My Family Autobiography

My name is Frank Cenname. I am currently a senior at Siena College looking to attain my Bachelors degree after completion of this course. I am majoring in Marketing and Sports Marketing Services. After graduation, I am looking to pursue a career in the sports industry or attain a graduate assistant position at an appropriate institution.

My first semester at Siena College was in September of 2016 after I transferred from SUNY Brockport, where I was apart of the football team. I have been playing football for my entire life and I had to make the decision to stop playing football and focus on my studies. Football has brought many different experiences to my family, as I traveled throughout the North East competing at a high level. The video below is from Nike that I believe described the amount of dedication I had to put into the sport at the time and now my studies.

Being apart of my football team in high school led me to meet many different individuals who are now my best friends. I consider all of these men apart of my second family and that is something I loved about the game. Comparing it to my intermediate family, we all have struggled, competed, cried and fought for what we love.

Inside of The Family: Diversity, Inequality, and Social Change, Phillip Cohen, the author, states that families are groups of people, bound by connections that are biological, legal, or emotional (Cohen 4). Many people would tend to believe that this statement goes a long way and creates what we call a family. Not every family comes together as one as many different individuals complete actions that can take them in their own direction. Whether those actions are good or bad, a family can be categorized in several different ways. From a Pew Research study, it states that many families are declining from your original two parent family. I believe that this study is relevant because in today’s world there are many different causes to raise a child without two parents. For myself, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer and had passed away when I was a young boy. My sister, Alyssa, and I were raised a majority of our lives by just our father.

As there are many members of my family, after my mothers passing her side of the family became very distant. I still consider these individuals apart of my personal family. Cohen states, “personal families are a group of people who mutually define themselves as a family are a family, based on their own understanding of the concept related. Whom people choose to include in these groups changes from time to time and differs from place to place”(Cohen 6).

Throughout my life there has been many ups and downs. I continued to fight through it and look to my family for support. When I was 8 years old, my mother was no longer able to fight off cancer and passed away. About 1 in 8 U.S. women (about 12%) will develop invasive breast cancer over the course of her lifetime. This led my father to be raising his two children alone. My father than was granted full power of the family and accepted several different roles within our family, which can be defined in the symbolic interaction theory (Cohen 21). Growing up in a middle class family, nothing was ever given to me other than guidance and support. My father would always tell my sister and I that in life you will succeed when you work hard and care for others. Once I was able to legally attain a job, I went searching to wherever would hire. My first job was as a bus boy at a restaurant not too far from my house. My work ethic was ingrained in my mind and I will continue to work until I cannot.

From a 2010 study from the Department of Education, 50% of the college population is compromised of people whose parents never attended college. I used this stat because this related to my family. I will be receiving my Bachelors of Science in Marketing in the winter of 2019.

As a family, we decided to be apart of the rescue team and adopt our dog Luke. Luke is a Shepard and Labrador mix who was in a kill center in South Carolina. In the United States, 1.6 million dogs are adopted each year from a shelter. Luke has been a crucial part of our personal family because he brings love and laughter to our family (Cohen 6).