My freshman year has come to an end and I believe that my vision for the future has become a bit more clear. I realize now just how fast a year goes by and thus, how soon I will be graduating. This realization made one question most prominent in my mind, “How will I go about experiencing every opportunity I desire in only three years?” I have begun forming a plan that I plan to revise and eventually carry out in order to improve my life and my perspective of the world.

My first step of  sophomore year is to get more involved. I was heavily involved in clubs and extracurricular activities the beginning of freshman year, but the pressure of so any demanding classes and clubs resulted in dropping my clubs for more time to study. I am going to work to find the balance between classes, studying, and clubs. The clubs I wish to get involved in are ones aimed towards service. I’m in a position where I have the ability to give up my time to help and assist others. My current career path is for the medical field which means that my whole life, I will be helping other people, so it would be wise of me to gain more experience now. At the club fair hosted annually on the oval, I can talk to different service groups and gain insight on the various activities they do.

Next, I plan to begin attending studying abroad informational sessions and start making arrangements for studying abroad. I have never travelled anywhere outside of the United States and I believe this would be an experience I would learn and grow from. Being away from my hometown in order to study as well as being completely submerged in a new culture and atmosphere to appreciate may widen my perspective of the world and the diversity of others. It would be my academic enrichment. I plan to study abroad for one semester my junior year so that I will have ample amount of time to be engrossed in a new culture and school setting.

Lastly, I would like to go to stone lab the summer of my sophomore year. I have already decided to take another biology class in spring of 2017 rather than in fall of 2017 so that I may have more classes at stone lab available for my to take up. Stone lab is on Lake Eerie and most of their labs are hands on. I feel that over the years, taking all courses in a classroom setting makes the material seem a bit unrealistic and difficult notice or apply in reality. Stone lab is a good way to understand how classroom material and course books apply to real life and will also teach me the proper way to use common lab equipment. This would be a source of academic enrichment as well as leadership.

I will still be planning over this summer on how to improve my plan so as to obtain the most out of college as possible. For example, I wish to being research, which would be original inquiry, but I have yet to think about how to go about reaching that desire or what I would even like to research. Researching just any topic for the sake of doing so wouldn’t be original inquiry. Original inquiry is something an individual would shamelessly give up hours of time to work on and expend all their efforts upon until the end.  At the moment, I am happy with the key points of my sophomore and junior year of college layout.

I feel that throughout my childhood, I was always closely watched over and taken care of. This is not a bad thing in my belief. I appreciate the way I was cared for and raised when many children go neglected or given the bare minimum throughout their childhood. It only means that my goals will be different from those of someone who was less sheltered than I. I was urged by my parents from a young age to strive to be the best I can be and stressed the importance of a good education, which has helped to shape the person I am today and explains why I am so driven to go the extra distance sometimes educational wise or to gain more experience in life or about the society I live in. An example would be of how I joined the scholars program when I could have skipped this opportunity to avoid extra work load. I know that a major reason they push me to do well is because they want me to do better than they did and also so I’d be the first in the family to go to college.
With this being said, one of my goals is to gain experience of the world and see for myself what it has to offer. I have always been watched over by authority figures and never bothered to pay attention to the news so I was pretty oblivious to the world around me. I believe studying abroad is a great way to take advantage of my new increased independence and take control of my own experience and what I learn from the world. Not only would achieving this goal give me global awareness and academic enrichment, but I believe it also falls under the title of leadership. I may not be leading a group of individuals but I’d be a leader of myself and be making an important decision. Not because I feel obligated or told to, but because I think it’ll be beneficial to me and I’ll act upon that.
I’ve been debating on how to approach my goal of studying abroad. I have already planned to attend a study abroad expo in the Thompson Library on Friday September 18th, and then going to the international affairs office during their designated study abroad hours. Though I do not plan to study abroad for another year or two, I feel that freshman year is a wise time to start figuring out where I want to go and what places are actually available to me based on my major, neuroscience. I can begin to establish a foundation and inquire about applying for financial aid and if I will be able apply for some now to use later and I’d still have time to maybe ask for help on how to write the perfect essays for scholarships.
Another goal of mine is pretty “unoriginal” but just as important. My goal is to graduate from college with a degree and use that degree to get into medical school, like so many others in Arts and Sciences, otherwise, what’s the point of being here? I know my parents have sacrificed so much for me to be a first generation college student, so I can’t let them down. But, I am not only doing this them. In fact, I’m mostly doing this for myself. Again, this goes back the title of leadership in my opinion. I like the freedom of college and all the events that go on around campus. I enjoy having to make decisions of doing homework or going to club. I enjoy the feeling of exhaustion from staying up all night to study and the satisfaction of passing or even the consequences of getting unsatisfactory grades from cramming. I love the task of learning and bettering my mind and having control over what it is I shall be learning
more in depth about. In college, I can actually have the opportunity to learn things that I didn’t have access to in high school, such as mythology literature, a fast paced biology class, or even ball room dancing (which I’ll have to schedule literature and ball room dancing at the end of this year). So my current goal is to stay in school so as to eventually graduate, and studying the things I’ve so desired to learn while I’m here. That also involves better studying habits since my habits in high school consisted of homework and cramming the night before the test. I also was never really organized in high school which I have quickly learned will result in failure here in college because there is too much going on to remember everything. I don’t have much of a “game plan” for studying. I attempt to keep up on the readings and catch up on chapters I didn’t read that week over the weekend. I still have a lot of room to try and better my study habits, which may be a good thing to ask during the upperclassmen interview this month. Then, my challenge will be to keep up those good study habits throughout the year. As for staying organized, I bought a planner. I used colored pens and mark things down with certain colors that represents how urgent or important that event is. An example would be, I write down my swing dance club on Mondays in black for not being too important, while homework due in chemistry that week is red for urgent. Anything written in purple stands for a quiz or exam and so on. I try to set aside ten minutes at the end of each day to check my buckeye email. Once I get into the routine of checking it every night, I also plan to get in the routine of also checking it in the morning and midday for urgent notifications.
At the moment, I do not have many goals, but it does not worry me in the least. There is no point in forcing goals or pondering new goals to create in my opinion. The real goals, the ones that actually count to an individual, are pretty evident to the person after a few moments of brainstorming. Besides, having two or three big long term goals that lead smaller current goals makes it easier to focus on and obtain rather than having a ton of goals simultaneously. More goals are sure to develop and be created throughout my time here at The Ohio State University