Head Over Heart free essay sample

5:30 am. I wake up with the alarm and start to get ready for school.. Everybody else in the house is sleeping; they will wake up in about an hour. I rush to be on time because if I am late again I will miss school. After putting on my uniform I hear my ninety-one years-old grandmother ringing her bell, so I go to her bedroom. She wants to change her position on bed, and since she can’t do it herself I turn her. Then I carefully check my parents’ bedroom to see if the noise woke them. Fortunately it didnt, probably because they stayed up late, taking care of my little sister and my grandmother. I smile because I know that those thirty minutes that they still have to sleep will improve their mood for the rest of the day. While I’m brushing my teeth, getting ready to leave, my dad wakes up and goes to my bedroom to wake up my sister. We will write a custom essay sample on Head Over Heart or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page I hope today he doesnt give up like yesterday and let her miss another day of school, but I know how tired both of them must be. I say goodbye and leave, wishing that this weekend my father gets a gig, since last month he didnt make any money, a common occurrence on his freelancer job. He seems okay, but I know that he feels worried with all the debts we have: electricity bill, telephone bill – one more month and they will cut it off, – apartment taxes, my sister’s old school’s bills, and all the bank loans we accumulated. After closing the door I remember that today is one of the long days: I will be back around 7:00 pm, after a tiring day of classes in my two schools. I feel tired in advance, but I ignore this feeling and walk confidently to the street to face the day. After all, I chose to attend two schools at the same time because I know that my hard work is the best way to achieve the security my parents don’t have. This was my routine during the three years of high school. Classes in the morning from Monday through Saturday, and in the afternoon three days a week, responsibilities at home that went beyond the regular house chores, including taking care of my grandmother and my little sister, doing grocery shopping, and sometimes going to pay a bill at the bank, plus a constant apprehension about my family’s present and future finances. All that made me more mature than most of my friends my age and gave me one certainty about my future: I had to make money in my career. I know that most people say that we should follow our dreams when choosing a career because if we do what we love we will eventually be successful and well paid, but I don’t buy it. Both my parents did that and, despite the fact that they love their jobs, they didn’t have the means to raise three kids without acquiring huge debts and an insecure future. My mother was a dancer, a circus artist, an acrobatics teacher for kids, and a Pilates instructor. My father was a sound engineer. Neither of them had a retirement plan, so my brother and I were responsible for the family’s income after they stopped working. I don’t complain about that. They did the best they could to provide us the best life possible, and I’m grateful for that. But I knew since I was fifteen that I didn’t want to follow the same path and struggle to support my future family. Even though I chose the money path while choosing my career I also tried to find a job that I would enjoy. Since I never had a dream job I analyzed every possibility in a search to reconcile financial security and an interesting career. My only dream was to have a regular salary in a secure job, so I thought about being a lawyer, a professor, a government employee, a computer programmer, a businessman, an engineer, and even an airplane pilot. Still, after lots of thinking, there I was: eighteen years-old, in my senior y ear, with great grades at school, constantly being greeted by teachers, friends, and family with phrases like â€Å"you can do whatever you want!† or â€Å"it’s up to you, you can do it!† and yet I had no idea of what to do for living. At that time I couldn’t imagine that I would end up where I am today. I had to give up having fun on my work in order to live a comfortable life, but now I can look back with no regrets. All that being said, you are now ready to understand my life. This is not a simple compilation of facts, but a story about how a value that I carried with me since my adolescence – financial security as a priority – affected all the decisions I made since my first year in high school: applying to two of the best federal public schools in Brazil, being accepted both in the academical and in the technical one, studying abroad for a year with the main objective of learning English, and choosing between going to college in the U.S. or in my home country. It’s a story about all the â€Å"whys† behind significant decisions I made in my life that might seem contradictory or even wrong to most people. I hope it makes you understand me and maybe rethink decisions you make in your life. Enjoy it.

Individual Adaptations Versus Population Evolution

Individual Adaptations Versus Population Evolution One common misconception about evolution is the idea that individuals can evolve, but they can only accumulate adaptations that help them survive in an environment. While it is possible for these individuals in a species to mutate and have changed made to their  DNA, evolution is a term specifically defined by the change in DNA of the majority of a population. In other words, mutations or adaptations do not equal evolution. There are no species alive today that have individuals that live long enough to see all of the evolution happen to its species- a new species may diverge from an existing species’ lineage, but this was a build up of new traits over a long period of time and did not happen instantaneously. So if individuals cannot evolve on their own, how then does evolution occur? Populations evolve through a process known as natural selection which allows individuals with beneficial traits for survival to breeding with other individuals who share those traits, eventually leading to offspring who only exhibit those superior traits. Understanding Populations, Evolution, and Natural Selection In order to understand why individual mutations and adaptations are not in and of themselves evolutionary, its important to first understand the core concepts behind evolution and population studies.  Ã‚   Evolution is defined as a change in the inheritable characteristics of a population of several successive generations while a population is defined as a group of individuals within a single species that live in the same area and can interbreed. Populations of individuals in the same species have a collective gene pool in which all future offspring will draw their genes from, which allows natural selection to work on the population and determine which individuals are more â€Å"fit† for their environments. The aim is to increase those favorable traits in the gene pool while weeding out the ones that not favorable; natural selection cannot work on a single individual because there are not competing traits in the individual to choose between. Therefore, only populations can evolve using the mechanism of natural selection. Individual Adaptations as a Catalyst for Evolution This isnt to say that these individual adaptations do not play a role in the process of evolution within a population- in fact, mutations that benefit certain individuals may result in that individual being more desirable for mating, increasing the likelihood of that particular beneficial genetic trait in the collective gene pool of the population. Over the course of several generations, this original mutation could affect the entire population, eventually resulting in offspring only being born with this beneficial adaptation that one individual in the population had out of some fluke of the animals conception and birth. For instance, if a new city was built on the edge of the natural habitat of monkeys that had never been exposed to human life and one individual in that population of monkeys were to mutate to be less afraid of human interaction and could therefore interact with the human population and perhaps get some free food, that monkey would become more desirable as a mate and would pass those docile genes onto its offspring. Eventually, the offspring of that monkey and that monkeys offspring would overwhelm the population of formerly feral monkeys, creating a new population that had evolved to be more docile and trusting of their new human neighbors.