This assignment asks me to write a narrative about myself and my journey to earn a college degree. Smith, 2017 discusses how our lives don’t follow a “predetermined arc”. Our lives, beliefs and view on things are constantly changing as events interject into our life. Through creating a narrative, I can chronicle the events that have occurred in the last years and show the effects that it has had on me and my college career. McAdams, 2017 discusses how a person creates an “internalized story” about themselves in order to explain what has happened to them. McAdams suggests that a personal narrative may be edited depending on the message the creator is trying to get across. Does the narrative want sympathy or cheers from the reader of the narrative? Nguyen, 2013 suggests that the e-Portfolio is a creative process that allows a person to express themselves through a narrative which in turns helps the person understand how his life has evolved. In creating this narrative, I hope to reach a better understanding of how I got to this point and where I go from here. I would like to know that the lessons that I have been exposed to and hopefully have learned from will make me a better person, both academically and spiritually.
BACKGROUND
I was born in Fredericksburg, Virginia. I lived with my mom until I was 12 and then lived with my dad and grandparents up until now. I was a very loved child and was pretty much given the world by the people I loved. I excelled at school and at sports. I was very close with my grandfather who died when I was 13. It was very unexpected and happened in the middle of the night. His death changed everything in my life. My dad had a hard time dealing with his dad’s death and my grandmother was lost without him. It took a while to get back to some sense of normalcy.
SPORTS/HIGH SCHOOL
In the meantime, I attended school and excelled in sports. I was even presented a gold medal by the mayor of my city for coming in first in a track event. I thought that my future involved playing college basketball. I didn’t know and my family didn’t know that you had to be recruited to play basketball. We found out our high school coach didn’t do any advocating to help anyone on the team get recruited. It was very disappointing, but I moved on. Eventually, graduation day came and I became an adult in the eyes of the world. That fall I enrolled at Old Dominion University and began my college career. With the death of my grandfather, money was tight, so I applied to the local university. Old Dominion had a good reputation and I felt that I would be happy there.
COLLEGE TRACK
At first, I was going the business track route: international business, finance and even criminal justice with eventually deciding on cybersecurity as my intended degree. The first couple of semesters, things went pretty well. I did my classes and joined a fraternity – Theta Chi. I met some great people in the organization and created some good networking contacts that I think will come in handy later in my career. I wanted to experience the college life: the parties, the people. Sometimes I think I forgot what I was at school for and had to reset myself to stay on track.
The classes I had to choose from were hard to get into, so I felt I didn’t have a coherent plan as to what I was taking in relation to my degree. Even now it’s hard to tie the classes together. They still seem like individual events that I can’t tie together. I am hoping that just having a general idea of what’s going on will be enough until I get into an entry level job and start learning on the job. Until then I don’t feel confident in my skills or knowledge to say “I’m in cybersecurity”.
FAMILY EMERGENCY
As the semesters progressed, I received a phone call that my little brother, who was 2 ½ at the time had cancer: Rhabdomyosarcoma. It’s a soft tissue cancer and his was in his bladder and he was showing a couple of spots on his lungs. This devastated me and scared the daylights out of me and my family. He went through many surgeries, chemotherapy and radiation during his treatment course. He had to be put on a feeding tube and many times we thought we were going to lose him. Over the next two years, my brother put up a great fight, and I seemed to lose my way at school with worrying about him and how fragile life was. Eventually, things starting turning around and now at 6 years old, you wouldn’t know it to look at him how close to death he came. He is NED (no evidence of disease) and he has semi-annual scans which have been great so far. He doesn’t have a bladder so he still has one major surgery left to get through to help him with that. I had a hard time concentrating and keeping up with my classes during this period, which caused me to take longer than normal to finish my degree.
PANDEMIC
School just didn’t seem as important as before with such a real-life drama playing out in front of me. It took awhile for me to get back into the swing of things. Then another roadblock occurred, COVID! The world seemed to go crazy and the definition for normal was once again changed. By this time, depression and procrastination started to interfere with my life and class work and I lost my way. Isolation and being alone had a terrible effect on me. I had a hard time not being with people. I had to take online classes and sometimes that was hard especially if the class was one that should have been taken in the classroom. It has taken a lot of self-reflection with help from my family and friends to get back on track.
REFLECTIONS
I am hoping that this e-Portfolio will document my journey to where I am today. Almost to the finish line with graduation. Three more classes when this semester ends. Hoping to start a new beginning in my life with a new career. I am hoping that I can show how I have overcome some of the tragedy in my life and show that I have grown and matured and have become stronger so that I can meet life’s challenges. I know there are many more battles to come and I hope I can meet them with the same courage my little brother shows in his battle with cancer. I want my story to be a “redemptive story” as McAdams, 2017 discusses and not a “contamination story”. I want to take my experiences and grow from them and add value to my life and to the lives around me.
References
McAdams, D.P. (2001). The Psychology of Life Stories. Review of General Psychology, 5(2), 100-122,
https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680. 5.2.100
Smith, E. E. (2017, January 12). The two kinds of stories we tell about ourselves. Ideas.ted.com.
Retrieved October 22, 2022, from https://ideas.ted.com/the-two-kinds-of-stories-we-tell-about-
ourselves/.
Nguyen, C. F. (2013). The e-portfolio as living portal: A medium for student learning, identity, and assessment. International Journal of EPortfolio, 3(2), 135-148. ISSN 2157-622X.