My family has always been one that put education above everything else.  To this day, my parents believe that an education is the key to being successful.  Having come from China with next to nothing, they had to work long hours to put my brother and I through school.  Both of us were good students, but we were never really that invested into our schoolwork.  We looked to make our parent’s lives easier by making money on our own, but that wasn’t that well received when my brother made the decision to not attend college. Every one of my relatives have all gone on to graduate college and that was probably what pressured my parents to want a child who has done the same.  For a long time, family gatherings were not easy for them because of him.  Everyone would talk about how he threw away his life and will never reach his potential.

Looking back now, my relatives could not have been more wrong since he is now more successful than anyone else in the family.  He had given up a chance to attend college to pursue own business and I was to follow in his footsteps coming out of high school.  The only reason I ended up attending college was because I felt like I owed it to my parents since I was not exactly the greatest kid.  They still think that me investing this time to school will make a big difference in what I will make down the line, but if they truly understood what I had to give up to commit these 4 more years to school, they may have felt differently.  Just as when my brother made his decision, they may not have felt the same if they knew what he would go on to achieve.