I’m Jason Ketchum, twenty years old and turning twenty-one in a couple weeks on May 4. I’ve been raised by my mother alone, to whom I owe everything. I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio and lived there for only a couple years I don’t remember. My mother and I then moved to Los Angeles, where I attended kindergarten. Then I moved up north near San Francisco, where my father lived, and made my first friend there, in the town of Tiburon, Marin County. After a couple years, my mother and I moved back to Los Angeles, where I’ve since stayed.
I graduated from Beverly Hills High School and went to Santa Monica Community College, after having been rejected from every college I applied to. That occurred for various personal reasons, and a lack of motivation to try and succeed. That, and I didn’t believe in safety schools. I stayed for the 2013 Fall Semester to the 2014 Summer Semester, and was then accepted as a 2015 Spring Semester transfer student to USC. It remains passing strange that I’ve somehow managed to graduate college in what? 2.5 years? And receiving this award has made it even more astounding.
I still really haven’t acclimated to USC, to where I feel I belong here, and yet I’m almost already done, and with honors. That is not to say I’m not grateful for being accepted to the school, and winning this award. But still, I feel like I’m wearing shoes a bit too big and expensive for me, a drifter who’s not quite at ease with everything and himself. Even this little statement here seems odd writing; I hope it doesn’t come across as being egotistical, obsequious, or any combination of the both, as I find I end up being. In truth, I just feel a bit embarrassed writing about myself in such a way. This scrap of myself I attempt to outline is the solipsistic speech I give when I’m alone, and imagining someone just asked me to autobiograph myself. It’s very sketchy, in several senses of the word. In the end, I really don’t want winning an award to get to my head too much. I’m already a little grossed out by what I just wrote, but I don’t want to try again. Thanks for reading, and I hope this statement comes across exactly as I hope it will.
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