It’s that time of year again. That’s right, college application season! The time for graduating high school seniors to pan over the 7,000+\u00a0post-secondary institutions in this country, select\u00a0the best options\u00a0for them and make their 300-word case for why they should be allowed\u00a0to continue their education.<\/p>\n
On a Thursday morning in early November, I had the opportunity to play my part in the application process\u00a0by volunteering\u00a0to\u00a0help\u00a0Detroit Edison Public School Academy’s<\/a>\u00a0(DEPSA) graduating seniors\u00a0with their personal statements for the\u00a02014 College Application Week.<\/p>\n There, I met a young woman who had spent the\u00a0summer\u00a0withstanding the barrage of concerned questions and underhanded insults thrown at her after casually stating\u00a0“Oh, I’m from Detroit”\u00a0to peers at\u00a0a Harvard Summer Program. She is\u00a0applying to\u00a0attend Boston University for Journalism with the hopes of learning how to deter the negativity and portray her home in a positive light.<\/p>\n There, I met a young man who\u00a0instead of being excited to open his Christmas presents as a child, looked forward to taking them apart to figure out how they work. His late grandfather, a male role model in place of his incarcerated father, had been an engineer and left an entire workshop to him in the basement of their Detroit home. He is applying to be a mechanical engineer at one of the\u00a0prominent engineering programs in the state.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s that time of year again. That’s right, college application season! The time for graduating high school seniors to pan over the 7,000+\u00a0post-secondary institutions in this country, select\u00a0the best options\u00a0for them and make their 300-word case for why they should be allowed\u00a0to continue their education. On a Thursday morning in early November, I had the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":218,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12403","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/challengedetroit.builtrare.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12403","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/challengedetroit.builtrare.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/challengedetroit.builtrare.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/challengedetroit.builtrare.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/218"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/challengedetroit.builtrare.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12403"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/challengedetroit.builtrare.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12403\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/challengedetroit.builtrare.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12403"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/challengedetroit.builtrare.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12403"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/challengedetroit.builtrare.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12403"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}This opportunity\u00a0reminded me\u00a0that There Are Birds Here<\/a>\u00a0waiting to spread their wings and take flight.<\/h3>\n