Lewis and Clark College My name is Joe Chojnacki. I am twenty-one years old. If that seems old, let me tell you that I am just like you, only in a bigger body. You see, when I was about your age I made a promise to myself never to grow old and boring. When I was little my family moved around a lot. I got to live in really cool places, like West Africa, India, and Egypt. When I came to Portland, Oregon to go to college it was actually my first year of school in the United States. So even though I'm an American, I hardly know my own country. I got to see lots of other great places, though. What I loved about the countries we lived in were the different sides of nature I got to see. Where I lived in West Africa, for example, everything was desert. The ground was cracked because it was so dry and hot. In Pakistan, we lived right on the beach. Besides the normal fun you have at a beach we got to watch endangered sea turtles lay their eggs. Every place I went I saw new sides of the natural world. Now I'm going to the Turks and Caicos Islands to explore another type of system: the marine world. I'm interested in it because it is so different from land. We're all very familiar with how things work on land, but there's still so much to learn about life in the ocean. When it comes down to it, my decisions are based on having fun. I expect to have a great time on my trip. Of course there will be lots of work involved, but it will be so interesting that it'll hardly seem like work. Learning can be a lot of fun as long as you do it in the right way, and I think this trip is the right way for me.
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Joseph Chojnacki