An Intellectual Friendship

Rochelle Coloma

Blog Post #8

            Throughout my years in elementary school, I did not have much luck in finding friends. I remember moving to a new city and seeing the kids on my street playing with their group of friends or siblings. During the fourth grade, I also remember being partnered up with a girl to teach the “May Day” dance for my class. We began having lunch together and doing the same activities. Since then, we became really good friends and eventually went to the same middle school and high school.

 Out of all my closest friends, I consider our friendship to be different from the rest. I believe it is due to the fact that she has known me the longest and was and still is very understanding when I need to tell her my frustrations or problems. When we were partnered together, we both had strengths in areas that the other might lack in. In one of our final projects, we had to present our chosen poems for our English class. While she focused primarily on the PowerPoint, and I with the research, we struggled in memorizing the long poem we chose. We spent the whole night creating silly cues and hand gestures for us to know all 25 lines. To think back, if I had a different partner, I could not see myself doing the same method my friend and I did as I would feel rather uncomfortable.

My best friend, Rachel, and I are also similar in ways that we are both driven, independent, and come from hard-working families. As we grew older, so did our goals and academic pathways. There was a period of time in our senior year where everything was hectic as college applications and scholarships were coming out. I was often discouraged when I looked for new scholarships knowing that my chances were probably small. Rachel and I were talking after classes one day and asked me how many organizations would I be applying for. I told her two and she had a genuinely shocked face. I reasoned that people like her would likely get the scholarships and so I should not waste my time by applying. She suddenly became serious and told otherwise. She explained to me that my leadership, extra-curricular activities, and job experiences were definitely enough to be a good candidate for scholarships. At that time, I assumed that the high-achieving, smarter, and all-around students would receive every grant or local scholarship.

            For someone that I know who is so smart and tell me of my chances, I trusted Rachel enough to know that she would not lie to me. Throughout that month, I put all my focus on the applications. Having her around was a constant reminder that I had someone always cheering me on and she knew I would be that friend if the roles were somehow to change.  

 At the end, I was awarded enough grants and scholarships for my first year at UH Manoa to be free. Though our experiences as friends may seem purely intellectual, I have gained much more and a lasting friendship.