During my senior year of high school, I attended a lecture series at Cornell University that shifted my view of college fundamentally. Prior to the lecture, my goal was to go to college to get a job or to position myself for graduate school, hoping these two goals would guide my direction. I was challenged to shift my thinking towards developing skill sets that will serve me throughout my life and in any career rather than tailoring my entire education for one job. Now, as a student at Texas A&M, I want to utilize the flexibility offered by an institution that is respected across dozens of disciplines to create a well rounded education.
In order to develop myself most fully, I’ve challenged myself in the classroom through the Business Honors program and the University Scholars Program among other avenues. I am majoring in Business Honors and Finance with a minor in Cybersecurity and a graduate certificate in Advanced International Affairs from the Bush School of Government. Outside of the classroom, I have involved myself in as many leadership positions as possible. I created a business doing speech and debate consulting, led a team advising small businesses on COVID-19 strategic planning, managed an $8 million portfolio, and found organizations on campus making an impact for Aggies and beyond.
Each experience I have had has shaped a part of who I am, but over the past year, there were a few experiences in particular that have helped me realize the person I am and who I want to be. Early on in college, I was asked to articulate my values and place them in tiers relating to how important they were to me. My number one value was the umbrella of growth, with faith, relationships, and service underneath it. Growth to me is fundamental to being a living, breathing, contributing human being, and a person who is stagnant, is a person who is regressing. No matter what part of my life it is, I want to constantly be growing and improving myself. My faith is also a guiding factor in the decisions I make, and it is crucial for me to continue to learn about my own faith as well as others so that I can understand the world around me more clearly. Relationships is inclusive of family, friends, colleagues, and even those who I don’t particularly get along with. As an extrovert, I treasure my relationships with others more than anything, and building them is an endeavor I find both necessary and enjoyable. Finally, service is a part of the way I was raised and the way I want to live. If I am in a position to improve the lives of others, I find it to be my duty to do so. During the Winter Break at the end of 2019, I traveled to a remote village in the Philippines about 7 hours from the city of Manila. I had done work in India numerous times before, but this was by far the most remote place I had ever been. It was eye opening to see the way that people lived without access to toilets, running water, nutrition, a tooth brush etc. The work I was involved with there was to build a well and renovate a tattered school. It was a moment where I felt immensely powerless to fix their plight, but also a responsibility to my part to take care of those who cannot.
Moving forward through the rest of college and my life, I want to challenge myself to create new things, help the marginalized, and measure my success through a humanitarian lens. I view money as a means to an end, not the end itself. Using the activities I have already been a part of, and utilizing my mentors for advice, I hope to constantly be in a state of growth in all that I do.