Blog Assignment #6

How I’ve grown, what I’ve learned.

Obviously over this semester, I'd like to think I learned my way around Iowa State and also more about myself and how to study efficiently and effectively.

Coming in this fall, I thought I could probably navigate the campus pretty well. After all, over orientation I had it down. Within the first month, I somehow managed to completely circle Parks Library... looking for Parks Library. Luckily for me, that hasn't happened again. Also thanks to Hixson, I know so much more about the campus' history and urban legends. Pretty neat things to be sharing with my friends and family when they visit. They're impressed with my knowledge. Or at least that's what I tell myself.

Taking the MBIT and other lessons over the semester have also shined a little light on myself and what I'm like. I come from a small high school, and it's been an interesting adjustment. I thought I was super outgoing and making friends came so easily to me, but of course that was in part to knowing the same kids since kindergarten. It takes some time for me to know people and open up. The first few weeks of the seminar were kind of awkward honestly, but things have improved a lot. As surely my social situation will over the next four years.

In high school I had a 4.0 GPA. For the most part, it was somewhat effortless. I didn't ever full out study, and as long as I paid attention in class the tests were cake money. College however is a completely different story. I study - A LOT. More in the first semester than my previous twelve years of school. EVER. And knowing this, I wonder what would have happened in high school had I actually applied myself more rigorously. (...curing the common cold perhaps?) Who's to say. But experiences and discussions in the seminar and recitation have opened my eyes to new and excellent methods.

Blog Assignment #5

What does the Hixson award mean to me?

The driving force behind all of my success is the yearning to not end up like my parents. I love them all to death, and they're at such better places with themselves right now. But the fact that it took them forty years to become this stable is unsettling at best. My parents were married for a year before an unplanned pregnancy resulted in little, baby me. The story goes that they were both cheating on each other in some respects, and only maybe a month after I was born they became separated. My dad stayed in Texas for a while and then drifted off to California. I didn't see my father until I was three or four, and by then my mom had remarried my step-father and they had conceived my sister Jenna. I only saw my father when he was in stable relationships and his girlfriend/wife actually had a place to live. I don't know much of my parents' pasts, but what I do know is shady. For instance, I know my dad experimented with a lot of drugs. I know that my mom's family has a long history of alcholism. My stepfather has never really valued education and only really cares about sports and lectures me about a poor work ethic in jobs that frankly don't interest me. Sometimes it feels like I'm the adult and I have to take care of my parents. Somehow even from a young age I knew that the best way to get out of here was through hard work.

"For many of the great, great successes of the world, the background they came from was their challenge. I'm trying to find those people. They are the ones who will lend the helping hands in the future." -Christina Hixson

Never before have words rang so true to me. I believe in the power of my own will and think it will take me far in life. The Hixson Award means so much to me in so many different ways. It's a chance to succeed, something I've always accepted the challenge of taking. It's an investment - in my own education and future. It's something I will forever be eternally grateful towards Christina Hixson for. And it's something I intend to use to make my family, Miss Hixson, and myself proud of me for.