My Senior Year I Made A Commitment

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In my junior year I made a commitment to participate in the IB Career Program and dedicate myself to receiving the certificate. This program entails learning in areas such as moral awareness, social awareness, social and moral responsibility, relationship management, and understanding empathy and compassion. With each day, I would learn more about these areas and apply them to my daily life in positive and reinforcing ways. In the past year I have begun to work with an organization called Uncommon Good, where I now work with Latino students, tutoring to help with homework and any other forms of school related material. In my senior year, applying to many colleges, I have realized that I have a massive amount of accessible resources at my disposal in terms of college councilors and tutors. With the knowledge I have amassed through the Approaches to Learning course at school, I soon was able to distinguish an underlying problem in our educational system today. There is a population of disadvantaged students who could thrive and excel, but lack financial or other external means of doing so.
Furthering my evidence to this, ive cited an article by Roslyn Arlin Mickelson on the cumulative disadvantages of minority students from first and second generations in the school system. “At the time the data were collected, the district had been operating under a mandatory desegregation plan since the early 1970s, which it continued to do for another five years. While the majority of students attended desegregated schools for most of their CMS education, a portion of youth also experienced school- and classroom-level segregation. Survey data collected from 1,812 students in randomly selected language arts classes stratified by track from the d...

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...ege promotes.
America has the potential to become the land of opportunity it has so long claimed to be. For that to happen, though, we must all make it our personal responsibility to engage in practices that can even the playing field, rather than working to widen the gaps of privilege and inequality.
Sadly I am on the opposite side of this spectrum, having these resources and advantages, but I have been able to identify this conflict and hope that earns me some merit. But identifying isn’t all that I plan to do, initially I believed that I was too small to make a difference myself, but as Dalai Lama put it “if you really think you’re too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito.” Volunteering at Uncommon Good has provided me with a new context and appreciation to my life, and I take with each day and try to make the world a better place.

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