Dear Reader

When I first found out that we were going to be able to pick whatever book we wanted I was ecstatic. I immediately knew that I wanted to read Crank by Ellen Hopkins. It's a book that I have heard about for years now but I never got around to actually reading it. I'm very happy that I did.

After reading Crank I was unsure about what I wanted to research. I had a couple of things in mind; teenage drug use, sexual assault in high school, personality disorder, etc. It wasn’t after a couple of suggestions that I decided that I would research the “success culture”.  I found out that “success culture” can have many different meanings so I went with the meaning that made the most sense to me which was; a young adult’s culture that leaves them wanting to strive for success while being surrounded by people that challenge you. I thought that this was very hard to research. I couldn’t find any data on success culture so I had to go with big ideas. I researched what comes with wanting to be “perfect”.

So I started looking up depression in high school and suicides in college. I found out that all of these things had a similar cause; success. All of these people were beaten down by the need to succeed that they had just given up. The pressure became unmanageable. They felt like their peers were superior and that they couldn’t compete.

I’m happy with the outcome. At first I was really confused because I did not know what I could do with so little research. I feel like my topic is really broad so it was hard trying to pin point on one thing that I wanted to research. I feel like I stressed all of the things that I thought were the most important. I really wanted to show that the affects that the society puts on young adults can life threatening.

My golden thread is my college. I have always been told that a picture is a thousand words and I feel like the pictures that I used represent the success culture perfectly. With my collage I wanted to show what the success culture can do to a person, where it is most likely resides, and how people cope with all of the stress.

Overall, I’m very happy with the topic that I chose. The further I went with the project the more I started to understand what I was doing. At first I was a little confused with my topic but as time went on I started to get into the hang of things.