Nadine Chami

James Buccellato
HON 1000
December 8, 2014
Essay 2 Evaluation
In essay two I was expected to address the question of Where are we going? I was
asked to put together a story of an immigrant traveling to an American city with a certain goal in
mind. My character, Ahmad, is a young Lebanese American who came to the United States with
the help of his cousin. His cousin, Ali, lived in Detroit, Michigan and worked at the Henry Ford
Automobile Industry. Hearing of the availability of jobs, Ahmad came to Detroit and with the
help of his cousin, was granted an opportunity at the Ford factory. My essay focuses on the
partial assimilation Ahmad had to encounter in order to fit in. It reflects on the drive the
immigrants had in traveling to American cities and the change in lifestyle they had to endure
when there.
I decided to focus on the story of the Lebanese Americans since I am Lebanese myself. I
used to live in Lebanon and moved here about eight years ago because my father felt like there
was more opportunity here than in our home country. I know what its like to move from
Lebanon to Detroit and was able to use my experiences to add voice to my story. Even though it
was only recently that my family moved here, my grandfather had immigrated to Detroit around
the time of the Henry Ford industrial revolution. Having struggled back home, he decided to
move to Detroit as soon as he heard of the job opportunities at the factories. After a few years, he
was able to bring his family to here. This story of my own grandfather traveling to Detroit to
work at the factory motivated me to create such a storyline as found in my second essay.
While researching for this paper, I developed more knowledge about the industrialization
that took place in Detroit and Henry Fords impact on the city. The industry in Detroit

contributed to its prosperity; however, the immigrants had to pay the price of such prosperity.
Not only were they a minority in a completely different country, but they had to suffer from poor
working conditions and had to face the problems of assimilation. All these concepts were
included in my essay to depict the hardships certain people had to endure to finally gain
prosperity.
I chose to include this essay in my e-portfolio because I personally think it was my
highest quality work throughout the semester. The personal relationship I had with the concept at
hand allowed me to add creativity and voice into my paper. As well, from the pointers I had
received on my first essay, I was able to complete a more solid paper. At the end of paper one,
Dr. Buccellato noted I want your analysis to be more research driven for paper 2. As you can
see above, most of the information I included in paper two was in fact research driven. For this
reason, I believe completing this work made me a better researcher and analyzer of concepts.
All in all, completing this essay provided me with motivation to strive to meet my
professional goals. Being an immigrant myself, I can relate to the experiences of leaving ones
home country and moving to a big city. Immigrants have been looked upon as the underdogs and
in fact, till this day we struggle with such stereotypes. I feel as though immigrants of Arabic
decent tend to face the most problems in America. Although in my community, Dearborn, nonArabs are the ones looked upon as the minority, outside of Dearborn we tend to face isolation.
Throughout my research for this project, I came across many success stories of Lebanese
Americans starting at the factories, but then eventually becoming the bosses themselves. All this
provides me with motivation and determination to receive my Doctor of Pharmacy degree.