THE KILGORE FORUM C.G.

Carl Gombert

“I had a final my freshman year and I didn’t study at all. I wanted to leave so badly that I filled in a bunch of boxes randomly. Everybody else in the class got a good grade and I was the one person who did bad on the test. I thought, ‘I can’t be doing this much worse than everybody else. I gotta do better than this.’ I definitely took my tests more seriously after that. When I came in freshman year, I didn’t know myself. I had a lot more negative influences in my life and I wouldn’t advocate for myself enough. I had a lot of self-reflection during the year of online school in how I wanted my life to look and who I wanted to be around. I have a much better sense of what my goals are now, what my values are, what I enjoy and who I am. I know that I want to get a degree, get a good job and be part of some community. I want to go into computer science. I like being able to construct something that’s completely unique, but I also enjoy having to be methodical about it. What I’ve learned in high school is that you can’t ever say you’re going to do something tomorrow. Don’t put stuff off and motivate yourself any way you can to do things as soon as possible. What I’ll remember from high school is that I had a great group of friends. I had some great teachers and a lot of freedom to figure out what I liked and what I wanted to do.”