My name is Benjamin Xavier Lee. I am a first-year Computer Science and Engineering Pre-major. I come from Cincinnati, Ohio where I attended Elder High School. My interest in STEM did not begin in high school, but it was cemented there. I always figured I would go into some field relating to technology or engineering. In high school I took an interest in programming and took my first programming course in Java my Junior year. I did very well in this course, but I wasn’t learning as much as I hoped. This was because the teacher, while knowledgeable in the field, followed a strict curriculum to the point of docking points if a student found a solution that didn’t match how he wanted us to solve it. The following year I took a class called Database Applications which was much better. The teacher gave us a crash course on Visual Basic, HTML, CSS, and mySQL all in the span of a few weeks. He then gave of the project of creating a game for the entire school to play. This was a project with spanned the rest of the school year. I excelled because we were free to have our own ideas, make our own decisions, and (most importantly) make our own mistakes. We were left to our own devices and as the weeks and months passed, our paper drafts and simulations evolved into an online game that was vaguely playable. I learned much more during this time than in the entire class the previous year. This is in part by the fact that I wasn’t being forced down a corridor of what I was and wasn’t allowed to learn. This is also because the majority of the responsibility fell on me. The class was only 6 students and we were divided into unspoken groups: the artists, the web designers, the ones who didn’t contribute much and spent the class doing work for other classes, and the programmer. I was responsible for nearly all of the coding the game required. This was a self-imposed burden, and one that I relished. I got to watch as a few short snippets of code here and there turn into a multitude of pages containing thousands of lines of code. This also meant that I was responsible for any bugs and glitches, of which there were many. When we finally released the game to the school it was a fairly broken game, but it was playable. As the school year neared its close, I released several patches fixing most of the bugs for the benefit of the few people still playing it. Overall, it was not a very good game that not a lot of people played, but it achieved its purpose. It taught me more about programming that my first class could because I completed a project, not a series of  predetermined exercises. It also confirmed in my mind that I wanted to be a programmer, which set me on the path I am on now.

I wanted to be a programmer, but I didn’t know what kind yet. This is one of my primary reasons for choosing Ohio State for my education. The University of Cincinnati has a good information systems program that focuses on business. Rose-Hulman University has a great engineering computer science program. I looked at both of the universities but found them too restricting in their focus for computer science. Ohio State is a huge school and it has just about every focus for education imaginable. So I came here with the knowledge that I wanted to go into computer science, but almost no idea of what I wanted to do with this background in terms of a career. I plan to use my time here to learn as much as I can in as many aspects of computer science as I can so that I can enter the world outside of school with confidence in my abilities and a clear focus on what my future will be.

The reason I chose to join the STEM EE Scholars program is not a tale of excitement or adversity. I had heard of Ohio State’s Honors and Scholars program and decided that I wanted to be a part of it. While I was filling out my application I was asked what sort of program I wanted to join, I didn’t even know that this was an option prior to that moment. I looked through the choices and narrowed it down to a few choices. STEM EE seemed like the best fit considering my intended major, Computer (Technology) Science and Engineering, directly contained three of the four aspects of STEM in its title. My epic journey of nail-biting choices and conundrums leading up to the thrilling climax of my finally settling on the STEM EE never really happened. It was the best choice available for a decision I didn’t even know I had to make. Now that I’m here I do plan to take advantage of all that STEM EE has to offer.

Relating to STEM, there’s not much more I can say other than that I’ve got a bit of  experience and I’m ready for a whole lot more. I can’t wait to get into the more advanced courses that will inevitably come further into my college career. I’m excited about all of the opportunities that are provided for me and I’m ready for any and all challenges that come my way. My name is Benjamin Xavier Lee, and I am ready for everything the Ohio State University can throw at me.

My top 5 strengths according to the StrengthsFinder test are: Deliberative, Input, Intellection, Analytical, and Restorative. These play a huge role in my life both inside and out of the classroom. They are major characteristics of who I am and what I’m good at. Even though I may not have known it, these strengths have influenced how I have lived my life, through my decisions, actions, and choices. Knowing my strengths doesn’t necessarily make me change my thoughts about the future as I plan my future based on what I think I am good at. This test just confirmed what I had already sort of known about myself all along.

Achieving my future goals will be greatly aided if I use my strengths effectively and appropriately. However, I will not make my goals solely centered around my strengths. While it is important to improve one’s strengths, I believe that it is equally important to put effort into one’s weaknesses. Our strengths merely help us to know what we are good at and what we might not be naturally inclined towards. However, it is still important to set goals to in areas where you may not be the best at because it helps us improve. That is why my strengths will certainly help me achieve many of my goals, but other goals involve skills that are far from my area of talent. Most of the goals where my strengths will certainly come in handy involve academic or professional goals. I want the most out of my education and I want a happy, successful career. Both of these goals can benefit from my strengths.

My strengths certainly play a large part of my life, but they do not define it. No matter how good a test such as this is, it cannot fully sum up a person. My strengths indeed describe some areas that I excel in, but they do not define me as a person. The only person who can accurately define me, is me.