College Admissions Essay: A Career As A Chemical Engineer

Ever since my dad, a chemical engineer, took me to a “Take Your Child to Work Day,” I have wanted to study science. My interests have not wavered much since then, as I hope to study to one day become an engineer. To achieve this, I have challenged myself by taking the highest level science and math courses available to me throughout middle and high school. I originally believed that all I would need for an engineering career was a thorough understanding of the hard sciences and calculus. Although my desire to become an engineer has not changed, my approach to how to achieve my goal certainly has. For my junior year curriculum, I had the choice between Honors English or AP English Language and Composition. Although neither one of these classes is easy,

Up until that year, I had not taken a class that had truly integrated science or math with another non related field, so I came to associate the engineering discipline with pure computational study. However, a major portion of the chemistry class was devoted to performing various lab activities and recording them in a lab notebook. At the end of each lab activity, I was asked to write a conclusion, which needed to clearly and concisely discuss the results of my findings. For a handful of the experiments, the writing portion took up about half of the time of an entire lab. The sheer amount of writing involved in the chemistry class came as a shock to me. Up until then, writing had never been a major part of any science class that I had taken, so I assumed that it would not be an important element of my future. The class taught me that, without an understanding of how to properly document and report my conclusions, my findings would seem unintelligible. I did not think that I would need as strong an understanding of English as I would science after high school, but my chemistry class showed me that English and science are very closely