Strawberry Season by Emma

Strawberry Season by Emma - January 2017 Scholarship Essay

The annual period from the beginning of May to the beginning of June is a critical and significant time in Greek Creek, New Jersey: strawberry season. Beside my house, my family has a small farm where we grow crops to sell at the roadside. We typically have peppers, tomatoes, watermelon, cantaloupe, and much more. At the time when the school year is coming to a close, a majority of the fields are covered in rows upon rows of strawberry plants. I am confident, and I know many other people will agree, that the berries from these plants are the juiciest and sweetest that I have ever tasted.
When I was younger I would stamp around barefoot in the dirt and pick piles of berries, eating them until my fingers and lips were blushed pink. As the years elapsed, I became exponentially busier with homework and after school sports or activities until my strawberry munching was limited to weekend occasions. Entering high school, I accepted responsibility on the weekends through my involvement with more competitive athletic teams, rigorous study groups, and my abundant community service endeavors; additionally, the month of May annually leaves me almost overloaded with the onset of the AP Testing.
In regards to my societal involvement in high school, I specifically was committed to raising money for the American Cancer Society through my township’s Relay For Life Event, which occurs annually on the first Saturday of June. My freshmen year I was Team Captain of a group of forty girls, and sophomore year I continued to hold that position but increased my workload by taking on the role of Event Co-Chair. As second in command for the entire event, I was told that we had fallen far behind our team fundraising goals. On my way home from one particular meeting, I was brainstorming fundraising ideas while nibbling on some early-in-the-season berries that my mother had picked. As I was savoring one of my favorite tastes, I was struck with the realization that people from southern New Jersey would donate just about anything for fresh, ripe strawberries. That afternoon, I trucked buckets into the field and picked for several hours. Then I bagged the berries by the bucket and had about a dozen full brown paper bags by the time I was finished. The next day, I brought them into school and peddled them for a raised price of four dollars each, in order to make profit for Relay. I sold out by sixth period.
Over the following weeks I enlisted family members and friends alike to come and help me pick berries—I was coming home from school with pre-orders from students, teachers, and administrators for up to ten bags each. I sat in the field with my AP Computer Science textbook open to pages about looping as I collected infinite bowls of fruit. The same project was continued last spring, the spring of my junior year, and I was instead reading up on AP Chemistry, AP Language and Composition, AP Statistics, and AP US History while harvesting strawberries. In total, we estimated that we were able to raise nearly a thousand dollars, once the small cost to the farm was deducted.
While I recognize that the American Cancer Society will not make millions of dollars by selling brown bags full of strawberries, I was proud to have made a contribution to this worthwhile cause with my own original idea and execution. One of the most meaningful parts of the whole experience, however, was when I picked, washed, and bagged several quarts of strawberries and delivered them with my mother, a breast cancer survivor, to the patients receiving chemotherapy at the treatment center my mother used to dread going to. I was greeted by warm smiles of all ages and backgrounds, some with hair and some without, as I passed out ripe fruit in the waiting room. The most important lesson that I learned was how valuable service to your community can be, no matter how small it may seem.