February 3, 2021
I am looking out the window of a school bus while riding home from preschool. As I look at the houses going by, I am imagining dinosaurs running along the sidewalk and jumping clear over the traffic coming the other way. These dinosaurs were coming in all shapes and sizes. Some were round, some were blue, and some had multiple heads. Some could fly, and some couldn’t even walk. This is from one of my earliest memories, from a time when my family lived near Philadelphia. At a young age, my imagination was never ending.
On another drive to see family in Pittsburgh, the dinosaurs returned. Throughout the drive, I saw an orange Tyrannosaurus running through the countryside. It would fall in ditches, crash into hills, and bounce off cars. My imagination ran wild like this T. Rex on the Pennsylvania turnpike.
My imagination defined me early in my life. Not only did it play a large role in my daily activities, but also formed the basis of my character as I grew up, and helped me adapt to the life changes that came as I got older.
After first grade, we moved to Minnesota and a lot of things changed. I specifically recall how different the winters were. Instead of getting just a couple inches of snow at a time, I could now sled in my backyard and build snowmen. The neighborhood in which I now lived was very different. Every house on the block had a kid my age and I made a ton of new friends.
The next big change was school. I didn’t go to MPA when we first came to the Twin Cities. Instead, I went to a different school where the classes were massive. As a second grader coming into a new environment, this situation was overwhelming. There were no walls between the classes, so if I sat in the corner of our class area, all I could hear was the class next to us. It was a distracting environment, and I couldn’t listen or get my work done. My parents and I decided it would be best to try something new, and we discovered MPA.
At MPA, I found a quiet environment, with teachers who would do the very best they could for me. As I look back on that decision nearly a decade ago, I feel relief and gratitude that I landed at MPA. MPA has allowed me to grow academically as well as creatively. The environment here has changed not just my perception of schoolwork, but my overall worldview. I began to view schoolwork as less of a burden and more as an opportunity to improve myself. I also began to see it as an investment in my future. Every assignment and test was going to pay off in the end, and the better I did, the better the payoff would be.
As I entered third grade, my curiosity caught up to my imagination. I was curious about the silliest of things, like dinosaurs for example. I had, of course, been interested in dinosaurs throughout my childhood. My collection of dinosaur toys and books was endless, and I was constantly thinking about them. But when fourth grade hit, I began to wonder about them even more. For example, I wondered how were they able to move, and how they ever possibly ate enough food to sustain their giant bodies. Looking back on this time, I can see that my inquisitiveness was more than just an increased interest in dinosaurs, it was when I became more curious about everything in life. And it was because of my teachers at MPA that my curiosity of dinosaurs led to a curiosity in academics.
In Middle School, I began to resemble the person I am today. I also had to develop a certain adaptivity. I attributed this to my parents’ divorce, because with it, came a variety of changes in my life, including moving out of the house I had grown up in and losing the neighborhood friends that I felt so connected to. It was tough at first, but I got used to it, especially with a close community at MPA. I began to adapt to my new environment at two houses.
Another challenge was my changing family. Prior to the divorce, I was an only child and I was used to having my mom on one side of me and my dad on the other. With both my parents remarrying, I not only had to adapt to new people in two different households, but I had to let go of the only life I had ever known. It was tough at first. I didn’t understand how family could operate without my mother and father on either side of me at all times. There was no technique to overcome the situation, I just found a way to adapt to it, with lots of support at school, and learned to live a life very different from the one I had before.
Now in my senior year, I’ve really begun to feel more self-sufficient. A lot of this came from my natural maturation as a person, and some of it I credit to MPA too. For example, four years ago I would’ve never been able to see myself with a driver’s license and a job. I used to spend much of my time after school wishing I could play video games. Now, I actually enjoy spending my school nights on academic work, which is thankfully not too overwhelming at MPA, and, more recently, completing college applications. I understand this is normal for most seniors, but when I compare this me to myself of four years ago, the contrast couldn’t be more noticeable.
All of my experiences contribute to I am today. I am someone who looks forward to the ultimate test of being self-sufficient, going to college in a few months. But until then, I am happy with myself as an adaptive, imaginative and motivated person who looks optimistically towards the future and the experiences it will bring.
