I am a first year chemical engineering pre-major student at The Ohio State University. Although being originally from Chicago, Illinois, I now call Fort Worth, Texas home. My list of favorite activities includes, but is not limited to, learning, meeting new people, reading, and doing anything related to hockey. Underlying any and all of my other desires is the most intense desire to just get out and experience the world around me because there is truly no telling what is in store at any given moment.

Nearly everyone that I have informed of my choices to come to Ohio State and to study chemical engineering have asked me “why”, and the answer to each of those questions is relatively simple; each of those were the right choice, not just a right choice, but the right choice. Upon finishing the eighth grade, where I was in a class of just 55 students, I entered a high school of roughly 3,300 students where I knew two other people, and it was the best thing that had ever happened to me thus far. After four years among about 3,300 students, I was ready to freshen things up again because even a pool of that many people can grow stale after four years, so only a university as large as Ohio State seemed like a possible place for me to spend the coming four years, and that is without even considering the expansive resources that only institutions of this size have access to. Beyond the “where” of college, there is also the “what”, and that was a fairly clear choice for me as well because chemistry is by far my favorite academic subject, and the more engaging work of engineering is highly alluring when compared to the seemingly monotonous lab work of commercial chemists.

Despite my special liking of chemistry, I positively love learning in any capacity. Any day where I learned something new about the world, regardless of the scale or importance of what I learned, is a successful day in the most basic capacity as far as I care. A day where you learn nothing is a day wasted. My favorite things to learn, aside from things pertaining to chemistry, are things about the people around me; it is so amazing to meet new people because each individual has essentially lived in their own, unique world, and there is absolutely no guessing what insightful and interesting stories someone might be hiding up their sleeve.

While this may make my entire life sound like a cakewalk, especially considering the idea that I would willingly uproot my entire life in the name of experiencing new things without as much as a single worry about how it would turn out, do not be fooled, life has been good, but not easy. Along side the importance of punctuality, which I hold in extremely high regard, I have learned and relearned the importance of hard work and perseverance. Nothing worth having comes without work, and every day that I spend here at Ohio State reminds me of all of the work that I put in to make this experience possible, from the countless hours that I spent making sure that I excelled in every facet of my high school career, to the immeasurable effort that I put into my junior year of high school to get back on my feet, both literally and metaphorically, after breaking my leg.