Jackie Robinson's Accomplishments

Throughout his baseball career, Jackie Robinson combated and disarmed antagonists of all kinds with an unflappable demeanor and preternatural inner resolve. My favorite example of his delicate balance between outward poise and inner tenaciousness lies in his encounters with Phillies manager Ben Chapman, who resorted to using malicious racial epithets and instructing his pitchers to purposely throw harmful balls at Jackie Robinson. In a game against Chapman’s team in 1947, Robinson responded by scoring the sole run in the Dodgers’ 1-0 victory. For Robinson, vindication came in the form of tangible results. His resolve and success in the face of contempt, bigotry, and harassment serves as an eternal example for students like myself who seek to

After leading his team to win a historic World Series in 1955 and garnering a rigorous and renowned MVP honor in 1949, Robinson proceeded to join the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and dedicate himself to a life of service and volunteerism, which sparked enormous and unprecedented progress in the Civil Rights Movement, a revolutionary period of tremendous social and political growth for African Americans in the United States. His endeavors in social work did not end there; after his death, the Jackie Robinson foundation was founded in his name, assisting numerous disadvantaged students graduate college and embark on a successful career in the corporate

In doing so, I founded Hack4Progress in 2015, a nonprofit organization that provides web-design support for other nonprofits, programming tutoring and mentorship for youth, and free Raspberry Pi computers for disadvantaged high school students in inner city Dallas. Although I have always been passionate about learning and applying engineering and computer science, Jackie Robinson’s selfless example developed a desire within me to use these disciplines to positively influence others in my community. For that I reason, I plan to pursue a professional degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin and use my acquired knowledge to start a humanitarian engineering and social entrepreneurship fi rm to build technological solutions to problems that persist with society’s most vulnerable, e.g. access to water, energy, health services, and basic