One of the Honors & Scholars G.O.A.L.S. is global awareness. This spring break, I was fortunate enough to be able to take a trip to England and Wales and was able to explore their cities (including London) and learn about their history and culture. Pictured above are just some of my pictures from when I visited London. I loved being able to talk to new people, see historic places, and try new things (including food and new ways of doing things). I also loved being able to see the differences and similarities between the U.S. and the U.K. like the different common types of travel (trains and buses are way more common) and different types of housing (smaller flats are way more common than houses unlike in the U.S.) as well as many more.

The Honors and Scholars program has a list of G.O.A.L.S. to help everyone in the program become better and well rounded adults. The G in GOALS stands for global awareness, which means making yourself aware of the differences in the world and the people that live in it and appreciating and trying to understand those differences. The O stands for original inquiry which challenges students to ask new and hard questions that have not been thought of before. The A stands for academic enrichment which pushes students to explore new and different things even in the field they are not studying. The L stands for leadership development which pushes students to step out of their comfort zone and into leadership positions to better themselves and their community. Finally, the S stands for service engagement which encourages students to help out in their community. This is the part that I am most interested in as I was involved in many different service projects in high school and would love to continue helping others.

One aspect of G.O.A.L.S. that I am most focused on is the goal of academic enrichment. I love learning and especially love learning about different and new types of things. As part of the Biological Sciences Scholars, I was able to visit the Columbus Zoo and take a behind the scenes tour of the zoo’s Health Center. While there I was able to learn about how animals are taken care of at the zoo. This included learning about how animals are given surgeries (and what they would need surgeries for), learning about the different types of check ups and procedures performed on the animals, and learning about the different types of projects that the people who work at the Health Center are a part of. It was very interesting to learn about all of these different things and it showed me that there are a variety of things that you can do with a single career.