A Product of Your Environment: The Environment Is a Product of You by Lilly

A Product of Your Environment: The Environment Is a Product of You by Lilly - October 2026 Scholarship Essay

We are all inevitably products of our environment. This ranges from family ethics being habits in adulthood to making poor decisions by hanging around the wrong crowd. We all fall victim to this concept often unconsciously. For example, your friends might start drinking when you hangout but you choose not to drink the first time. Each time you hang out though, it becomes more and more tempting. What’s the harm in one drink? One drink leads to a few more, a few more leads to bad decisions, and further on escalation.
Similarly, simply by growing up in a poor neighborhood you’re more likely to carry that on to adulthood than someone who grew up in a middle class family. These daily experiences in our lives do make us products of our environment but not the final product. When any first product is made in a business it’s almost unlikely that it won’t be changed in a way for the better later on, either by using a better ingredient or just simply changing the packaging.
In the same way, by being the first to graduate college in your family, that’s a huge step to making your environment be a product of yourself rather than letting it define you. Going to college and being around like minded people who are interested in the same things as you, naturally builds that motivation to strive for good grades, big internships, and just bigger better things for yourself. This is cause you are not the final product of your environment.
We are all constantly changing in a way to improve ourselves in order to achieve our goals. Our environment may be a product of ourselves now but in due time, it’ll can be. By taking those little steps, it can make significant progress. Being products of our environment should outframe oneself to think beyond their set original limits rather than put one in a box in order to encourage the transformation of our environment being the product of ourselves, setting up a higher standard for generations to come.