Drive Safe

November 30, 2019

To start off this essay, I would first like to introduce myself. My name is Andrew Nguyen, and I am a senior at La Quinta High School. I am planning on majoring in Human or Molecular Cell and Developmental Biology, and I hope that, in the future, I find a profession in which I can help others. 

When I turned 15 and a half, I immediately began to work on my Driver’s Education online. One of the main reasons I was so eager to receive my license was that I believed I could go anywhere driving a car. Since entering middle school, I started going out a little more with my friends, and I would always have to ask my mom or dad to drop me off and pick me up later on. Because I was restricted by parental guidelines and the incapability of taking myself anywhere I wanted to go, I knew that as soon as I became of age, I would work as hard as I could to achieve my freedom of driving. However, another reason why I wanted to drive so badly was because I was involved in a lot of extracurricular activities including playing water polo, planning and setting up school-wide events, or going to weekly meetings at the park with my Boy Scout troop. I wanted to save my parents the hassle of having to take me to so many things I was involved in, and driving provided a medium for me to go wherever I needed to. But before I could receive my license, I needed to take Drivers Ed. 

At first, I just looked into finding the cheapest option I could get, and there was a program that allowed me to achieve my certificate in just 30 hours. To me, I believed that if I just spent a day and a quarter on the program, then I would receive my certificate in no time. Boy, was I wrong. For each lesson, there was a certain time limit that I must meet in order to move on to the next section. So say, for example, if I finished a topic in 30 minutes when the lesson required me to take an hour on it, I would have to wait 30 more minutes even though I attained all the knowledge I needed from that area and answered all the questions correctly. Because of this, I would focus on doing other activities in the meantime like my homework or watch a movie, and sometimes I would end up forgetting that the required time for that lesson finally finished. This cycle would go on for a long time, and this made me actually take more than a month completing my drivers ed. However, because this was the case, I figured that if I really needed to spend that much time on a certain lesson, then I would try to memorize and read into as much detail as they could provide me. I remember nearly all of the meanings of the symbols on road signs, the amount someone was fined if they ran a red light, and just all the nit-picky details that some people would often read over. 

As a result, to this day, I have never gotten into a car accident, and I think that I owe this a lot to my attention to detail on how to be a safe driver through the drivers ed program. With driver’s education, one can dramatically reduce the number of deaths as long as certain steps are taken. Most include using turn signals at appropriate times, looking over your shoulder when making lane changes, following the speed limit, turning on your lights 30 minutes after sunset or 30 minutes before sunrise, making sure you look both ways at an intersection, yielding to pedestrians, halting for a good amount of time at a stop sign, checking both rear view and side view mirrors, getting a good night’s sleep before hitting the road, and many more laws that people should be familiar with like the back of their hand. Many people don’t realize this, but more often than most, we are distracted while driving. So aside from following the law, one must also keep a calm, collected mind and direct all their attention to the road in front and the sides of them. With the age of technology, switching the music, texting on one’s phone, or even looking at a GPS are all small things that could easily throw someone off their complete focus on driving. Thus, not only is it essential to drive carefully, it is just as important to make sure that nothing except driving should be on one’s mind behind the wheel. 

I have had experience being in a few car accidents, but many of them were minor and either just scratched the back of my parents’ bumper or on the side. Yet, every time it happened, my heart beat so fast because things could have been so much worse. Because of that, I never want to experience those things personally driving ever again, and that is why I do my best to follow what I have learned from drivers ed as well as being on the road for a period of time. Whether or not I am late to a game, meeting, or important event, I need to ensure my safety rather than revert to reckless driving that could potentially escalate to more extreme situations. That is why another essential part of driving is that if you need somewhere to be, make sure to spend time beforehand to get their earlier so that you wouldn’t have to worry about any sudden traffic jams or construction projects along the way. 

I have seen a lot of my friends driving irresponsibly, and sometimes it is even in the school parking lot. One time, a friend told me that he was so late to school that when he tried parking into a parking spot, instead of hitting the brake pedal to slow down, I pressed on the gas pedal and his car slammed into another friend’s side view mirror and completely shattered it. Another accident came when another one of my friends was backing into a parking spot, but he easily got distracted and did not see another car passing by and hit the front of his bumper. On the bright side, they all turned out alright, but hearing these stories made me realize that even if you trust yourself and take precautions to drive safely, others may not do the same.  

Steps that I can take to be a better and safer driver as well as spread awareness to help others become safer on the road involve the very basic steps. Make sure to put on your seatbelt, check to see that all mirrors are viewable, adjust your seat so that you are comfortable driving, look over your shoulders for blind spots when changing lanes, following the order of the traffic lights, and keeping a collected composure. The steps are not hard, you just can’t be afraid of doing them. Please, when you are behind the wheel, like Brian Imanuel once said, “Drive safe.”