Kaelin

http://animoto.com/play/r1k3uS0iRjp1wLpFVcRU3Q

My high school experience started with a bang well before the first day of school. In late July, I endured band camp, where I spent hours sweating in the sun and memorizing difficult music. I can easily say that those two weeks were the most physically and mentally demanding of my life. After that, the weeks got progressively worse, and I began to view marching band as the worst mistake of my life. After sophomore year, I planned on quitting, but thanks to the coaxing and reassuring of my fellow upper classmen, I stuck with it. I don’t regret it simply because I’ve met incredible people. It also taught me how to be friendly with those whom I found it difficult to get along. And of course, I also learned many lessons about the importance of perseverance and the incredible feeling of pride that results from a successful performance. Furthermore, I spent the majority of my summers at church retreats. This provided me with the opportunity to meet other teenagers of my faith from all across the nation and to bond with the ones here in my youth group. While these experiences strengthened my faith, they also encouraged me to live by my religious morals. I will never forget the other teenagers I met. Their examples provide me with daily support so that I can live by my values. In addition to my marching band and church friends, I was also able to meet new and interesting people in my classes. Just as they supported me in my geeky past time of marching band, I appreciated the hard work they put into their favorite activities. There was my cheerleader friend who was nice enough to talk to me during a football game even though I was dressed in that hideous uniform. There were the two bickering boys who sat behind me in Calculus, one who had an unnatural love for physics and another who had an unhealthy obsession of torturing him for it. However, underneath all their arguing, they were truly friends, and I became friends with them as well. Moreover, there were my cross country friends who would run past the marching band field calling my name in the middle of practice, and my chorus and drama friends that I met through my participation in the musical orchestra last year. All these friendships showed me that the movies like Mean Girls have it all wrong. It is possible and even easy to be friends with anyone, no matter what “clique” they belong to. All in all, as I have looked back over my high school years, I've realized that I won't remember the material I learned or the tests or the grades. For marching band, I won't remember how we sounded or even what we played. But I will remember all the amazing people I've met and the lessons that they've taught me. I would not be who I am today without their influence.