long bike rides around my neighborhood, and experience this foreign idea called “me time.” In regards to my strengths, I think that this was the emergence of being a learner, both about who I was and in more literal terms of discovering new knowledge. I learned to play a third instrument with the help of two friends, joined another musical activity, and shifted my focus from “do as much as you can” to “do what makes you happy because it’s the last chance to do this in high school.” Did that make me more or less busy? The answer is actually more...but it didn’t feel like it because I was suddenly much more on top of things.
The transition to this year as a college freshman was quite a shock to me, because for the first time ever I had regular bouts of free time. Instead of feeling refreshed, this felt very wrong at first, because of my tendency to want something to work towards. I was so stuck on the idea that DAAP would mentally kickbox me that when I discovered otherwise, I felt like I was missing something. But this was actually a positive approach, as it turns out, because I’m making good habits in going to the rec center almost every day, spending time with my friends, and spending enough time on every assignment to make something that I’m proud of. I’ll certainly have a busier routine later on, but for now it’s most important to have a strong foundation of good work and habits.
As I’ve thought about my honors experiences, I’ve become more and more excited for what I can do in the next five years. Having six ideas already floating around is more than necessary, especially in the first few weeks of my first semester, but I really look forward to them. Soon I’ll be meeting new friends on the LeaderShape retreat, and after that, I plan to be a Peer Leader for a Gateway class next spring, teach myself Italian, spend a week or two with a host family in Italy to be right in the middle of a new culture with a different language, go on a study tour when I can, and maybe even get a Zumba teaching license.
That’s a lot to think about right now, so I’m taking it piece by piece...something I probably couldn’t have done a few months ago. But diving deeper into these ideas, I can see that my strengths come forward in what I’m interested in doing. I want to learn more about my path and my relationships with others. I want to achieve working towards each next accomplishment step by step, and I want to have a healthy level of discipline that allows me to celebrate goals along the way, whether that’s in having a full conversation in Italian or teaching a fun and energetic exercise class.
Looking forward, I don’t necessarily see my career connecting to any of these experiences, but they’ll certainly remain important to me. I know that I will always value building relationships with people and figuring out who I am and where I feel most comfortable. I’ll continue learning languages and broadening my scope of the world — my goal is to be fluent or near-fluent in at least four languages, starting with my current English and French. I think that part of me still wants to prove that I can complete a task and reach the top of the mountain, but I need it to count for something and make me a better person in some way.
Farther down the road when I’m out of college and working as a graphic designer and researcher in Cincinnati, I know that the strengths and traits that I’m developing now will have a positive impact externally as well as internally. My drive to finish tasks and complete them thoroughly will help me stay on target and benefit a shared goal in a project. My newfound adaptability has made me flexible and able to consider many approaches to a problem rather than running solely on instinct.
Overall, I recognize that the next five years are somewhat of a gray area. A lot will happen that I can’t possibly foresee, and I’m learning that that’s okay. Gateway to Honors helped me tie together why I operate the way I do with how I can make the most of whatever comes my way.