My family is very large. There are over sixty people on my mom’s side of the family and an even larger number of people on my dad’s side. My mom’s mom–my grandma–is one of eight children. Seven out of eight of them had kids, and five out of eight of them had at least three kids. Almost half of those kids–nine of the nineteen–had from one to three kids. Meanwhile, my dad’s parents are both one of eleven. As for the specifics of their children and then those children’s kids, I have no idea because I haven’t met the majority of them, and neither has my dad. I enjoy having a large family and I feel it has had a big influence on who I am, especially with the things I'm interested in and my personality.

Family can influence a lot in your life, especially interests and careers. Music is a very prominent part of my mom’s side of the family. All of my grandma’s siblings are music and musical lovers. A funny fact about my mom’s family that I have the pleasure of telling people is that they tend to break out into song a lot. If someone says something that reminds them of a song, one of the siblings will start singing and the others will join in, singing, clapping, snapping, and even pulling out and playing an instrument until the whole family is laughing and singing along. It’s something I love about my family due to how super unique and funny it is. Growing up surrounded by music fostered a deep love and appreciation for it in me. It’s created a special bond with my family as we can share the joy of making music and listening to music together. Having a large, musical family gave me a unique perspective on how I grew up. Music was not the only thing that side of the family influenced in my life. I was always more close to my mom’s side as my dad’s side lives far away so it’s only natural that I gained my interest for most sports and sports teams from them. Most of them are avid sports fans and one of the “clans”, as we jokingly call them, is a big hockey family, New Jersey Devils fans, and that interest in the sport mostly rubbed off on me as they used to–and still do–take me with them to Devils games frequently. My family’s sports interest has made me want to study and pursue a career in sports analysis or management. Along those same lines, their influence on my choices of colleges has heavily affected my decision in the schools I want to apply to. Overall, my family has had a major impact on my interests, specifically music and sports. 

Even though I am around my mom’s side of the family more, I tend to have most of my personality traits and looks from my dad’s side of the family. Most of my more personal interests, like hobbies, places I like to go, and books and movie genres that I’m interested in are things I never really shared with my mom’s side. However, my dad’s side of the family shares the same interests, and even though we're not physically close, I text many of my cousins, aunts, and uncles about those kinds of things regularly. In fact, one of my cousins on my dad’s side is what my family refers to as my twin, even though he is three years older than me, we are practically the same person. We even have a lot of the same features and look like siblings. Despite the fact that he goes to college on the other side of the country, we like to joke about how we are mentally connected because we both frequently think and say the same things, and even though we only met each other 4 years ago, we discovered we share many of the same music and movie interests to the point where it was almost creepy how similar we were to each other without having ever met. Evidently, family can significantly influence personality traits and passions.

As you can see, family is very important in people’s lives and the amount of cousins, aunts, and uncles you can have also influences an individual's way of life as it can affect personal interests, personality, and passions.