Academic Artifact
My sophomore year of high school was a time of trouble for all. A junior committed suicide. I did not know him personally but judging by all the posts on social media I knew that his passing affected many people. I wanted to do something to give everyone strength while mourning the passing of a dear friend. I came up with the idea of writing motivational sayings on colored sticky notes and posting them on the lockers around school. I thought it was a good way to shine light on a bad situation. By the time I came up with the idea it was 11 P.M., but I stayed up the whole night writing over seven hundred sticky notes to put on each locker. The sayings were: you are wonderful, you are loved, you always have someone to talk to, you are unbreakable, and, you are important. I went to school early that Monday morning and started posting the sticky notes on everybody’s lockers.
Later that day I saw pictures of the sticky notes with thankful captions all over social media. There were comments asking who made them and answers saying a guardian angel or that this person or that person made them. I didn’t correct them because it wasn’t about me and I didn’t want it to be. The feeling I got inside was indescribable because I knew that I had made a difference. Those who knew that I wrote the notes knew that I did not want recognition because it did not feel right due to the circumstances.
I expected the sticky notes to be taken off the lockers the next day, erasing all memory of them, but it was the exact opposite. The sticky notes were still on every locker and stayed on the lockers until the end of the school year. Seeing how they withstood the wind and the rain filled my heart with joy because I knew that nothing could tear those words down. I knew that they had impacted others, but I did not realize how much. After the school year ended, I got a text from a friend who had just graduated and moved into her college dorm room. I opened the attached photo of the sticky note on her bedroom wall. To know that just one person had taken the sticky note home and put it in a safe place was unbelievable. She thanked me, saying the words really helped her get through the rest of the year. To me they were just another action I did out of the goodness of my heart, but to her and others it was a symbol of goodness in a world full of hatred.
Now the school has transformed the sayings on the sticky notes into magnets to be more permanent. They have the same sayings that I came up with and are on every locker in the school and on some of the teachers’ white boards in class. I even saw one on the back of a car in the senior parking lot which made me really think about how the act of helping others may seem so simple and natural to one person, but so grand, kind, and foreign to others.
Response
This was one of my essays that I wrote to submit to my colleges that I applied to include in the writing portion. It follows the story of how I helped other kids at my high school cope with dealing with the fact that we all lost somebody due to suicide. I did it to make sure everybody was aware that it was not any of our faults and we all need to know our worth to try to prevent this from happening again. I attended a small private school with not many students so tragedies like this rarely happened and when it did it affected everybody including the students, faculty, staff and parents. I chose this to be my academic artifact because I think it shows the kind of person that I am; kind, caring and empathetic.
It shows that I like helping others and am always up for giving a helping hand no matter how good or bad the situation is. I don not really like writing essays for English class about books because I feel like they become routine and I just spit it out and write whatever the teachers want to read in order to get the A and that is why I chose to submit an academic piece that was not an essay from one of my English classes over my high school years. I think as a composer it shows that when I write I really like to connect my writing to personal situations that I have gone through or personal beliefs that I stand for. I have been told and I believe that I tend to have a very liberal thought process so in my essays it sometimes shows through my writing and word choice, which I like but past teachers have not.
