Directions: Speculate on your American Dream. What is it? How will you achieve it? Perhaps you have an American Dream; perhaps you don’t. Perhaps you never thought about it until now. In what ways are your personal dreams for the future part of the America Dream? Write a 600 word personal essay that answers these questions and/or some issue related to them. Below you can read an essay that I wrote last recently. I wanted to provide some kind of model for you, my students. Of course, my perspective is backward looking. You, too, in thinking about your future, might want to look backwards or compare yourself to someone you know. Perhaps you have your future all planned out or perhaps not. the source material for what you write will not be research, but personal opinion, experiences, observations, theories, etc. You may use “I,” ”me,” and “mine.” Here’s a six and a half minute video that may kick off your thinking. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8pNGa_IFoU You don’t need a formal one-sentence thesis, but the entire essay should have unity and an engaging introduction. Develop your essay through multiple, unfied paragraphs; take frequent paragraph breaks Your essay should have some sort of organization. This can be pretty loose with a personal essay, but make sure ideas “connect.” Avoid spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors. Here is my example essay. Note that I wrote way past the minimum 600 words. _________________________________________________________________________________________________ For me, when I was 18, I don’t think I had dreams. If I did, they were vague or I wasn’t aware of them. Dreams are goals, and I was not a goal setter, for the most part. The future looked good, but I couldn’t describe the details for you. I had no career plans. I guess I had few plans at all. My view of the future was, Let’s see what happens. My oldest friend, Steve, was a neighborhood kid who lived on the next block and who I’d gone through grammar school with (We had no middle school). He was smarter than me and way more ambitious, so when he got to high school he took honors classes while I did a standard “college prep.” Steve always knew what he wanted, and he knew then, in high school, that he wanted to be an electrical engineer, so of course he took Calculus and Trigonometry while I fumbled through Algebra, twice. We were never in the same class together—not even English—except maybe for gym, maybe once. In other words, he moved in a completely different realm of high-achieving, ambitious students and I moved among the crowd that was just trying to get through high school. Sometime during high school or maybe earlier, Steve set a goal: for college, he wanted to attend the United States Military Academy at West Point. It’s a very good place to study engineering, and your education there is completely free. Of course, you have to serve in the Army once you graduate, but that was apparently a good-enough trade-off for my friend. Not anyone can go to West Point. In those days, you had to have an appointment, meaning a United States Congressman had to sponsor you. I remember at Steve’s Eagle Ceremony (Boy Scouts), our Congressman was there to congratulate him because he, the Congressman, had already picked Steve for West Point. Meanwhile, I ended my career in Boy Scouts having achieved only First Class status. (Steve joined Boy Scouts two years late and so he worked extra hard for the top honor). In order to get an appointment to West Point, you not only have to be smart and high achieving; you have to be “well-rounded,” too. Steve joined all kinds of clubs in high school to make his college resume more attractive and even joined the track team although I don’t think he liked sports very much. He did these things to achieve his goal: West Point and a career as an engineer. Of course he graduated high school with honors and went to the Academy. But Steve never did serve in the Army. However, he did become an electrical engineer and help mid- and upper-level management position in telephone companies and retired at a ridiculously early age, and he and his wife got to travel a lot and to live around water, which they love, including living in the Virgin Islands. Steve had achieved his dreams. Meanwhile, I might have had a vague idea of becoming a teacher, or perhaps that came later—I can’t remember. That summer of high school graduation, I enrolled in community college because there didn’t seem to be any other options. I don’t think I even tried to get into a four-year school. That came later, and graduate school came much later. To make a long story short, I guess this is an essay of contrast, Steve and me. I’d say that Steve long ago embraced the idea of the American Dream, “a dream… in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position." Steve went far because he knew what he wanted and knew how to get it. For me, the good life I’ve been able to live happened more by accident than intention, more by luck than striving. At least that’s the way I see it. Some might say that the American Dream is whatever you want it to be, that it’s all things to all people. I’m not so sure about that. I don’t have any advice for people contemplating their dreams in America. I haven’t earned many credentials in the School of the American Dream. All I have is examples of lives lived.