For Briauna Evans, cialis a senior at Richmond Community High School, family is everything. She said she has about 25 cousins, all dispersed throughout the Metro-Richmond and Tri-Cities area. They all act as a support system for one another. “We’ve been through pretty much a lot of the same things – like a lot of the same family and personal problems – so we’re able to help each other out,” Briauna said. “Our parents may not have been able to help us because they didn’t understand what we’re going through, and we had a common understanding of what each one was facing so we would be able to give advice … basically we just supported each other and helped each other along the way through school.”
As the second oldest in school right now, she said she has a lot of responsibility in mentoring and being a good example for those younger than her. “I have plenty of cousins in grades under me who always call for help with homework and projects,” Briauna said in an essay. “Being that I’ve already gone past that level, I don’t mind lending a hand to help them out.”
With graduation around the corner, she’ll have even more family in college. Briauna plans to go to Virginia State University, where she says a lot of her family and teachers went, so she will already have a support system when she walks on campus in the fall. At VSU, she will major in computer engineering. “I’ve always had a fascination with computers growing up. My older cousins always had laptops and gameboys so it kind of piqued my interest. I always wondered how they worked and what systems they used to run them.” She said her dream job with a computer engineering degree would be to work for Apple or Google to make a new Smartphone that has a longer-lasting battery.
Briauna said that with all her cousins and family support system, she does look to one person as her inspiration for wanting to do better. Her mother, Rosalind Evans, who has an autoimmune disease called lupus, has always been her role model. “I’ve watched her overcome so many obstacles in life and that’s just showing me that no matter what gets in my way I can always pursue it the way she did and I could strive to walk in her footsteps.”
Walking in her mother’s footsteps, Briauna looks forward to the next chapter in her life at Virginia State University. Though she lives in Richmond, she said she will be staying on campus. She also said she plans to try out for the famous Trojan Explosion marching band her sophomore year of college.
