Before coming to The Ohio State University and becoming involved in the STEM Exploration and Engagement Scholars program, I would say that I had never been truly challenged as a person in an educational standpoint. While I had been involved in many difficult classes in my high school career, having taken many Advanced Placement courses and exams, I had never faced a challenge this great in my classes. In the beginning of the first semester, I realized how much harder classes would be in college than those in high school. Coming into college actually expecting easier classes than high school led to me being caught completely off guard when I recognized just how difficult this process would be.

After my first full year here in college as well as my participation in the STEM Exploration and Engagement Scholar’s program, I have grown to learn how serious classes and programs here are and have adapted to this very well. Certain events in the STEM EE scholars program including the “Professors are People Too” events, Byrd Polar Research Center event, and many community service hours I have been engaged in thanks to the STEM EE Scholars have encouraged me to move out of my comfort zone as well as evolve my future ideas. In the “Professors are People Too” events, we had the opportunity to talk to and ask many questions from professors of all different programs and fields. This allowed us to learn about where their work has taken them in the field, what research they have been assisted in completing on campus by students, and what classes they recommend for certain majors. At the Byrd Polar Research Center event, we learned about the research lab The Ohio State University is connected with in Antarctica and what experiments and studies are conducted there.

Both of these events have inspired me to get involved in my education in a much larger and broader fashion than I originally planned before coming to my first year of college. I am now very interested in becoming involved in research with a professor in my future here at The Ohio State University after learning of the many in-depth research opportunities here as well as how these research opportunities have assisted in helping students gain internships, co-ops, and jobs later in life. The event where we learned about the Byrd Polar Research Center has inspired me to one day attempt to pursue studying abroad in Antarctica if ever possible. While this is not very relevant to my major, as I am hoping to major in Aerospace Engineering, it is a field that still very much draws my attention, an area of learning that I may not have ever become interested in or learned of the possibility of unless I had been involved in the STEM EE Scholars program.

I am extremely grateful for the person I have become in this very quick year while at The Ohio State University and while within the STEM Exploration and Engagement Scholars program. Without my presence here and in this program, I may have never learned of many of the opportunities offered at this college or of my interests in them.

Of the five facets of the G.O.A.L.S. of The Ohio State University’s Honors and Scholars program, Global Awareness, Original Inquiry, Academic Enrichment, Leadership Development, and Service Engagement, the two I associate with the most are Global Awareness and Original Inquiry. These two facets are both aspects that have greatly influenced my life and the creation of my goals in life and continue to do so greatly in college.

Global Awareness and Original Inquiry speak to me the most out of the five facets of the G.O.A.L.S. of Honors and Scholars because they are the supporting structures behind what I believe to be the personal and career goals I am most passionate about. As a Morrill Scholar, I belong to a group of students who are very much focused on the importance of diversity and the benefits that come from it. Thanks to my background of being raised in a half Irish, half Puerto Rican family, diverse and different cultures have always had a strong impact on me. One of my many personal goals in life includes being able to one day travel the world and visit numerous different nations and see these cultures in person. While the idea of traveling to many different countries and continents seems somewhat bleak in the next four years, as I hope to be preoccupied with my studies and possibly an internship or co-op, I have hopes that sometime while at The Ohio State University I’ll be able to participate in study abroad. Currently, my largest hope for studying abroad is to travel to Antarctica to become involved in research there over a winter break before I graduate. In the next ten years, I hope that my career will allow me to travel to many places around the United States as well as the world. Hopefully becoming an aerospace engineer after I graduate, that line of employment could allow me to become involved all around the world dependent of what business or agency I would work for in the future.

Original Inquiry speaks to me the most because of my career goals. One of the main reasons why I decided to study engineering, and especially aerospace engineering, is because it would allow me to focus on being creative in my classes and in my career. In the past year at The Ohio State University, my engineering classes have allowed a group of students and I to design a vehicle that travels along a rail system, with full control over the appearance of the vehicle and the code that controls it. I have loved participating in this project as it is the exact reason why I became involved in this major, to be allowed to apply my ideas and concepts towards solving problems and creating designs or products. In the next four years, my classes will get more involved with creative processes and allow for me to further express my own ideas and opinions into my work. My dream is that in the next ten years I can work for a company that allows my ideas and creative mindset to be fully expressed and allow my original concepts become part of a project that can affect or change something in the world.

When I was six years old, my family took my brother and I skiing for the first time. At such a young age, I knew very little about skiing or snowboarding but coming from a family where my parents and their friends and their friend’s children all ski, spending my time at mountains was going to become a part of me. I’ll be honest, no matter how much I love skiing now or see it as a part of me, I absolutely despised it at first. No it did not matter that this trail was deemed “Easy” by whoever does so on the mountain, I still fell down, got hurt, and looked like a complete fool in front of my family, friends, and others on the mountain. And being six years old only made it worse, I’d rarely struggled with events so difficult to understand or complicated to pick up and I was barely ever a subject to embarrassment. After many lessons, runs down trails, and especially falls, I decided that skiing would never be a part of who I am.

Four year later, when I was ten years old, one of my best friends and his family invited me to come skiing with them. Sure I completely hated the idea of skiing, but I was in no mindset to reject going on vacation with one of my friends, so I decided to go. While I won’t sugarcoat this experience and say I loved it, or anywhere near that, it slowly became more comfortable and less unbearable as compared to the last time. After this experience, for whatsoever reason, my family began making trips to Pennsylvania multiple times a year to go skiing with friends, and my options were to either work as hard as possible at getting better or learn to not get involved in these activities like the others were, and that was something I was not willing to do. After a number of countless trips to Pennsylvania, Vermont, or Upstate New York to go skiing, I went from despising skiing to it becoming what defined me as a person. I learned to go from barely being able to travel more than ten feet without falling to teaching myself how to ski backwards, go off of jumps, grind on rails, and travel down the hardest trails on the mountain, the infamous “Double Black Diamonds”, as if it was as simple as tying my shoes.

Skiing taught me that maybe my passions in life won’t be immediate, or anywhere close even. It taught me that no matter how much I think I despise something at a moment, I have to learn how to focus on the end goal. I learned that with practice comes perfect, and at such a young age this lesson would become something that defined me. No matter how difficult the path ahead was, I knew that as long as I worked as hard as possible to push through the struggle I would become rewarded later. I applied this in my life to numerous events, from learning how to play the saxophone or guitar to completing my Eagle Scout project, where even if the task seemed so complicated and unattainable in the process, through hard-work and determination I could attain enlightenment and happiness. As explained by one of my favorite singers Dan Reynolds, “The path to Heaven goes through miles of clouded Hell”. Today, skiing is my favorite hobby, on the mountain is the one place I know I can lose focus of the stressful or emotional events taking place in my life at the moment and feel complete peace, with the only thoughts in my mind being an idea of how I’m going to complete this run down a trail, whether I’ll go fast or slow or what areas I’ll go backwards on or attempt a jump off of. I can simply stop at an area on the trail and take in the beauty of the view from the mountain, or how peaceful the snow on the pine trees look. It has taught me to appreciate the little things in life and how they can help me achieve happiness or decrease my stress.

Over the past few years, my friends and I from Long Island, New York have made it an annual trip to go skiing in Pennsylvania or Vermont, with many of them having learned how to ski from me. It makes me happy that I have found this hobby that I believe has bettered me as a person and that I have been able to share it with others.

According to StrengthsFinder 2.0, my top five strengths are harmony, communication, achiever, focus, and discipline. While I do not usually believe in these tests, the StrengthsFinder 2.0 test seemed to be extremely accurate to me. I believe that my five top strengths are very applicable to my life and thoroughly play a role in it and in my academics.  Harmony states that I can realize that certain individuals appreciate my practical sense of thinking, which applies in my real life to being able to treat people with respect to gain their friendship. It also applies to how I am able to apply my sense of practical thinking to problem solving, whether it be in a lab, homework, or group assignment. Strengths such as these allow me to bring a different mindset to teamwork and become a more helpful member. Communication relates to life and academics because it focuses on my desire to be a listener in conversations rather than a speaker. This helps me become more understanding and supportive of others around me and also academically allows me to pick up on more information and become a stronger auditory learner. Achiever states that I like to try my best to be efficient and successful and reach my goals. This is my leading strive to be successful and reach my career goals, it also leads me to finish assignments completely and on time. Focus means that I am able to easily set long term goals for myself, such as one day having a family and working for a company I’d enjoy working for. Discipline means that I enjoy following the rules and having others follow the rules. I have noticed this in my life where I enforce that my friends follow laws and rules such as saying thank you always or cleaning up after ourselves and also in how I organize group projects, assigning each individual to do a certain assignment.

Being aware of my top five strengths, while as fascinating as they are, doesn’t really support or change my thoughts about the future. I feel that I’ve been aware of these five strengths for most of my life and reading the StrengthsFinder 2.0 assessment feels more like a refresher on what I know than teaching me new lessons. My future goals continue to be the same and haven’t been changed by my strengths. I am able to use harmony, communication, achiever, focus, and discipline to achieve my future goals by applying them towards my life and academics in the fashions described above. By fully utilizing my strengths, I can become as efficient of a worker as I aspire to be.

Welcome to my e-Portfolio! This is where you will be able to learn about the knowledge I have gained from my experiences at The Ohio State University and from my participation in the STEM Exploration and Engagement Scholars program. From my beginnings in engineering participating in Northrop Grumman’s Next Generation Engineers program to now studying aerospace engineering, I have learned many different concepts of engineering that I can hopefully apply one day in a career. I aspire to be able to work for a group such as National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), SpaceX, or Boeing, where I could work on projects involving space travel, or possibly being the person who gets the chance to travel to space, and I am willing to work as hard as necessary to make it happen. As my favorite astronaut, Jim Lovell, once said “If you want to be successful as an astronaut or anything else, you have to keep trying. There will be disappointments in your life. You’ll get so far and then there will be a setback and if you let the setback overcome your drive, your willpower, then you’re in trouble.”, and I am willing to push through every obstacle and setback to reach my goals.