Personal Narrative: The Words Of Judy Blume

In the words of Judy Blume, "Each of us must confront our own fears, must come face to face with them. How we handle our fears will determine where we go with the rest of our lives. To experience adventure or to be limited by the fear of it." I found myself these crossroads during the spring of my sophomore year of high school. All of my friends were getting ready to attend the State Leadership Conference for the club we were in, The Technology Student Association, better known as T.S.A., and while all of them had competed for years at this conference, it was going to be my first time. The question of whether I was going to follow through with it was briskly approaching. I was fearful of doing a project that a panel would be judging. I mean …show more content…
What if I didn’t do well? What would all of my peers presume? How could I not compete after telling everyone how superior I was at coding? These questions weighed on my mind for weeks leading up to the registration deadline. In the end, the encouragement of my fellow members won me over and I told our president to register me despite my self-doubt. After that, I began to work almost immediately with the team of two others who had registered. I quickly set up a conference call with them to discuss our draft of how the website should look, and discuss a rough delegation of jobs for each of us. Once we determined, I spent weeks on my part, first drafting webpages, only to modify them into a completely different format until eventually the layout was solidified and the interesting features, such as a live slide show and an interactive splash page, worked properly. When I saw the other coder’s work, I was a bit disappointed at how little effort he seemed to be put into his work, but I knew he also had other competitions to prepare for, therefore I told him I would improve on his work for him, and show it to him when I was done. Two months later we had finalized the website and were at the conference in Athens, Georgia awaiting our interview. Before the interview sessions began, we found out that we had made it in the top ten spots. My heart felt like the highest …show more content…
Before, I had never been required to really work as a team, since the two most extroverted people do the whole group assignment each time at school. This time, however, was different. We each had our own ideas. This forced us to compromise and work together to bring our ideas to life. For example, I knew how to code well and could find ways to do just about anything, but I could not design a color scheme for our website to save my life. Thankfully, one of my teammates actually did the graphic design for our chapter and possessed a great talent for this, so she was able to take our design and give me back a color scheme that popped, and reflected our school pride. This was not an easy task; it took us over a week to accomplish together, and after that, we still critiqued it until the very minute it was due. I would never have developed these skills had it not been for this competition, and thanks to it I not only possess these abilities, but am actively improving them from running for office and being