In my senior year, the first and second trimesters attended school over zoom from Alaska. One day I got a call from my sister asking if I wanted to go and help her out by taking care of my nephews.

Knowing I was online and not going into school I decided to go and help out and still be able to attend my classes.

The plan was just to stay for a month but with the snow storms and the big increase of covid it became 6 months.

On Oct, 5 2020 I decided to go on a 13 hour flight to Alaska, and start my far away learning.

I knew it was a big sacrifice. I will have to take classes early in the morning and help out my nephews with their classes for the rest of the day.

It was difficult at first, I was always tired from waking up early and I was always worried that I would miss one of my classes because of the time difference.

I had to wake up at 4 am every day to attend my classes. I had to make an alarm for every start of each class so I wouldn’t miss them.

I quickly got used to the time difference of 4 hours and got the hang of it.

I felt like I paid more attention in class. Feeling more pressure to do my best helped but having more responsibility was difficult.

When Dallastown added the wildcat wednesday i saw it as a blessing since it was a day i didn’t have to wake up super early.

Living in Alaska is a big difference from living anywhere else in so many ways.

There aren’t as many stores or restaurants that you would be everywhere in PA. There were a couple stores that were available like Walmart and Costco most of the others were native to alaska.

There was a “mall” with only four stores, which gave me a shock when I first went.

The prices for anything are raised and everything is way more expensive, but there are no taxes when you buy things.

Being hispanic and trying to find most of the ingredients for our recipes that would be needed for our meals are very hard to find and would be needed to replace with other ingredients.

To get to the next closest town it would be an hour drive to get there, which would be the North Pole, and the next big city is an 8 hour drive through the mountain.

To go out of the house it is needed to have 4 layers of clothing so your body won’t freeze even if your going to get the mail, It gets to -30% in alaska

It will always be dark in winter, the sun comes out for an hour and it will be sunrise and sunset. In the summer it’s the opposite, it is hot and always sunny.

The big plus out of all this was the great view and that I finished my classes by 9 a.m which let me have all of my day to go out on adventures and explore Alaska and spend time with my family.

I had the chance to see the Auroras Borealis, Ice Pillars, A Glacier, and many animals that I would not see in PA. I had many adventures and went on walks everyday.

The snow cannot be played with because since the temperature gets so cold it turns into ice and it can be very dangerous.

Overall I had a great time and I did great in school. I had better grades and paid more attention than what I would have if I was in school. It was an amazing experience and I would do it all over again if the chance came across my path again.