Scholarship Essay Entry – Lisa A.

Turn on your T.V. In the next 30 second, watch the images that come on the screen and flood your mind. If what came on was a person, I can almost guarantee that they were to the standard the media has set for 'beautiful'. ...unrealistically and un-diversely, 'beautiful'.

These are the images, the people and the standards of beauty that our young adolescent girls and boys are being bombarded with. It makes perfect sense why 40% of girls in grade ten perceive themselves as too fat, and why 4% of boys in the same grade reported using anabolic steroids in a 2002 study. (According to the National Eating Disorder Information Center (nedic.ca)).

Come September 8th, I will be attending Red Deer College enrolled in the Bachelor of Arts program majoring in Psychology. Through this program I will be educated on topics such as how the media can alter view points and opinions of human beings, especially those of young minds.

But I am at an age where I am aware of the misconstrued and retouched people of 'beauty' in the media; and how unrealistic it is for society to hold such standards.
...But does a young girl or boy in grade 8 know this? No, most likely not.

Therefore my ambition is to take my education and apply it to creating media awareness programs and self-confidence workshops. These workshops would then be interactively presented in our schools through-out Alberta.

I have already begun implementing workshops such as this in the community figure skating club at which I coach. I teach my skaters what healthy eating habits are and explain what a healthy weight range is for them at their age. I also make it clear that what is a healthy weight, may not be the same as what the media portrays as 'beautiful'. But I am there to tell them, to show them, and to make themselves believe that they are beautiful, no matter what size, shape or race they are.

If I can create and bring these types of workshops into a school setting, I can begin raising awareness of how the media negatively affects body image. I can also begin raising the self-confidence of every adolescent that interacts with these workshops. If I can do that, then I can begin to effectively change a generation, who will change the next, who will change the world.