Hurricane Michael by Kaziyah

Hurricane Michael by Kaziyah - May 2021 Scholarship Essay

In October of 2018 my small town, Panama City, Florida, was hit with a category five hurricane. Hurricane Michael. I was a sophomore and dualed enrollment student at the time. Neighborhoods were wrecked and business buildings were collapsed on every corner. It will forever be the saddest and most eye opening day I have ever experienced. School was obviously out for some time, about a month and a half to be exact. My family and I were hopping from hotel to hotel, state to state. It was honestly a little mini vacation from us. The government was paying for all of our living fees simply because they had to due to everyone being displaced from their homes. Then reality hit again..
When returning back to school everything was different. School days were cut in half and to be quite honest, students were not getting enough classroom time to understand the material. Teachers were cutting modules in half and going over only “the most important things” because we genuinely just did not have time for it all being that we missed so many school days already. Everyone, teachers and students, seemed to be unmotivated.
Experiencing this extreme lack of motivation for me was new. It seemed due to everything that was happening outside of school it was starting to affect not only my owns but everyones performance in the classroom. Living out of bags in hotels, and worrying about if your childhood home will ever be fixed due to the insanely high demand for construction workers at the time. Honestly the last thing on my mind was school because I had so many others things to worry about. Life was stressful and not easy.
Fast forward a couple of months and school is a couple of months away from being out. I have realized that if I could survive a category five hurricane I can survive almost anything that comes my way. I got my groove back for studying and wanting too excel in school. I realized I was going to be a junior the following year and it is said that is when colleges really start looking at transcripts. I did not want that devastating hurricane to define my future so I choose to overcome all of the obstacles that came with it. So I buckled down and told myself all the hard work would all be worth it in the end. God only gives his toughest battles to his strongest soldiers because he knows they will get back up and keep going. Going through Hurricane Michael was definitely my toughest battle.