What's Your Sentence?

I'm late, I'm late, I'm very very late!

    Being a Senior, I have to worry about applying for college and it is a stressful time! I have to decide where you want to go, how I’m going to get there (scores and transportation), and if it’s where I want to spend the next four years of my life. It’s hard to decide these things. I am super close to my family and am afraid of being too far from them, but my dream school is 3 ½ hours away! I also have to decide if I want to be in a sorority, if I want a single or double room, and which meal plan I’ll get! I’ve never had to make such big decisions on my own in my entire life. I have had to grow up so fast and it’s scaring me to death! However, that’s not all I have to worry about. I have school… then my mentor… then homework for an hour… swim practice… more homework… then bed. But, on top of all of this… I have to find time to be a teenager! Through this experience, I’ve learned time management skills that I’m sure I will keep for the rest of my life. I have to manage it just right to fit in everything that I want and HAVE to do.  So now, not only do I have to grow up in just a matter of months, but I also have to manage my time as if I am already an adult! I don’t know how I’m going to do it, but I know that I can!


How I feel now:

How I'll feel when this process is over:



Money Issues

   This weeks assignment dealt with an exerpt about money problems that we had to read and respond to. These questions and answers are my responses to the exerpt.

1. What do you think this means?

         I believe that “We do not break the bad habit of debt through earning more money, but rather we break any habit by replacing it with a better one” means that those who have problems with money need to decrease unnecessary spending, rather than just getting more money. If anyone is irresponsible with their money, then having more money just means that they will have more money to be irresponsible with. Also, if someone is in debt already, having more money won’t necessarily help, because they are still in debt, regardless. If people replace their bad money habits with good ones (such as only spending on necessities, looking for sales, etc), then they will have less debt and be better off in the long run.

2. Are you worried about getting into financial trouble as you get older?

            I am kind of worried about getting into financial trouble only because I have never had a credit card and I don’t really know much about how they work. Also, I want to be able to spend my money on fun things, but as I get older, I’ll need to be more careful about what I spend my money on, which will be an adjustment. However, I know that my parents will always be there if I have any questions about how to spend my money or how credit cards work, so I’m sure I will be fine!

3. Does money factor in to your culminating project/or career path you have chosen? If so, how? Should money be a major consideration in choosing your life’s path?

           As a nurse, I will not be handling money directly, however I may do some charity work on the side, which will deal with money. When I grow older, I hope to be involved in volunteer work to help raise money for children who have terminal illnesses which will involve fundraising which directly deals with money.
            I don’t think that money should be the reason that you follow a certain career path. If you get stuck in a job that you don’t enjoy but gives you a lot of money, you will just be rich and miserable. I would rather have a job that earns me a fair amount of money but that I am extremely passionate about.

Personal Statement: Goal for the Future

I will find the humor in life, when people try to break my down I will laugh it off and be secure in the person I am.
I will help those in need in whatever means it takes, everyone deserves a chance.
I will love unconditionally and forgive easily, there's no point in holding a grudge, people can change.


     During this adventure otherwise known as Honors Mentorship, I hope to gain knowledge of what is expected of me in the nursing career. I hope to form a bond with my mentor and the other people I work with so that in the future if I ever need to get advice from someone, I have a good group that I can trust to give me the best professional advice about my problem. I will accept the challenge of reinstating my mentor’s confidence in my generation and proving that one bad seed doesn’t affect how the rest of us react in the same situation. I will do everything that my mentor asks of me, and never let them down. If I feel like I’m just sitting around, I will find someone and ask them what I can do to help out; I never want to spend my time doing nothing, I want to get everything I can out of this experience.
    From this experience, I hope to discover if nursing is truly my passion. Also, I hope to learn all of the different kinds of nurse I can be, and to find out if there is another specialty that I feel will fit me better than anesthesiology. During my time with my mentor, I plan to see many different cases and how to treat each one specifically. When I go to college, I know that this journey will make me more secure in my passions and help me to achieve my goals in the nursing field; I will have a one-up on the competition.

Do You Accept The Challenge?!

    I just watched a video and read an article of Shawn Achor talking about how to be a happier person. In the article, Mr. Achor pointed out that many people base their happiness on success, he then said to look at all the famous actors of Hollywood and see how many of them are actually happy. I never thought of this! I, for one, am definitely guilty of saying “I’ll be happy when…” but then once I achieve that, “I will be even happier when…” I never realized how toxic that can truly be. In the video, he tells a story about how his sister “magically” falls off her bunk bed and hurts herself, and he consoles her and tells her she must be a unicorn based on the way she landed. After this entertaining story, he relates it back to the main idea of the video which is the advances in positive psychology. Positive psychology focuses on avoiding being average and focusing on being different. He encourages people to focus on the positives, rather than the next challenge. Mr. Achor then says that only 25% of jobs are acquired based on IQ, while the other 75% is based on positivity, performance, happiness, and intelligence. At the end of his video and article, Mr. Achor discusses five different things you can do for 21 days to train your brain to be more positive. The 21 days challenge is to pick one of these ways, and to focus on it, and do it.

The five things are:

1. Write down three new things you are grateful for each day.

2. Write for 2 minutes a day describing one positive experience you had over the past 24 hours.

3. Exercise for 10 minutes a day.

4. Meditate for 2 minutes, focusing on your breath going in and out.

5. Write one, quick email first thing in the morning thanking or praising a member on your team.

I am very interested in taking part in the 21 day challenge. For the next 21 days, I am going to write down three things I am grateful for, because Mr. Achor says that this will help my brain to look for the positive things in life automatically rather than the negative. Any of these activities would be beneficial to someone who is in search of happiness, and let’s be honest, who isn’t? Doing any one of these things for 21 days will help improve your mental health and in effect, make you a happier person.

What's My Directionality?

    Recently, all of the students in the Honors Mentorship Program took a survey about what our communication styles are and how it affects the way we interact with others. The results of my survey told me that I am considered Spirited. Being spirited means that I am not only opinionated, but I am also persuasive, it also means that I am very animated in my speech and use a lot of movements when it comes to my body language. In the packet that we received talking about the different styles, it covered all four of the different kinds. Using this packet, we learned how to communicate with others who may not share our communication techniques. For example, if I wanted to communicate with someone who is Direct, I would need to just get straight to the point of what I want to talk to them about and make sure that I maintain eye contact and act sure of what I’m saying. Learning how to talk to people with different styles will help me to be a great leader. When I am talking to a huge group, I could use aspects from all the different styles. Also, to be a leader, you have to be able to understand why people react the way they do to things you say, and how you can reword it to make it easier for them to understand. When it comes to my style, however, there are disadvantages. I may generalize when talking about something or gloss over details that I feel aren’t important but are important to whoever I am communicating with. I may also be overdramatic and respond negatively to criticism that could be beneficial to me in the end.
     Last week, all of the students went to a church near our districts and met up for a Lapdog Retreat. I believe this retreat brought us all together but also helped us apply everything we learned from our directionality results. We broke up into groups and took part in multiple activities. I believe the most important activity was this one where we laid dots on the floor and basically played “don’t step on the lava”. After each round, we would take away 3 dots and move 1. We set a goal in the beginning to get it down to 15 dots. In this activity, we all had to work together, get close, and share ideas about how we were going to reach our common goal. This was really fun because we got to hear how everyone else thinks, and we all worked together and finally reached our goal!

     When it comes to trusting myself, I have a hard time sometimes. I feel like I can achieve whatever I want, but when the time comes, I may psych myself out and feel like I can’t. However, I also have a hard time trusting others. When I open up about myself I worry that the person I am talking to might judge me, or twist my words and cause me problems. Once someone has my trust, they have it forever; if they break that trust, then it’s really hard to get it back. But I think it’s harder to be the person who is being trusted. When someone enlists their trust on you, it is a very important thing to fight to keep. If you let that person down, you could cause problems for them or they may decide that you aren’t the person they thought you were and it can result in a conflict. Also, sometimes you feel like someone has told you something that you feel you shouldn’t keep to yourself and then you have to decide if giving up their trust is worth it or not, which is a stressful situation.