With the purpose of (later in the Final Essay) connecting it to the issues, events, and ideas in American history.
Consider the following as you construct your essay:
Family can be just your parents and sisters and brothers or it can include extended family like grandparents, aunts/uncles, cousins, etc., but it can also include other people who have had such a significant role in your life that they have become your family (or you have become their family).
Your community can be the neighborhood where you grew up, the places you have lived, gone to school, worked, etc., and your friends and other people you have various relationships with in those places. But community can also be any group of people that you share something in common with who are important to you or that had an impact on your life. Types of communities could include racial/ethnic/language, gender/sexual orientation, religious, political, medical/disability, sports/recreation, art/music, other lifestyle/interests/hobbies, etc.
Your individual experiences can include anything from ordinary, everyday experiences that shaped your life over a long period of time to major life-changing one-time events that reshaped your life all at once. These can be good experiences, bad experiences, and all kinds of experiences in between. Usually, your family, your communities, and your individual experiences are all intertwined and overlapping, but sometimes they can impact your life separately.
Questions to Consider
How important is family in your life? How much do you know about your parents, grandparents, or other ancestors experiences before you were born? What roles did your immediate family and extended family play in your childhood, in your adolescence, and as an adult?
How important are the communities you belong to in your life? Which communities have shaped your identity in the most important ways? Which communities or parts of your identity have changed over time?
Which individual experiences have had the biggest impact on you? Have your day-to-day experiences been more important? Or have larger, more significant specific experiences been more important? Are your most important experiences connected to your family or communities? Or have they been separate experiences?