What Booker T. Washington High School Has Done for Me

As much as I like to think that Booker T. Washington is my own personal hell, complete with flighty people that have absolutely no idea what they want to do with their lives, people who think that Andrew Lloyd Weber is just going to pop into the classrooms pointing fingers going "I want you, and you, and you!"... as much as I think that, I don't want to be a cynic, because cynics are absolutely no fun and because Booker T. Washington has given me valuable gifts that I haven't realized I've gotten until this year. Maybe unfortunately not until the end of this year. I want to be a neuroscientist, and at least in the visual sense I've been taught by my art teachers to view objects objectively, to problem solve with the eyes by breaking down what we know into forms and shapes. This is also appropriate in science. A problem needs to be solved, a pathway needs to be found, without all of the complexities of chemical equations. You take the raw forms of what you know and what you don't know and you look at something objectively. It gets too complicated otherwise, likewise when trying to draw a landscape or a portrait. So I guess Booker T. Washington taught me to problem solve, they say that creative people are the most valuable in a laboratory. But I like to think that I was at least born with a tinge of creativity, but everyone is born with a sense of composition--a little house with a stick figure and a sun in the corner. I guess I was taught to expand on that, which is valuable in its on right, though I'm not sure yet what I'm going to do with it. I plan to major in neuroscience in college, go on to medical school and get an M.D./PhD in neuroscience and neurosurgery. I don't want to listen to people talk on a couch, I just want to cut their head open and save their lives. I think I owe it to people to share my knowledge with them, otherwise learning anything is just pointless. I always say that I wish I went somewhere like SEM or TAG, but I love the people at Booker T. Maybe all of them, even. That would be something nice to put in my speech, because in these final days of senior year I've realized that I've grown up with these people, even the ones that I absolutely despise. They have had an amazing influence on my personality and they've seen me in my most vulnerable moments, as I have them. I wouldn't want it any other way. I think the people who leave Booker T. deciding that they don't want to pursue art, get just as much out of it as the ones that do.