The Unexpected Perspective

By Carl Hill Jr.

Teamwork makes the dream work. Several life events took me in unanticipated directions. I had to decide whether to dive into the new challenges and enjoy the ride or remain stagnant and let opportunities and experiences pass me by. This story examines fresh perspective I gained by taking chances, making mistakes, and embracing the messiness of life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Nov 8, 2015
• ISBN: 9781682226322

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Everyone Has a Choice

On the eve of my senior year of college, I sat on the office floor of my third successful internship my junior year of college crying like a full-grown child while talking on the phone to my mother. At the time I wasn’t even sure what I was so upset about and I could barely gather the words to express how I felt. What I did know was that I was uncomfortable. After three years of working in different corporate internships every summer since entering college I had finally reached my limit.

I didn’t enjoy having to meet the expectations of others. I cared less about having to do certain things in order to achieve goals and tasks that I didn’t fully believe in. I really didn’t enjoy having to conform to different social settings on a daily basis and feeling like I was someone other than myself day after day. That day in the office I walked out of a meeting where I was speaking and talking about thing I had no interest in just to seem unique to clients and other co-workers in the room. At one point I caught my reflection on the glass doors in the room and my face didn’t match the words that were coming out of my mouth.

I can’t. I just can’t do it anymore, Mom, I said in a slow, muffled voice. I don’t feel like a real person. I just can’t do it.

As my superhuman mother had done for my siblings and me throughout our lives, she gave me a simple yet powerful response. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. As long as I’m here, you’ll always have a choice. Never let anyone tell you what you need or should do. Come home, son.

In that moment, the course of my life changed for the better. I had a subtle realization and confidence that I had total control of my life. It was almost as if I had forgotten this simple truth. It was a truth I was very aware of as an adolescent but seemed to forget in my early twenties. After that experience, I wanted to regain that power for my life.

Since I first started out in school, I had excelled at everything. I had this unearthly desire to be first, to be better than everyone, to never fail. I wanted to win every footrace, every competition, every contest, and get better grades than everyone around me. I was rewarded constantly for these accomplishments, and that feeling of self-confidence drove me to push myself continually to become better.

My only shortcoming was that I didn’t hit my growth spurt until I was seventeen, so my size was always a challenge. I circumvented that obstacle by learning to talk myself out of virtually any situation, even if it meant degrading someone to the point that he or she felt inhuman. Thankfully, I learned to use that talent more for good than for bad. Nevertheless, it served as a defense mechanism when I met with authority. Those experiences prompted several learning opportunities on how to get what I wanted no matter the circumstances. The key was understanding my opponents, as I tended to regard other people, and appealing to their strengths so that those very assets became their greatest weaknesses.

Being the only boy of five children, split between two families, didn’t affect me as much as one would expect. My mother said often that I appeared oblivious to our atypical family structure and thrived where most would have faltered. My grandmothers on both sides of each family taught me a great deal and sheltered me from any ill intentions or feelings that could have been brought about from the outside. Being the only boy had its perks in the sense that everyone wanted me to be the best man I could be, so they taught me how to do things right, as they saw it in their eyes.

I studied my grandparents closely—their actions, reactions, emotions, suggestions, and everything they said and taught in regard to relationships, especially with females. At a young age, I developed the ability to relate to women of all ages. Being coddled by both grandmothers and being my mother’s only son, not to mention the brother of four sisters, it was almost inevitable.

My mother made it clear to us early on that each of her children would be college educated and achieve more than she was able to do for us. She made many sacrifices for my sisters and me so we would be able to go away to school. Even with the full tuition scholarship that the incredible Posse Foundation provided for me, a number of expenses were still required, which I didn’t discover out until I got to college.

Once you turn eighteen, you’re grown and on your own, my mother told us whenever we thought we were old enough to talk back to her, disrespect her, or ignore a direct order. This phrase stuck with me and changed my thought process when it came to decision making once I did turn eighteen. Although I understood this and worked continually to be independent in my own right, that phone call to my mother humbled me and put a lot of things into perspective—particularly how tough life really was and how it was nearly impossible to make it on my own.

The Posse Foundation was instrumental to my success before and after university. Their selection process is quite interesting. It includes three DAPS or group interviews with a select number of high school seniors throughout the city of Chicago. During the DAPS, we performed mostly group tasks while being evaluated by Posse Foundation staff. The first two DAPS were group-heavy. They evaluated how well we worked in teams, our reactions to certain things, and our thought processes.

They never really told us exactly how they decided who would return for the next interview, but we knew they were looking to form a posse of ten students who, when combined, would make for a cohesive team able to support each other throughout college. The foundation had connections with colleges and universities throughout America. For Chicago, we could choose between select colleges in the Midwest and one in California. My particular pool of schools included the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, DePauw, and Denison. I wanted to stay in Illinois and go to a big school, but if selected, the program leaders would place me where they thought I would be most successful based on their evaluation.

As a full-tuition leadership-based scholarship, interest in the opportunity was strong. The final interview, which involved the top twenty students, dressed in nice clothing meeting with university officials and Posse leadership, was when everyone began to realize the concept of the posse and the uniqueness of the opportunity. It was nerve-wracking, because everyone in the room knew that only half of us would be chosen.

The idea for the organization sprouted from when the founding president was speaking with college dropouts and they said to her, If only I had my posse with me, I never would have dropped out of college. From there, the idea and the organization took form and began sending groups of ten to twelve students to attend and, more importantly, finish university together.

I was fortunate enough to outlast several very talented students and join a posse filled with ten other absolutely astonishing individuals who would have a huge impact on my life. The final group was so outstanding that the foundation took eleven instead of the traditional ten students. It was that difficult to decide.

Before attending university, we had three months of training three times a week after school in downtown Chicago. We discussed social issues, did team bonding activities, and began to understand how we could work together to make our university experience as powerful as possible. Two trainers led my posse. Each week, they challenged us to think deeply about our fellow posse members and ourselves. Since we were still in high school, we bumped heads sometimes on ideas and actions, but in the end, we always came together to support one another, because we were not just a family, we were a posse.

The preparation before arriving at school helped us to form bonds and understand each other, allowing us to flourish as friends and posse members while at school. Throughout my time at DePauw University I leaned on and turned to my posse on a weekly basis. This bond only grew deeper and stronger as we matured and endured countless hardships and successes together. Being able to arrive at university with ten friends, all with different backgrounds and interests but who I already knew well and could talk to during those awkward getting to know you meet-and-greets that universities have for students made the adjustment a lot easier. It expanded our networks and resources, because even though we were all very different, we knew and supported one another. My posse was definitely a huge part of my success in school and a major reason I was able to finish.

Posse Luv!

The Road to University

My first day at college was one of the most dreadful days I had experienced during my collegiate life, had finally come to pass. The day the potential costs for books and the process we had to go through to find our books in bookstores or rummaging through online search engines was released was when everything became all too real for me. Being located in the middle of nowhere didn’t help either. It only stifled our already limited resources. I had four classes, with an average of four books per class, bringing the total to nearly $600, with only a day or two after class schedules were released to purchase the necessary books. That amount nearly surpassed all of my savings and ensured that all I would be able to afford to do was go to class, study, shower, and brush my teeth every other day.

Mother’s ever-present words, Once you turn eighteen, you’re grown and on your own, reminded me that where there’s a will, there’s a way. I needed to figure out how to make the best out of a difficult situation.

I took on every job, every hustle, and every opportunity that came my way. Through many of these avenues, I met some unforgettable people and learned the ins and outs of how to survive college life without calling home every other week. I can’t lie and say I never made that call, because I did, but only after all of my other resources were exhausted, and even then I never expected much, just enough to be sure I wasn’t completely up the creek without a paddle.

The first year was the hardest, because I wasn’t aware of all of the shortcuts and corner cutting in which all of the upperclassmen were so well versed. Inter-library loans, book rental websites, and copy machines became my saving grace and saved me literally thousands of dollars over the next three years of school.

Outside of the standard hardships, my first year of college started off with an unexpected and unwanted turn. As I sat in my tiny room, playing video games with my good friend from New York (I think we were playing Resistance, Fall of Man) I received a text from my fellow posse member Anajah letting us know that

Reviews for The Unexpected Perspective

[Buzzread01 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

It feels like you're a part of the story and it really engages with you the more you read it

[Teacher 1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

It was an interesting read to say the least. Through the novel the actor aims to address perspective change through experience. Would recommend for college and graduate students, as well as a person who's ever learned from an experience that were very much opposed to.