Personal Essay

I am the person who I am today because of what I have been taught by my parents. In class, we did an exercise that consists of the cycle of socialization. It taught me that parents play a big role on the type of person their children will become. Parents are our source of where we get our norms, values, roles, rules, models of ways to be, and they are even our sources of dreams (especially mine). In my personal identity wheel, I was surprise to see how I can describe myself in just 3 adjectives. I had that I was smart, funny (though most people don’t think so) and ambitious. I caught myself thinking, “Why did I choose these 3?” I am many more things but these are the ones I want to be known for. These are the qualities I strive to be every day.

As for my social identity wheel, that’s a whole other story. In the section that states the identity that I mostly think about I stated Ethnicity. Going away for college where the majority of the school is “white,” I am constantly reminded that I am Latino. The reason why I put quotations around word “white” is because the meaning is way too vague. No one in the world is white. We have Germans, Italians, Polish, Jewish, and a lot more too just plain “white.” I just think that society became lazy and decided to put certain people into one category. I know where I come from and I know that society put my ethnic people into the minority. People mistake that for being poor and ignorant people. I am one of the people who want to help change that. As for the one that I think about least often is socio-economic class. I think that we are all in college to make something of ourselves and since we all have the same opportunities, it shouldn’t matter where you stand in this economic world but where you will stand in the long run. My group had many similarities such as birth order, favorite music and favorite movie. It was an interesting experience to listen to each other’s wheels because it helps build that trust, that bond that

friends share and I feel like the wheels made me see that some people you might think you have nothing in common with can actually prove you wrong. There were also differences in how people described themselves but what my group notice that no one said anything negative about ourselves; that people always delve in to the positive rather the negative.

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