My essay to get into the Honors College was about my experience with Health Occupations Students of America (HOSA). I joined the club in high school my Sophomore year, and I loved it. I got to practice beginning medicine, like how to splint a leg. There wasn’t a HOSA team at my school when I moved to Florida, so I tried to start one. For the first five meetings, no one came, but I kept trying to get people. Constantly. Finally, I got a team and a bunch of people made it to nationals.
I joined HOSA at ETSU. It was one of the first things that I’d done. HOSA always reminds me why I love medicine. Whenever I doubt that mayybbeee I don’t want to be in school for the next ten years or mayybbee I don’t want to work the hours that I’ll have to, HOSA reminds me that I am really happy when I get to work with patients. I like getting to splint legs. It reminds me about all the opportunity I’ll have in the future. HOSA keeps me excited. And, like in Florida, no one shows up to the meetings. But we can change that!
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I always want to go to the symphony. For three years, I was a part of my school orchestra. I played the violin. I stopped when I moved to Florida. One of the bad things about playing an instrument is that you start hearing the imperfections when other people play. When you know the songs and know what the notes are supposed to sound like, it’s easy to be a critic, even if you’re not that great yourself. I stopped listening to orchestral music for a while. I wanted my joy for listening to it to come back. I like how music moves, how when an orchestra plays, the notes jump around the stage like birds fluttering from tree to tree. Even though the performers are all stagnant, it’s like there are dancers on the stage. The music flutters left to right, up and down. I’m caught up in the motion. I feel like I’m the second dancer spinning around with the music as my partner, listening to the story it tells. It’s undeniable that music sounds like a story. Each instrument is a character given personality by the piece that’s played. As the personalities come out, the story is shaped by high and low notes. It was the first time that I sat close enough to the stage to see the emotion on the soloist’s face. His name is Dr. Wesley Baldwin. I wonder what story he was telling himself. He’d memorized the entire performance. His eyes darted from the strings on his cello to the ceiling to the audience. His face fell as the notes did. I wonder if he was performing or if he was thinking. There’s a lot to think about when you’re mastering a story without words. As part of his encore, he played my favorite piece, Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1, the Prelude. I wanted to shake the person next to me, I was so excited. My friend and I went to the symphony together, but we’d accidentally reserved seats in different parts of the auditorium. I had to just imagine shaking her. The applause for him went on forever, and I’ve decided that there are very few things I hate more than applause. Applause snips away peoples’ words in its explosion. Like a machine gun, it chopped away the last note of my favorite song. The sound wasn’t allowed to resonate, but I sat there, playing it over in my head. For some reason, the music that makes most people relax makes me exited. I stood to applaud. I’ve always been a proponent of the idea that art has a very distinct meaning. People saying that any type of art, especially literature, has a meaning that is purely objective have always made me mad. There is objectivity to art, definitely, but the fundamental meaning of a piece is fundamental. The piece can’t be judged without respect to that theme. For example, it’s wrong to say that a book like Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut is pro-war. If you say that, you’re wrong. What’s objective is people’s perceptions on the values presented in the piece. Analyzing art is a process of adding on, subtracting from, or expanding upon the values the artist has presented. It’s almost mathematical, and there’s no denying that math lacks subjectivity. Slaughterhouse 5 is a book about the horrors of what humans can do and the absurdity of war, and I could come away from reading the book and believe that, despite what I have read, horrors are justifiable. I could even cite examples from the book that helped me make my choice, but I cannot make the book as a whole pro-war. I could argue the book. There are art pieces that are more open-ended that others. Photography is often just about observation. In the Solcumb Galleries, there was a table set up featuring photographs of poverty in rural America. I was enamored by the introduction to random peoples’ lives. I always wonder if photographs can actually capture life, because so much of the wonder of that type of art comes from thinking about how the person or thing in the picture got there, or if the person in the picture was maybe just caught at an odd time and they were frozen with an angry face, when in actuality they were telling a joke. Maybe photography is great. If I were walking past that strange man who looked so angry in the photo, maybe I would have assumed that he was angry because I only saw him out of the corner of my eye. Photography reminds me how I constantly make assumptions about the people around me that I will never get to know. Right after the Solcumb galleries, a group of friends and I went over to the Reece Museum. I worked at the Reece Museum for a week my sophomore year of high school. I helped curate an exhibit called Yahoo! Mountain Dew, which is exactly what it sounds like. The origins of Mountain Dew are ambiguous. The drink might have begun in Johnson City, it might have been invented in Kentucky. What’s inescapable was that it was first a mixer for alcohol drunk by people in the mountains. My part of the gallery was an exhibit on how the old mascot for the drink was a stereotypical hillbilly and how the mascot came to represent the people of Appalachia in a negative way. (So, just in case you need another reason to not like Mountain Dew, you can point out that they had a sexist hillbilly to represent them for a long time, at the expense of an entire group of people.) I learned a lot about museums from putting an exhibit together, like about fifty years ago, people were shorter so exhibits had to be closer to the ground. There’s a strip of wood that goes around the main gallery in the Reece Museum which was supposed to represent where eye -level for the average American is, but now galleries have to be put up higher than that because people are taller. One of the main exhibits was on political art. Art tends to be more liberal leaning, and I went with two conservative people. We both valued the beliefs in the art differently. Our views affected our perceptions. I tended to put a liberal spin on conservative art, and they did the opposite. Our perceptions of our own politics affected how we visited the museum. There was a piece called “The Fundamentalist” by Cynthia Marsh. It looks like it’s made from homemade, mix-matched paper. On it at the top are the words GOD, FAMILY, COUNTRY in English. At the bottom, painted in reverse colors, are the same three words in Arabic. The speckled background brings the two streams of words together. The painting is supposed to underscore the radical right-wing leanings of both faiths. The speckled background holds them together. Fundamentalism is inseparable, it says. My conservative friends thought it was stupid and slightly offensive. I thought it was clever, but then again, I didn’t like some of the pieces that were opposite to my political beliefs. I thought that they weren’t considering the thing that they were painting in a complete light, which of course, is something that a conservative could say about “The Fundamentalist”. The next two galleries were all about perception. Some pieces relied on mirrors. Some photographs showed a scene where something ambiguous occurred. My friends and I started taking pictures of the art and adding our own details. We called it art from art. We assigned the photos more concrete meanings. My political views have changed a lot over the last few years. I’ve moved from thinking that every opinion is somewhat correct to thinking that some opinions are just dead wrong and can hurt people. As we all looked at the same art, we all thought different things. My friend might have thought of her family when she saw GOD, FAMILY, and COUNTRY. I thought about the Lord’s Resistance Army and their horrible human rights violations and then I thought of Boko Haram. Perception shapes who we are, and in a way, it keeps us who we are. Where Am I Going?
Hmm. I do not know where I’ll be in the future. Usually when someone asks this, I tell them that I want to live in a box. After living in a single box for thirty years, migrating like a little crab, I’d write a book about my life. With the money from the book, I’d make a mansion made of boxes and live the rest of my days out that way. Another thing that I tell people is that I’m going to flee to the mountains and start a small alpaca farm. I don’t know anything about alpacas, but that would be the fun part. I try to get people to agree to be a part of my venture. I say that if I get enough people in on the deal, I’ll be able to have llamas too. Sometimes I tell people my real back up plan, that I want to take over the world, but I have to be careful with that one. People get concerned when they find out how detailed my plan is. Oh well. My real plan for the future? Hmm. I guess I want to (realistically):
After that, for really far in the future-
I guess my real mission statement would be ACHIEVE. I don’t really have any too specific ideas about what I want my future to be. I don’t want to limit it. One of the weirdest feelings is when I get off the interstate on a road trip and end up in a new town where I’ll probably only spend only ten minutes in my entire life. There are always fast food places that look the exact same as what’s in my town, the streetlights are the same, the layout could even me the same as where I’m from, but it’s undeniably different from anywhere I’ve ever been. It’s odd to think that to other people, that place might be where they live their entire lives. The empty parking lots might mean something different to them that it does to me, and I’ll never know what that different thing is.
Volunteering in Johnson City made me feel like I was in a new place I’d never get to really understand. There are so many different places to explore. My ten minutes will be another person’s lifetime. I volunteered with a construction firm that donates building supplies to charities who build houses for the homeless. Each window I passed down the assembly line of other volunteers will end up somewhere I might never see. The window might be a part of a home I’ll never visit. Maybe it will never be part of anything, but still. It had my finger prints on it. One of the reoccurring ideas that I’ve heard from within the Honors College is that the Honors College is a cult. I can see it. We watch out for each other. We stick together. We suffer together, but we motivate each other. Being part of this program is making me rethink what I value. When I was applying to colleges, I wasn’t really looking for a community. I was looking for scholarship and scholarships. I found a place that I’ve actually…begun to call “home”. I don’t use the word “home” lightly. It has immense connotation, and I value it.
But this is home. As I surveyed all the tables, I thought about how coming to ETSU was a strange twist of events. But this is home.
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Kyla
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