This past summer, BCS chose five students to participate in an expenses-paid transformative summer wilderness expedition with North Carolina Outward Bound School. As an NYC Outward Bound School, our school gets special opportunities like this and I was so happy to be chosen after attending an info session and submitting an essay about why I wanted to attend and how I would transfer the skills I learned moving forward.
I really enjoyed going camping this summer. It was a really good experience and I would definitely go again. I went on a 9-day course in August, and it included mountain back-packing and rock climbing in the forests of North Carolina.
I enjoyed connecting with other people on my expedition and getting to know them and their stories. The group I was in was very small so it didn’t take us long to know each other. As a group we really supported and comforted each other. We had each other’s backs during the hard times especially when we had long hikes and some of us, including me, had a challenging time keeping up.
My course instructors Meg and Seb did an awesome job of making sure we had everything we needed from start to finish and helped us jump into certain challenges that most of us had never done before. Meg was really helpful because she created a safe environment for me to talk with her about anything. She was not judgmental. She helped me develop my confidence during rock climbing when I didn’t trust my feet and pushed me to overcome my fear of heights.
The camping trip was hard in other ways. You couldn’t take a shower and you had to use the bathroom outside, but that’s something I got used to as the days went on. What I learned from going on the amazing trip was to be open-minded to everything around me, be grateful of the things I had, and to never give up. Like the motto of Outward Bound, “there is more in you than you know,” I kept pushing until I reached the end because life will be difficult sometimes but you just have to keep trusting yourself. You can do anything if you put your mind to it, and I hope you will consider applying for the summer scholarship next year!
