Personal Essay

After reading College Essay Essentials, the book gave us tools to write our own personal essays. I wrote about a difficult event in my life that has effected the way that I view and mindset on life.

A shoe with cardiac monitoring would have helped.

I would have been sitting on the bench, hearing the squeaking of shoes behind me as she ran back and forth. She would be doing some simple jogs to reassure herself that she was fine and ready to go back on the court. I would have turned around because I heard a different sound: a weight hitting the floor.

Instead, I found out through her sister’s Snapchat story. “Please pray for my sister”, simply typed out on a black screen. The next day, I finally understood: my opponent on the basketball court and my friend of six years had collapsed courtside and passed away. 

As a freshman in high school, I hadn’t dealt with anything like this. 

I started by being the strong one. At basketball practice, as the coaches mentioned the loss and players broke down in tears, I stood and held them. We shared the pain, the horror of losing a friend at such a young age, and the confusion of what caused her death and why it happened without warning. We would eventually grapple with the big question of how to move on. 

Two weeks later, I sat in English class with my computer open. I sat with my face resting on my hands, staring at the picture that her sister had posted on Instagram. The guy next to me simply asked who she was. As he finished the question, I felt the first tear slowly descend down my cheek. The tears didn’t stop until the bell rang to signal the end of the day and to me, the end of her life. 

 I went home that night and made a high school bucket list. After all, she had just turned sixteen and had a bright future ahead, full of laughter, school, and basketball. Yet, something so unexpected took her breath away, forever. My list included taking care of myself better, being better at standing up for others, getting a job, going on a mission trip to serve others, and so much more. My list became my life, the life that I wanted to live to be happy. 

What happened to her didn’t just involve me, though. 

I have always been known to be a happy person, but since her death, I have made more conscious efforts to spread happiness, something she did so well. Reminding the world that happiness resides in the littlest things, from tipping the waitress, to buying my coworkers snacks, to a simple smile to a stranger. My job’s mission statement says it best: I want to be “the best part of people’s days”. 

Time was something that I had always had define me but now I want to define time. I want to be able to control what happens with my life and be able to take control in other ways like design. Design is something that I have total control over, something that I can manipulate to mine and others’ choosing. Product design is a type of design that solves everyday problems with a simple solution that makes life more efficient and simple, and that is why I want to study product design in college. Product design is all about listening and observing people, having a desire to make change. My design could better people’s days without them realizing. Design could change lives.

Maybe I can even create a shoe that tracks cardiac monitoring.