What are your top 5 strengths? How do you see those playing a role in your current life? In your academics? How does knowing your strengths support or change your thoughts about your future goals? How might you utilize your strengths to achieve your future personal and/or professional goals?

My top 5 strengths are restorative, individualization, learner, analytical, and activator, and they certainly play an important role in both my current life and my academics.

Being restorative allows me to be adept at dealing with problems and good at figuring out what is wrong and resolving it. Also, according to Strength Finders, restorative people consistently acquire new information to make needed upgrades seek to understand things that most people do not comprehend and want to make things better tomorrow than they were today. I completely agree with the description as how they are reflected in my current life. Different with many other programmers, I relish the process of debugging. I enjoy doing additional assignments to further enhance my understanding of a certain subject. I also love to challenge myself to comprehend concepts that seem to be peculiar or difficult to others. Knowing that I am restorative supports my plan of being a software engineer in the future. As software engineers encounter countless problems on a daily basis, my strength would allow me to better locate the problem and figure out the most effective way to solve it. In addition, computer technology updates every second, being restorative promotes me to gather all the needed information to achieve the best outcome.

Aside from being restorative, I am also an individualized person. I am intrigued with the unique qualities of each person and have a gift for figuring out how people who are different can work together productively. Before taking the test, Individualization is among one of my top five strengths in mind. I believe that each and every of us is different; we all have our uniqueness. Therefore, whenever I am doing a group project, I always tend to discover what is unique about each and every member and wondering how he or she could best contribute to the team. I never fully agree with the idea of working separately and combining all the works in the end. I think it defeats the purpose of group work since it does not utilize the talents of each member correctly. I believe that each member should utilize their talents to best contribute to their team. Knowing that I am individualized furthers strengthened my plan of being a software engineer in the future. While in nowadays most of the projects and software are completed in teams, my talent of individualization allows me to discover the uniqueness and talents of each of my teammates in order to better assign tasks.

The ability to learn ranks third among my top five talents. I have a great desire to learn and want to continuously improve. In particular, the process of learning, rather than the outcome, excites me. Surrounded by such an academically rigorous environment, I believe learner is not rare among people around me. In fact, it is one of the most common talents that I heard in my Scholar Seminar class. Being a student for the past 12 years, I find myself no place to argue for that. I generally enjoy the processing of learning; however, I also emphasize on the outcome. I consider learning to be one of the few meaningful events in life. Many things fade gradually, but knowledge is yours to keep forever. Learning never stops. One learns constantly with or without consciousness. Having learner as one of my top five talents definitely helps me to better fulfill my role as a student. Driven by my talents, I often have extra energy to work hard when I am acquiring information to broaden your knowledge base. I often find myself studying for hours without feeling bored or tired especially when studying for the topics within my interests. My ability to concentrate allows me to ignore my surroundings and focus only on the staff I am trying to comprehend. Career wise, this talent will also help me a lot. In order to keep up with the most up to date technology, I can already anticipate the amount of learning I will be doing on a daily basis. My strength as a learner enables me to maximize my efficiency and enhance the effectiveness of my time.

Also as expected, I am also an analytical person. I tend to search for reasons and causes. And I have the ability to think about all the factors that might affect a situation. Being analytical not only helps me as an undergraduate student majoring in computer science, but also it helps me to have a better understanding of the cause and effect of incidents. I believe everything happens for a reason. One does not act without causes or intended outcomes. Being able to see the relationship between them grants me a more pervasive view of the world. To draw from the mistakes that both others and myself have made by analyzing the cause and effect reduces the odds of making the same mistake in the future. As a student, I draw from the mistakes that I have made in my homework or practice problems, so I will not make them again on the tests. As a software engineer, I draw from the mistake that I have made over my years of programming experience, so I will try not to make them in the future. Being analytical will help both my college career and my career as a software engineer in the future.

Lastly, I am also an activator. I make things happen by turning thoughts into action. According to Strength Finders Instinctively, people who are activators typically take the lead. They seldom wait for orders or directions from people in positions of authority. I find this description somewhat fits me. I sometimes do instinctively take the lead, but it also depends on the situation. However, I rarely act before receiving complete instructions from people in position of authority. Nevertheless, I do often make things happen by turning thoughts into action. I often try things out right after they come across my mind. It could be a better way to solve a problem, could be a more efficient way to write a program. I seldom sit upon ideas before I turn them into actions. As a student I benefit from this talent by turning thoughts into actions so I have plenty of hands-on experience. As a software engineer, I can benefit from this talent by having plenty of back-up plans available in case of any emergency.

Hello people, my name are Allen Lin. I am from Naperville, a small town near Chicago. I am currently double majoring in pre-med and CIS. As many of you might have already known, I have a twin brother who just happens to look almost exactly like me. I am not really a football fan. I do not play basketball frequently, but for some reasons I love watching the NBA. Badminton is really my field. I play it on a semi=professional level on a daily basis.

School-wise, I really like all the computer science related subjects. I have always had a passion about technology. I guess that is what drove me to the path of a software engineer. Since my middle school did not provide any programming courses, I did not officially start learning knowledge of computer science till high school. In high school, I took a year of programming in both java and python. The more I explored about computer the fascinated I became. Those two years of programming experiences not only taught some of the basic logic and syntax about programming, but also made me more determined about the path I am currently taking. Computers are nothing but just machines. At times, they could be rather insensitive and incomprehensible. Even though I only have two years of programming experience, talking to a computer could be frustrating at times. Even a single semicolon could lead to the termination of a thousand page long program. Being a programmer, one must be extremely meticulous and cautious. And even with that essential idea in mind, most of professional programmers spend 60% of their time fixing bugs or typos, not to mention a newbie like me. I remember spending more times attempting to interpret the cause of the error and fixing them than actually typing in code. However, none of the frustration I endured was for vain. All the problem solving and bug fixing strengthened my logic and made me more prepared for picking up a new language. After all, no language could last forever, as a software engineer the most important element to master is the logic that could enable him or her to quickly pick up a new language.

I am currently working as an assistant app developer for the MMC scholar program roughly 10 – 15 hours per week. And since I also have a quiet busy schedule, I apologize if I could not participate in all the scholar events. But I will certainly try my best to manage my time so my job and courses will not hinder my responsibility for being a STEM scholar.

The reason why I joined the STEM Scholar program is partially because of the courses I took during high school. But more importantly, it is because of my desire to utilize my knowledge to educate the others. In the 21^st century, basic understanding of technology is essential for success. However, statics has shown that only 5% of high schools in our nation provide any programming classes. This missing early education on technology could really hinder student’s interest in computer science. Many of first year college students express their lack of interest in computer science due to their lack of understanding of the subject. As a STEM scholar I wish to bring my passion for computer science to more people who have not yet had the chance to explore much about the subject. I would love to help more teenage students understand that there are other subjects besides Math and English that a student has to master in order to be independent and successful in the future.