The participant requested that he be referred to only as Bob for the purposes of this article. I would now like to summarize Bob's life as you would see it in a newspaper account. Bob is a forty-one year old supervisor at a well-known factory. He has a wife and three children in his nuclear family. Bob identifies as agnostic, although he was raised Christian, and has no specific political alliance as he believes the current government is dominated by extremes on both sides and finds the system to be breeze. He lives in rural Illinois and his socioeconomic status is middle class. I've always felt that these types of summaries don't adequately capture a person's true identity. I think you have to hear a person’s story to understand who they are. A turning point in his life will be the moment when he makes the decision to obtain his diploma. I don't actually get the degree, I just decide to do it. He realized that his past experience meant nothing and that he needed to make a change to better provide for his family. He seems to be proud of having achieved this goal without anyone telling him he had to, but it was his own motivation that pushed him to achieve it. A positive experience from his childhood would be when his third grade teacher, Mrs. Thomas, would tell him that he was a very good writer. Bob notes that although he has never written a book, he is still proud of his writing abilities, citing his ability to write a book. English paper the night before and I always get an “A”. A negative childhood memory that still haunts Bob is when a girl in middle school who he wanted to ask to be his girlfriend rejected him in a public and humiliating mansion. He looks back now and notes that it was simply "kids being kids", but nevertheless, middle of paper...... identified or desired social interaction, these aspects of his personality were are developed over time. Through his life experiences and the way he interpreted them, he developed a way of approaching and understanding the world. It seems obvious to me now that our personalities are more than our initial reactions to life, they are shaped by our experiences. Bob's experiences show profound and significant changes throughout his life that I had not fully recognized prior to this analysis. The change that college had on him, as well as meeting his wife, seemed so tiny to me, something common that most people have experienced. But for him, these were earth-shattering, life-changing things. I understood better who Bob is thanks to this mission. I now fully understand that the way people perceive their own lives is complicated and highlights aspects of their lives that one would not expect..