Autobiography

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A lot of responsibility for where I am in life can be attributed to where I grew up and what the people around me were doing. I am from northern California and lived in an urban town called Folsom. Folsom is a fairly conventional town where it is by far the standard to go to college right after high school. There is also a large percentage of the town’s high school graduates that decide to go to Cal Poly. It is not just a coincidence that I followed the path that was familiar to me, the path that I had seen many of my peers take growing up. I, like anyone else, value familiarity, especially when it concerns a change as big as college. My choices brought to a SLO, a town I had been to before full of people I already knew and that was helpful for me as I began to build something new with my life. Although a lot of my decision making seems to follow the pattern of my surroundings, the rational was well thought out. Coming out of high school I did not have a clue what I wanted to do with my life and the only clue towards my future career was that I was inclined to interact with all sorts of people groups. Having only this vague idea in mind, I decided to go to a community college to buy myself some time and hopefully some direction. I had already visited many schools and thoroughly enjoyed Cal Poly’s hands on approach and their aptitude towards putting students into their chosen career fields right after graduation. This, coupled with the familiarity of the town and its people, I decided on Cuesta Community College in SLO so that I could experience the surroundings of what I hoped to be my future 4-year university.

Now I was living in San Luis Obispo and going to a community college to decide what came next. Coming out of high school I had had a lot of experience in leadership as well as experience in public speaking on a large scale. I had taken several volunteer roles in my church and was chosen for a few in my youth group. I also was a part of many clubs and extracurriculars. I had cultivated a lot of skills from my involvement but the involvement that was most beneficial for me was my time as an elected Public Relations Commissioner. I was chosen to be a figurehead of my high school. My duties included speaking to the entire student body on a regular basis, formatting and delivering announcements each morning, and commentating during the many events that the school put on. From my time as a PRC I developed an interest in communicating with people and an affinity for public speaking. While I have no ties to the agricultural field, I found myself in a college town that focused heavily on the subject and was swayed by the desperate need for the agriculture business to thrive in efficiency and sustainability in our near future. Putting my love of communication and my new-found interest in agriculture together brought me to Cal Poly as an Ag Comms major. The rest of my life is built on those decisions.