Most of my life I felt like a character in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. I was tossed and turned and thrown into life feeling utterly out of control.

I was always considered “gifted.” I taught myself how to read at age four, and I learned my multiplication tables in the first grade. I always knew I was smart, and I grew up thinking I didn’t have to work hard to achieve great results; they came naturally. That kind of thinking bred laziness.

By the time I was in the sixth grade, I was so smitten with knowing I was unusually smart that I didn’t feel the need to bother with petty things like homework. I was the artistic intellectual. Writing a five-paragraph “hamburger essay” was beneath me. My life progressed, and my behavior deteriorated. By the time I finished my seventh grade year I was involved in drugs and started acting promiscuously with boys. My parents had divorced when I was six, and all that psychobabble about “finding attention from males due to lacking a prominent father figure” couldn’t have been truer in my case.

My life reached its pinnacle of disaster in the beginning of eighth grade. I was a runaway, trying to self-medicate my pain through drugs, alcohol, and sex with older men. I didn’t heed the prices I would pay for always seeking to more mature than my peer group. My biggest excuse for myself was, “I’m allowed to be precocious; I’m smart.”

Eventually my family grew sick of my impudence and self-destructive ways. They sent me to a behavior-modifying, all-girls boarding school, better known as “a program”. I spent seven months in at a school in Arizona, repairing the relationship with my mom that I had annihilated by my rash decisions that I regarded as spontaneity an just plain fun. In my program I worked on communication skills and dealing with my feelings.

Fast forward seven months, and I re-entered society in May of ‘04 as a much happier person. Things went well for a while, and I vowed to a life of hard work, sobriety, and chastity before marriage. That didn’t last long. After two months I was back to smoking marijuana, after four months I was back to having sex, and after seven months I was back to drinking. However, it took five more months of drinking, drugs, sex and sneaking out to prompt my mom into action.

It had been thirteen months sine I left the school in Arizona, and I unknowingly found myself back in a program. I thought I was going to summer camp. I couldn’t have been more wrong. I arrived at Horizon Academy on June 15, 2006, a week after I completed my freshman year of high school. I had no idea how much my life was going to change.

My first week of attending Horizon Academy, I was completely immersed in feeding my anger and self-pity. I couldn’t believe my mom would do this to me. She hated me, and she was wasting the best years of my adolescence by sending me away to these pointless schools. Didn’t she learn from last time that they don’t work? The difference this time, she said, is I’m going to graduate the program. She’s not going to make the mistake twice of pulling me out early.

When I learned all the schooling at Horizon was on the computer, and the pace of advancement was set by the individual and his or her capacity for work, I finally saw the light at the end of the tunnel. I thought, “If I can graduate high school, then my mom will take me home!” I became obsessed with school. Every day I challenged myself to get more work done than the previous day - not because I wanted to further my education, I just wanted out. It wasn’t until I had been in the program for nearly a year that I discovered how much more life had to offer.

I signed up for “Advanced Financial Economics” because I wanted a challenge. This class wasn’t on the computer, and everyone that took it was notoriously smart. It was taught by a man named Mr. Joe MicoMonaco, someone who would change my life forever.

In Mr. Joe’s class, I was introduced to the world of finance. I learned about the mechanics of the stock market and how many different variables affect the ebb and flow of inflation and deflation. We did a process called “Interpreting Street Signs.” The class was given a set of circumstances involving the core CIP and price of oil per barrel, and then told the predict whether or not the Federal Reserve would change the FFR, and how many basis points they would alter it by. When we completed the first task, we were instructed to project how each sector of the market would be affected due to our changes.

Up until that point I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I was more confused that most elementary-school children with their career path. When I was i the second grade I was confident I wanted to be a lawyer, in the third grade I wanted to be a veterinarian, and in the fourth grade I was confident I wanted to be the first female President. By the time I was in the tenth grade, I had no idea what I wanted. Advanced Financial Economics and the mentoring of Mr. Joe changed everything.

I gained vision and desire for my future which prevents me from ever going back to the life I was living before - one of anger, loneliness, and an induced state of euphoria that always left me feeling worse afterwards. I chose to climb out of the rabbit hole, find purpose in my life, and regain the love and power I had neglected to see in myself for so long. Sorry Alice, but this isn’t your Wonderland; it’s MY life. (NOTE**Was written for admission to Berkeley)

BROOKE P.

CURRENTLY ENROLLED

HORIZON ACADEMY