Revision Piece Autobiography

Hi, my name is Astrid and I am from Tegucigalpa, Honduras, but I have been living in Maryland for about 13 years now. Throughout my first couple of years, I had to take ESOL classes to improve my English speaking and writing skills. Moving to a different country was hard and it was a difficult transition. However, with the help of my family and teachers, I was able to achieve my goal of learning English and continuing my education.
I graduated from Bethesda Chevy Chase High school in 2012, and I applied to the University of Maryland my senior year. Unfortunately, my grades and SAT scores were not up to the UMD standard. I decided I would attend community college to increase my GPA and take all my general courses to transfer to UMD. I always told myself I would strive to attend my dream school of UMD; even though I was not admitted the first time, I would succeed the second time around. To accomplish my vision, I had to make changes in my life, such as studying more and putting in more effort and dedication at school. I attended Montgomery College for 2 years and found my passion for becoming a speech pathologist. I graduated with my associate degree and applied it to UMD. The second time I applied, I was accepted. Being accepted gave me a sense of pride and accomplishment in my life and for my family.
Once accepted to UMD, I decided to major in Hearing and Speech Science. With this major, I will need to attend graduate school to become a speech pathologist. Since I was a child, I was always below average in school. In elementary school, I was diagnosed with ADD and a speech language disorder called cluttering. These two diagnoses weighed me down and made me feel different and abnormal. I had to attend speech therapy to help with my speech disorder. With the help of my therapist, I was able to overcome my disorder, and so this became my calling: I wanted to be a speech pathologist. I want to help children and adults with speech and language problems to overcome them just as I did.
In college, a writing style that is either formal or rhetorical is required in every class that I have taken and will likely take. Throughout the years, as English is my second language, writing in general has always been hard. Grammar, sentence structure, and punctuation have been obstacles for me to overcome. I know my area of weakness and am aware of the strategies I can implement to improve. I use basic English books to refer to while writing papers. In the speech and hearing field, I can work in schools, hospitals, and clinical practices. In my major, the writing style must be formal, especially when writing reports on patients and records of improvements, tips, notes, and techniques. Practicing writing formally in college will help me in my field in the future. Practice makes perfect and writing formally as much as possible will help me improve my ability to write.
As I mentioned, formal writing has been an issue but writing poetry is not. A strategy my speech therapist mentioned to me was to write poetry, as in to write my emotions, concerns, and dreams down in a composition book. The more I used this technique, the more my writing improved. The more I wrote, the better I became at writing. I was able to perform one of my poems on stage. Poetry is a type of writing style in which I excel, a method I use to help with my writing and with putting ideas down on paper. It is my own creative outlet, and I am able to connect ideas and create formal and rhetorical papers.