Chris McCandless rejects a traditional path of success and instead defines success on his own terms through freedom, experience, and personal meaning. Reflect on what success means to you at your current stage in life. In the response, explain how success is currently defined (grades, college acceptance, achievements, happiness, etc.) and where those ideas come from. Then, consider whether that definition truly reflects personal values or if it is shaped by expectations from family, school, or society.

 At my current stage in life, success is mostly defined by my grades, or scores on tests such as the SAT. This mostly comes from my family, as they all have very high expectations of me and want me to do well, especially my mom, as though she did well in school like I did when she was younger, she never went to college, and it kind of went downhill from there. It does somewhat reflect my values, but to an extent. I feel like to my family and others, all that matters in my life is my grades and college, and while I do acknowledge that and view those things as important, I feel like it completely ignores everything else about me, like what I want, like, and what my dreams are. While I do want to go to college, I hope to go into medicine in the future, I also love to dance, and read, and crochet, and one of my biggest dreams is to travel when I'm older, and my family doesn't know this, but I want to go to college in a different country if I can.

In class we did worksheets on connections we made in chapters 9 and 10, and we also picked research topics based on what we read.

Doing this has helped me make personal connections to the story, and also make me think about the deeper implications of what's happening in the book and how it can relate to a bigger topic.