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Three Things Milton Hershey School Has Taught Me Before Graduation

By Gabriel Rojas Gomez ’20

1) It is important to embrace the desert.

If there’s one mentality we can take away from our days at Milton Hershey School, it is to embrace the desert.

A quote from Charles R. Swindoll says, “In life, things are 10 percent what happens to you and 90 percent how you react to it.

There have been many obstacles and lessons we have had to overcome during our time at MHS. Problems that no other school could understand besides Milts. We could have easily quit and threw in the towel when things got hard, but instead, we embraced the dry spells and the adversity. We embraced the challenge to fuel us to where we are now.

2) We are a lot tougher than we think we are.

Our minds become sharpened and our mentalities change through hardships. We have all been at a low point before. We have lost motivation. We have hit rock bottom and that can be a strong foundation. It helps us to rethink and realize that we can not control what comes in our way. But, we can control our outcome. We make the decision to quit or to keep going forward with all of our might.

There are days where all of us wanted to quit. There are days where we wanted to pack up and go home. As you go through hardships in life, your mentality changes. It changes from getting through to getting from. Instead of “I need to get through this,” it became “What can I get from this?” It goes from counting the days, to making the days count. It is the growth mentality and always challenging ourselves to be better. Our minds were sharpened throughout our time at MHS and we have become trailblazers because of it through the lessons learned.

The Milton Hershey School basketball team.

3) We have become unstoppable.

Aristotle once said that “We are what we repeatedly do.” Therefore, excellence is a habit, not an act. You look at everything we have accomplished throughout our years at MHS; all of the championships, recognition, awards, and honors were not because of luck. It did not happen overnight. It happened because of habits. We built a strong foundation. It happened with arriving early every day. It happened with challenging yourself to be the best that you can be every single day. I learned that good enough isn’t good enough. When we learned these habits and put them together, the mentality we have built is unstoppable.

Do not ever hinder yourself by striving to be normal. Nobody who has ever strived to be normal has been excellent. We will meet with failure. We will meet the challenges and obstacles. It is up to us if these obstacles and lessons will overcome us or if we will overcome them. MHS is a place for the strong and that is why we are called Spartans.

Milton Hershey School does not discriminate in admissions or other programs and services on the basis of race, color, national or ethnic origin, ancestry, sex, religious creed or disability. Read important MHS policies on equal opportunity and diversity, equal employment opportunity, and more.