<p>Essay question: Considering your lifetime goals, discuss how your current and future academic and extra-curricular activities might help you achieve your goals.</p>
<p>Essay answer: Like most people, I didn’t grow up knowing exactly what I wanted to do when I was an adult. I changed my mind like the seasons of weather changes where I live. For a while I wanted to become a cook, then it changed to flight attendant, then to detective, and so on changing about every month of my youth. It wasn’t until my junior year of high school that I decided to seriously think about the future and what I can do to contribute to society when I get out in the real world. I always knew that I should go to college after high school because that’s what people who want to be successful do, right? So I started seriously evaluating myself starting last year and asked myself things like: what classes have I found most interesting? What do I want my main purpose in life to be? How long should I attend school to achieve my goals and what kind of school should I be looking to go to? That’s when I decided I wanted to go into the medical field and study nursing.
The thing that I notice differently from what my goals are now to those goals that kept changing is that I have an invested interest in the subject matter that it takes to go into studying nursing. My previous goals were based on television shows and movies. But as I started “soul searching” last year, I started thinking about how much I enjoyed biology and chemistry. Sure it was a class that I had to put the most work into, but it was among my most favorite and the most rewarding of classes that I took in high school. I enjoyed learning how complex, complete, and creative the human body is orchestrated. It blew my mind learning about how chemical bonds can be broken off between atoms which forms entirely new molecules. It amazed me how the body functions together to fight against diseases and wards off any potential dangers that poses a threat. I continued investigating my interests and carefully observed the nurses as they worked to take care of my grandmother in a rest home. As I watched the smiles on their faces as they fed the elderly people there, I couldn’t help myself but think what a difference they were making in their lives as they helped their patients feel as comfortable as possible. Towards the end of my junior year, I was invited to participate in a medical Renaissance Scholar summer program at Baylor University. What I learned in that one week brought me to a closer understanding of what the power of medicine and nursing holds. We debated medical ethics, learned about diseases in the liver and how they can be treated, and studied where words are formed for medicine in medical terminology. But the most important thing that I evaluated there was what medical journey I should travel down: nursing or becoming a doctor. After that week I decided that I should go in the direction of becoming a nurse. The reason most people want to become a doctor is because they want the prestige of calling themselves a doctor and also the big pay check that it entails. But the thing that most doctors do not get to have is a personal relationship with their patients and the chance to see them through most of their treatments because they are coming up with the treatment behind the scenes. I want those personal relationships. I want to see my patients through the roughest times and help them push through them and not always work in the background of things. I not only want to become a registered nurse, but I want to take my education further and become a nurse practitioner and be able to specialize in neonatal care. I want to be able to help people right from the start of their life and be able to make a difference in their physical well-being so that they can grow up and become cooks, flight attendants, and investigators.
Now that it is my senior year of high school, I plan to volunteer at Houchin Blood Bank and/or a pediatric hospital starting near the second semester. I am ecstatic of what has to come for me in the next few coming years and can’t wait to begin my higher education where a university like Texas State has the goal to see me succeed in my lifetime goals. I believe that Texas State can offer me the education that I need to complete and pursue my current and future dreams by offering me a personal interactive small classroom feel, and a supportive community to push me well past any boundaries that I put up so that I can reach higher than I thought I could ever reach before. </p>