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Scholarship Recipients
 2007 LBSF Scholarship Awards : Read these moving excerpts from the winning essays of the LBSF 2007 award recipients, who attend Temple University, North Carolina A&T University and the University of the West Indies in response to the statement, "The most life-changing moment of my life was ..."
Essay #1
(This student writes about her emotional turmoil upon learning of her father's life threatening illness during which the family members used all of their available assets to pay for his medical expenses)
"The thought of excelling academically and assisting with my father's medical bills gave me a sense of hope: hope that death will not come too fast. When I thought about being able to help, I had a sense of satisfaction. It was at that time I realized that courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the jugement that something else is more important than fear, and thus, the mind becomes a powerful instrument.... Like a kite, I will rise against the wind than with the wind [for] there is no form of adversity that a person with a tool as powerful as the mind cannot overcome. The only time we cannot do what we want to do is when we convince ourselves we can't."
This was my "wake up call." Essay #2
Entering my freshmen year of high school, I didn’t know I could and would be stereotyped and statistically degraded, because of the environment that I lived in and the high school I elected to attend for my secondary education, but I would soon find out. Residing in the most notorious area (Southeast, Washington, DC) and the most notorious high school in The District of Columbia (Ballou Senior High School) easily allowed for my goals and ambitions to be just as unimportant as the many other lost souls destined to fail, never achieving a more respectable and prosperous lifestyle.
I’ve always said I wanted to go to college, but more truthful words have never been spoken so clearly until the one day I ran across the statistics of my neighborhood (in saying neighborhood I mean Ward 8) while surfing the web. It was like being snapped into a sudden reality, to read in front of me what I already knew . . . the most poverty stricken area, the lowest high-school graduation rate, the most children under the age of seventeen, and the highest unemployment rate . . . but seeing the actual percentages and numbers somehow penetrated my thoughts and made me realize that I wanted to be better than those statistics. Combine that sudden dose of reality with all the craziness I’ve been through within the walls of Ballou; the mercury incident, student brawl and shooting of James Richardson, I knew I had to get out of that environment and try to better myself.
Unlike a lot of my peers that are stuck back home, I was fortunate enough to have had help and guidance from family, teachers, and mentors. My aspirations were the nail in the board, but all those who have ever helped me were the hammer, the driving force that gave me the motivation to succeed and for success. So to answer the question, I believe the most life-changing moment of my life was the realization that I am not helpless or hopeless in achieving my aspirations. Although I wasn’t afforded the privileges of many of my peers here at Temple University, I am nevertheless still here, pursing my goals - just as they are!
Essay #3
The most life-changing moment of my life was leaving my father to live with my mother. I lived with my father until I was five years old. He was the person who raised me, and I could not remember my mother being around that much. When I found out I was leaving my father, I was mad and confused. I was trying to figure out why I had to leave him and go to live with this my mother when she was not around much. I was so young I could not understand what was really happening. All I knew was that I was being taken from someone I saw everyday and who took care of me. When I was taken from my father, I never thought that I was not going to see him again for a very long time.
The reason this was the most life-changing moment of my life is that I had to change most of my ways. My mother did not like the way my father was raising me. She told me that she was going to break me out of my old habits. I was such an angry and mean child. I never wanted to play with my sister; I was so mean to her. I wanted to fight everyone who made me upset. The reason I was like this is because my father taught me to be that way. He would allow me to do whatever I wanted.
Now, on this day, I’m glad that change happened, because my mother has raised a beautiful, intelligent, sophisticated, and talented young woman. On the other hand, I believe that if my father would have raised me, he would not have done a better job than my mother.
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