I'm Thankful for ACES

Hello my name is Roland Dewonou and I’m a senior at Clarksburg high school. I’ve always been involved in school activities but ACES has given me the confidence to do even more. Like most high school kids, I have had a very active social life participating in sports, clubs, and scholars programs. I also have a passion for the arts so I’m on the Latin dance team and I’m in chorus but I’ve also experienced some hardships. My sophomore year of high school my grades started dropping drastically. I didn’t know where to go to for help and no one seemed to notice so I stayed quite, however towards the end of the year my counselor told me about a new program called ACES. She thought I could benefit from what the program had to offer. I met up with the ACES coordinator along with a few other kids who were told about the program. In this meeting I learned that the ACES program would not only help me keep my grades up but also prepare for college and life after high school. It sounded like just what I needed so I applied and was accepted. We learned leadership skills and learned to work together as a team to complete tasks while having fun. During my junior year we had a lot of workshops, from the Do’s and Don’ts of interviews to the importance of organization and punctuality to applying to different kids of scholarships. All things that I honestly was terrible at. The summer before senior year we had another summer program but this one focused more on what to expect going into college and how to best prepare myself. That was a real eye opener because it hit me that I was about to be a senior applying to college. ACES gave us many tools like College Greenlight, Khan Academy, Shmoop and workshops on resume writing. Those four alone have opened so many doors for me. I came into senior year with a list of about 12 Colleges and Ms. Thomas, the ACES coordinator, at Clarksburg helped me narrow that list down to 7. I’ve been applying to many scholarships and I’ve gotten a good amount from schools. I feel like I’m more prepared for college than most people because I hear them talking about not knowing where to start looking for scholarships and not knowing deadlines and such. I’m very thankful for ACES.