Koehler Family Trades and Engineering Scholarship

My name is Lukas McGill and I am a senior in high school graduating this spring with a 3.3 grade point average. I am interested in pursuing a degree in the trades, specifically electrical construction. I am very interested in the trades because I enjoy working with my hands. I love to problem-solve and see the finished product. I have spoken to many electrical companies near my home and have shadowed electricians to observe their work. I have toured and been accepted into several trade schools. The school I would like to attend, Dunwoody School of Technology, is extremely expensive and would require me to take out many loans but I feel it is worth it to get the best education. I began working when I was twelve years old. I currently work two jobs in addition to playing four sports and volunteering by helping elderly neighbors with outdoor chores. I began my working career by assisting with groundskeeping at local residences. This position taught me valuable skills such as being on time and doing a thorough and quality job. When I was thirteen, my teacher approached me about working on her family’s cattle farm. I have been working there ever since. Since it is a small family farm, I earn much less than I could earn at other jobs. I continue to work at the farm because I enjoy working hard, caring for the 300 cattle, baling hay and general caretaking of a farm. The farmer I work for has taught me the value of hard work, problem-solving, being responsible and generally how to be a good and humble person. An example of my work ethic and level of responsibility would be when the farmer left the country for two weeks and trusted his family’s livelihood, their farm, to me. I successfully managed the entire farm and animals. I work every Saturday throughout the year in the rain, heat, and snow and never call in sick. I use my problem-solving skills every day at work. You never know what the animals are going to do and I never know what the farmer will have planned for me each day. Sometimes we are mending fences, sometimes we are tending to sick animals, sometimes we are cleaning the stalls and sometimes a cow gets loose. Now that requires quick thinking, problem-solving and fast feet. In the summer, I work at a store display company. I have learned how to use power tools, read blueprints and how to work on a team. This experience has prepared me to work in the trades by giving my real-world experience in a successful shop environment. My supervisor would tell you that I work hard, I am willing to learn, and I do my best every day. I enjoy helping my grandmother with all kinds of chores. We lost my grandfather a few years ago to pancreatic cancer so she needs a lot of help with outside chores like mowing and shoveling to various repairs around her home. These tasks allow me to spend quality time with her. I am applying for this scholarship because I feel I would be a good steward of the money for my education. I am motivated to finish my schooling and know that I will be successful in my trade because I am a hard worker and have a good moral character. I would like to eventually have my own business and mentor other individuals within the trades. I would be very thankful to receive this scholarship. Thank you for considering me.

I am passionate about becoming an engineer because I get to create new things, solve problems and work together with a team. My uncle was an engineer and on every birthday he would get me some sort of building set. My favorite set was an electronic circuit kit where I could perform different actions on my circuit board like playing music and turning on different LEDs. I would spend hours making the different layouts they had in the directions booklet but then I would also come up with some of my very own and test my knowledge of the kit. This kit made me fall in love with creating new things and using my hand. I have lived on my family's beef farm my entire life. Many things come with living on a farm like learning responsibility and hard work. When equipment breaks down on the farm, I enjoy helping fix things and figuring out how they work. Working on the farm teaches me a lot about how things work and how it can be a time-consuming process. This has taught me to stay patient and not be afraid to ask questions when I need help because there are plenty of things to break on the farm if you don't know how to use them properly. One time I was at my Grandpa’s farm and my uncle and I were fixing his lawn mower. I was about ten years old and didn’t know much about fixing lawnmowers. My uncle had to run into town and pick up some parts we needed for the mower and he told me to try and figure out the problem on my own. He left me a manual for the mower and told me to try my hardest and try to learn as much as I could. I never figured out what was wrong with the mower but I loved learning a lot about the mower and how it worked in general. Another reason why I am passionate about engineering is I will be able to work with people every day for the rest of my life. One day, at a 4-H camp I used to go to when I was younger, my group was given the mission to build a stick tower that was as tall as we could make it and could hold a basketball. The group I was assigned to was creative but shy, so I felt like we needed a leader to help get our tower in the sky. The only rule in the contest was you could only use sticks from the nearby woods. I assigned half of our group to go to the woods and get sticks the other half would help build the tower. In the half-hour-long period, we ended up building a six-foot-tall tower and holding the basketball. This was some of the most fun I have had working with a team and I hope to build more awesome things in the future with a team of engineers.