Wrestling Sheep

College entrance Essay

Wrestling Sheep

 

High school is often remembered as the best or worst time of a person’s life, such an extreme label for a small amount of time.  Of course when your going through it the four years spent confined to a classroom seems like forever. Let us not forget the drama attached to said four years, no never a moment where someone wasn’t doing something worth notice. Students are filled into little niches by other students, filling in the necessary roles that they need to be filled. I do not intend to write another essay, one which I’m sure you’ve read a million times about how my time in high school did not fit this mold, no I’m going to tell you how it did fit that mold and filled it to the brim.

            The first time that I got on the bus to go to Norfolk County Agricultural High School I was a shy girl, going from a middle school that I had never fit into to a high school where I would be amongst brand new people, needless to say I was scared. I had never been good with crowds, yet the first day was only the freshman, meaning there was a manageable number on the bus, still I knew no one. I watched the other children as we approached the school, I had been there a few times before but it still impressed me. I had spent my prior school life in a single building with two floors but the Aggie, as we would come to call it, was five buildings with varying levels. I was sure that I would be lost within minutes of trying to find my classes; I hoped that I could find someone to follow around. We got off the bus each of us trying to spot people we may know, and follow them to wherever we were supposed to convene. As it turned out they had all the freshmen head to the cafeteria for an orientation of sorts. Little did I know it but these hundred twenty other people would become something akin to a community where we all knew each other by sight at the very least.

            I didn’t know it yet but I met my best friends that day in the cafeteria, we latched onto each other and have all been the best fiends since, but this isn’t about them. I said that I would explain how the Aggie broke the mold of high schools; there were cliques like in every school. The groups of those who were popular, jocks and such but those groups were far less important than the groups that were unique to us. Majors were a huge part of who you were at the Aggie, I was a Plant Science major and as such I knew every other plant major in my year and had an immediate connection because we knew that we shared interests. The same would go for the younger classmen as I progressed through the years, sure some of the older students stuck to the mold of testing the younger students but there was always a certain alliance between the majors. Just as there was a war between them, Animal Science and Plant Science, we would compete with school sponsored events and field trips, all in good fun. This acknowledged connection was one of the unique things about the Aggie, and one of the best.

            I had always been a shy kid, and to a point I still am but now I have far more self confidence then I did. Going to the Aggie helped with that in ways that I’m still learning about now. One was the connection that we all shared, the desire to not be in a conventional high school, our desires to do something above and beyond the norm. Like in freshmen Animal Science when we herded cows, wrestled sheep while other students sheered them, holding small animals, showing dogs, things that we would never learn sitting in a concrete room. Freshman Plant science we learned the parts of a plant, the magic that was another form of life none of us had ever given a second thought, walks around our expansive campus, getting lost in the woods following a teacher who wanted to locate a specific tree. This was something that no matter your major you had to enjoy, an hour and a half outside between the regular classes. Yes we had those too, no less important than our agricultural studies. The last freshmen segment was Ag. Mechanics, woodworking, Equipment operations, imagine our delight at eleven and twelve years old when we got to drive little tractors around in the fields, drafting the old way on paper and the newest means on CAD, so many new things that we all shared. Uniting us in a way that sharing a math, English, science, or art class never could, even once we separated into more specific majors no longer sharing every experience with the whole year we all retained that single unified experience from the beginning.

            To close I love my four years attending Norfolk County Agriculture High School, I would qualify it as the best time in my life so far, and one of the hardest. Despite the fun we had in our unique classes they were no less in quality than other traditional classes and required just as much hard work to succeed. I firmly believe that my time at the Aggie was something that will benefit me for the rest of my life, something a standard high school could never give. The feeling of truly fitting in and a pure sense of loyalty to a group of people, We may have graduated but all of us will always be Aggie students.