Who Am I

Okay, so who am I?
I would be remiss to try to delve into the deep answers to what makes me the person without listing some of the more superficial answers to that question first. My name is Clayton Perry. I am a young man, I am a teenager. I'm a fifth generation Washingtonian. I'm the grandson of a rocket scientist who is my namesake and I am the son of two eccentric and dedicated people.

As far as background, I spent a good deal of my life growing up in neighborhoods I wasn't allowed to walk down the street in. My parents called themselves "urban pioneers," and would move into nearly gutted houses in a bad neighborhood to fix them up while we lived in them. We would then move on to the next house and rent out the previous one. In contrast to this, I commuted to the same private school for my entire education before college. Some of my classmates were related to movers and shakers of Washington, D.C., while others, like myself, were well-off but lucky to get into this school. I learned that my grandfather had gotten me a letter of recommendation from the previous head of school that supplemented my application for kindergarten, which was reviewed along with my interview. Letters of recommendation and interviews for a four-year-old. It still sounds ridiculous to me, and as I learned these things in my adolescence it made me wonder about whether I had really earned my spot where I was. I tried to prove this wrong by taking AP tests or trying to out perform my classmates, while attempting to give the impression that I did no work at all. I wanted to embrace the culture of the neighborhoods I lived in to appear more disadvantaged than I was while still performing at this level, and took risks for no reason but to give off an impression I thought would be impressive. I don't think that I had a "passion" until I hit the 11th grade.

Going into my junior year of high school I had elected to take my school's only course in economics. The teacher was renowned for being fantastic but the class was for being very hard, and I took it out of hope for challenge and the outward appearance of taking on a challenge. I soon fell in love with the course, between the material and the presentation. The teacher did a fantastic job of keeping the class engaged while the course material seemed just so logical and applicable. I excelled among my classmates and made it my goal to go into banking a make a lot of money. It did not seem like a noble goal, but a fun one and that it would be good for my future children, so it was acceptable to be somewhat selfish in it. By the end of the year I felt brilliant and was looking forward to taking the same teacher's class in Environmental History and Philosophy the next year as an easy A for senior year.

That class flipped me on my head. It broadened my perspective to try to encompass all of the people that would be effected by my actions as well as the systems that guide our society. I wanted to save the world, and still do. More than people, I do want to save the world overall. I empathize for the people in the near future that may be effected terribly by the climate change I believe we are causing as a population. At the same time, I'm very comforted by the fact that the world will live on after us. Worst disasters have happened to the planet and worse have yet to come, yet the planet lives on, even if we don't. That aside, I do have a vested interest in our species continuing to live and doing so sustainably, and that has become my passion and my charge in college and hopefully my career.