Autobiography

      Hey, guys, it’s Sean.  I’m 22 years old and live in Southern California. I’m a pretty cool person to hang out with and very easy to get along with. I love hanging out with my family and friends  the majority of the time.   As some of you might know, if you’ve ever met my family, I was adopted at the age of 11 months from Seoul Korea. I have a loving mother and father and one brother and two sisters.  It’s pretty amazing to think that I ended up here, out of all the places in the world.  Could there be another place be better than living here in Southern California with such a loving, caring family?

Over the past 22 years I’ve come to learn, understand and accept that the way in which I learn is going to be different than others. While struggling with being severely ADHD, along with the frustration of a visual and auditory processing disorder, I find learning in large environments to be very distracting.  It’s not the best situation in which I learn. Because of this, I would personally find myself lost in the teacher’s lesson and become bored and quickly distracted by the things around me. While not understanding what is going on, I would be too shy to ask the teacher about what I wasn’t able to understand.  I the feared kids and teachers would think I’m stupid for constantly not understanding. Having been put in special resource in elementary school, I found it more frustrating to be pulled out of class for special tutoring and having to be away from friends at times in which I did not want.  Having not ever really been made fun of for having learning disabilities in elementary school, I was very fortunate. Many kids with LD are made fun of and ridiculed for their learning disabilities

During middle school at MBMS, I found myself more frustrated than ever with school and learning.  There would be times in which I would call my mom asking her to pick me up from school because I was so frustrated in the class room.  I would break down and cry, especially when I was in the 7th grade. It wasn’t until then that my mom realized how terribly far behind I was compared to my fellow classmates. Having been lied to by the school district. I was pulled out of MBMS and was enrolled at a school in Culver City, called Summit View.  I wasn’t exactly happy with the decision to switch schools, and having to leave all my friends.  I can remember what one of my friends told me, it helped me a lot, about what this change of schools might mean to me.  It was, “He told me to not be sad, but think about it as getting to know new people”

I remember starting my new school.  To even make things worse, I was made to ride a twinke bus for the first three years. This made me feel special, having a small bus show up at my house in the morning and dropping me off in the afternoon. For the most part, I was no longer getting frustrated with my schoolwork.  I found that with a smaller classroom environment, I was able to ask the questions that I needed to be able to understand what was going on.  I no longer felt intimidated by my fellow classmates thinking I was stupid since we all shared something in common. We all suffered form some sort of learning disability.  Over the next five years I continued to go to Summit View.  I did not return to my local high school until my junior year in high school.  I did dual enrollment during my junior and senior years of high school.

School will always be difficult for me and nothing is going to change that. Now that I have finally made it through high school, I can now concentrate on a new beginning and start to enrolling in the classes that interest me. One of my favorite quotes goes something like this.

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward you can only connect them looking backwards so you have to trust in something your guts, destiny,  life,  karma, whatever.  Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well worn path, and that will make all the difference”.

Right now, I’m currently going to school and majoring in architecture. So far I’ve been at El Camino College for the past three years since graduating high school in ‘06.  Slowly but surely I’m making my way through college.  I hope to transfer to a Cal State someday.  With my brother being a Landscape Architect and my Dad being a general contractor, I’ve grown to love and appreciate the fine details which are put into buildings.

I love technology and reading all about the newest gadgets.