As a college freshman, just barely nineteen, I can hardly say that my plans for my education and my career are set in stone. I’ve been struggling with the idea of dedicating four years to studying one relatively narrow field when I’m interested in so many things in so many diverse areas of study, from engineering to history to creative writing and beyond. I’ve realized simply don’t have enough time here to pursue all the things I want to pursue, so I’m in the process of deciding which of my interests to pursue as a major, which as minors, and which through extracurriculars and outside opportunities. While my plans for my minor and other academic pursuits are very much fluid, I’ve landed on a major that I’m incredibly passionate about, that …show more content…
I come from a family with STEM in its blood – my mother and grandfather both have PhDs and my father is a computer engineer. As I grew up, my parents gave my nascent interest in STEM every possible encouragement, buttressing nature with nurture. I spent much of my childhood in my mother’s neuroscience lab, transferring tissue samples from petri dish to petri dish while she quizzed me on my times tables and the functions of different lobes of the brain. My classmates wanted to be firefighters or astronauts: I imagined my future self in a crisp white lab coat, making earth-shaking discoveries. So as I grew up, I gravitated towards math, science, and in my coursework and my extracurriculars, taking Higher Level Mathematics and Biology and eventually competing at Science Olympiad Nationals. As I mentioned earlier, I took an introductory engineering class in my freshman year in high school, and the class was a revelation. It took all the academic subjects I knew and loved and brought them into force in the real world. I found it fascinating, and decided more or less immediately that I would study more …show more content…
I was part of the International Baccalaureate (IB) program at my high school, and part of the program involves fulfilling service requirements and reflecting on those service experiences. I would have gotten involved in service with or without these requirements, but they served to motivate me to expand my service horizons. I worked at my local Humane Society every week for several years, served on the Board of Directors of a nonprofit that aimed to foster intercultural tolerance, acted as vice-president of my high school’s Service Club, and interned at a nonprofit that sent Colorado high school students to Guatemala to help with environmental service projects there. Before high school, I had never experienced a sense of fulfillment from service. In high school, service became integral to my sense of myself, of how I fit in to the larger world. Service brought me into contact with hundreds of people I never would have met otherwise, and it gave me an understanding of my global context that I lacked before. Perhaps most importantly, my service gave me a profound sense of fulfillment that I had never had before – the kind of fulfillment that only comes from knowing that the world on a given day is a little better for having had you in it. I want to have that in my career, and it’s something that working in environmental