SAMARA ROBISON 

Transformation to me means change, growth, development.   

Hi Samara Robison, I'm 19 years old and we're in New Canaan in Connecticut. 

I grew up in Westport. I attended Kings Highway Elementary School.  At around third grade, my teachers started to notice that, you know, I was a really smart kid but I wasn't able to put my thoughts on paper. They started giving me an educational test to see if I had a learning disability. What it resulted in is me being diagnosed with ADD. Personally, me and my family, we don't believe I have ADD at all. I actually have dyslexia. But at the time, they weren't diagnosing kids with dyslexia.  

Because I have a learning challenge. They wanted me to be enrolled in this resource program at the Coleytown Middle School, where my classes and class work would be reduced.  And I wasn't going to be allowed to take a language. And at the time I was very passionate in Chinese culture and Chinese language. So, I really wanted to take Mandarin Chinese which they were just starting to offer at Coleytown and they weren't going to allow me to take it so it was a deal breaker. So, my parents started looking into other options. 

My experience at the Montessori Middle School was incredible. They believe that kids need to you know go out into the real world and learn through experience.  So, an eighth-grade trip that we went on was to Tanzania. We got to help a school there. We helped build a library. We donated desks and chairs and a bunch of books. We also built a water well for the school. 

For high school I went to the Center for Global Studies at Brien McMahon High School. It's a language magnet school open to any kids in Fairfield County and I was the only student from Westport. It's just like a melting pot. Everybody's friends and everybody just like loves the fact that it's such a diverse place.  And really, we take a lot of pride in that.  My friend group in high school we call ourselves MCK squared. They were we were composed of two black people, two Asian people, one half Hispanic black person and me, the token white Jewish girl. 

Currently, I'm a student at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. My major is film. My freshman year at Pratt started off really great, and then at the end of the semester, I started getting really sick and I wasn't sleeping. I had like a fast heartbeat. I felt very kind of nauseas and sickly so I decided to go home. I went to the doctor and they gave me a blood test. I had no iron in my blood. So, I had to just stay at home. I was very tired.  So, I kind of missed the end of first semester and I had to miss all my finals.  It put me in a pretty difficult position going into second semester. The summer following second semester, I was in a car accident which caused me to have a concussion. My symptoms from my concussion is aching, nausea, difficulty falling asleep, fatigue, and a consistent feeling of pressure in my head. 

While I've taken this semester off, I've gotten to have an internship with the Bushwick Film Festival and also work as a P.A. on a documentary film. 

Getting the experience to travel in middle school and to China in high school you know I've gotten to see many different ways of life and, through film, I think films are an amazing tool to kind of put people in other people's shoes so that's why I wanted to go into film. Documentary film in particular because I think it's really a great way to educate people on other people's situation. 

I would actually want to make a film about Brien McMahon. It's an amazing program where you can really focus your learning on certain language and culture. And there's travel opportunities and it's really a cool different kind of learning. And I would want to show that film to kids who go to Staples - because I don't think people - and especially probably Staples kids - realize how lucky they are to have such an amazing high school. At Brien McMahon, I couldn't even take a film elective because we didn't have a film elective. And, my senior year they finally had a video class, but the teacher who was teaching the video class was also the teacher for drawing, and AP Art History. So, we don't have the resources like Staples or the opportunities like Staples at Brien McMahon High School. 

My concussion has kind of made me rethink my path. I don't know if I actually want to continue at Pratt because they kind of have a limited - they have limited choices of what kind of courses you can take. So, I'm very interested in political science, but at Pratt I don't have the opportunity to take any courses related to that or also I can't even take a language at Pratt. So those are two things that I really would want to take. I find it crazy how one event - me getting a concussion - totally shifted my path.  But it also opened up a lot of opportunities I wouldn't have been able to experience if I didn't get my concussion.