Personal Essay

As I was growing up during Middle school, I was not aware of the aggressive and competitive world that surrounded me. Moreover, I did not know the importance of education. However, it took a harsh family experience to reveal to me the valuable lesson of the importance of having an education. My father had a decent paying job after six years of service to his Aeronautical Company as a sheet metal mechanic. He thought he had a stable job but soon after the company went bankrupt. The Aeronautical Company laid off all their workers including my father. The day he was laid off, my mother and I went to go pick him up. When we arrived at the company, we saw my father with a sad face. When he got into the car, he told us that they had laid him off. It was then I knew that our family was in trouble, and it was only a matter of time that I would experience the emotional frustration of bankruptcy. My parents had enough savings to get us through one year. After the first year, we would then have to rely on my mother’s low-income job to support us. Long term it was difficult, especially in the beginning. All the things that my family and I took for granted were gone. Things such as toys, new shoes, and cell phones had no part in our every day lives. However, we did recuperate, and three years later I learned one important lesson from our adversity. During those three years of unemployment, my father could not find a job because he did not have enough education, so he then decided to take multiple aviation courses for three years. After my father had completed his aviation courses, he then started working again after three years of unemployment. I was captivated by the fact that my father could not find a decent paying job during his unemployment, that he had to go to school in order to find a job that would be able to support his family . After the big ordeal had calmed down, I started thinking about my future. I knew that I did not want my own future family to go through what I had gone through. I especially, did not want to go through the experience of bankruptcy again. It was then that I knew that education is and will always be the stairway to success. This experience was truly an epiphany at that point in my life. Before my father was laid off, I did not take education seriously and thanks to that experience I now value education. I took the harsh conditions that my family and I encountered as an opportunity to learn more about life and my future. If it where not for that adversity I would have never thought and or dreamed of a better future for myself.