Being a healthcare professional means not only being a professional on the field, but means having a caring heart that someone can talk to at the end of the day. None of my family went into healthcare, so it would never have been on my radar until some of my family needed healthcare. It was a new experience for me being called out early of my sixth grade classroom thinking my mom was taking me to some fun event that I didn't know about until the silent car drive home turned into a heavy one. My grandfather suffered from a stroke, something my eleven-year-old self wasn't very familiar with. Though I quickly got familiar with it in our first phone call. It hurt me to see him this way, and it hurt even more that I couldn't communicate with him as his words slurred together in incoherent sentences. Long sob story short, he had to move away to find care that was good for him, and though nine-year-old me felt like I was grieving a grandparent who wasn't truly gone, I now understand why it had to be done. Working in healthcare isn't just about focusing simply on the end goal, it's about the process. It is about being there to support that person through their downfalls and through their victories. You have to have enough empathy to stand by them whether they remember who you are or are yelling you out the room. Which is what my grandmother used to do in her nursing home before she passed. Every time we went it would be a new surprise. She would tell me to take her to Disney World, or to a different state that she never showed interest in before the dementia. Even though it didn't make any sense to me, I always told her I would take here there. My three-year-old godbrother has autism and, though he is likely smarter than me, his communication was a little delayed. His mother, knowing that I was interested in what they did, let me sit in on one of his speech therapy appointments. Seeing the whole process made me notice how his behavior wasn't the best, but the therapist worked around it and found what worked for him. That is what healthcare is all about, in my opinion. I am now going on to be a speech language pathologist in the future. Going on journeys with others to help them not only speak about now, but their journey ahead. Although Speech Language Pathology has a small workforce, that is what I enjoy about it. I love the tight-knit community where everyone seems to work together. But I do think that the people behind the curtain should be given credit where credit is due. My goal for being a speech language pathologist is to one day open a space where children can get the specific cares they need. My idea of it is having a company where we put Speech, Physical, and Occupational therapy all in one. It would be filled with caring workers who really do put in the effort for their children and do their best to set them on the right path for the rest of their lives. I also think it would be a good idea to make some type of support groups for parents to know that they aren't alone in whatever they are currently facing with their child. All of these ideas fill my heart and mind and push me towards the future.

Being a healthcare professional means not only being a professional on the field, but means having a caring heart that someone can talk to at the end of the day. None of my family went into healthcare, so it would never have been on my radar until some of my family needed healthcare. It was a new experience for me being called out early of my sixth grade classroom thinking my mom was taking me to some fun event that I didn't know about until the silent car drive home turned into a heavy one. My grandfather suffered from a stroke, something my eleven-year-old self wasn't very familiar with. Though I quickly got familiar with it in our first phone call. It hurt me to see him this way, and it hurt even more that I couldn't communicate with him as his words slurred together in incoherent sentences. Long sob story short, he had to move away to find care that was good for him, and though nine-year-old me felt like I was grieving a grandparent who wasn't truly gone, I now understand why it had to be done. Working in healthcare isn't just about focusing simply on the end goal, it's about the process. It is about being there to support that person through their downfalls and through their victories. You have to have enough empathy to stand by them whether they remember who you are or are yelling you out the room. Which is what my grandmother used to do in her nursing home before she passed. Every time we went it would be a new surprise. She would tell me to take her to Disney World, or to a different state that she never showed interest in before the dementia. Even though it didn't make any sense to me, I always told her I would take here there. My three-year-old godbrother has autism and, though he is likely smarter than me, his communication was a little delayed. His mother, knowing that I was interested in what they did, let me sit in on one of his speech therapy appointments. Seeing the whole process made me notice how his behavior wasn't the best, but the therapist worked around it and found what worked for him. That is what healthcare is all about, in my opinion. I am now going on to be a speech language pathologist in the future. Going on journeys with others to help them not only speak about now, but their journey ahead.

“If everything’s the same, then there aren’t any choices! I want to wake up and decide things!” This is a quote from Lois Lowry’s 1993 classic book The Giver. Now this may be a generic answer, but it is generic and correct. This book carries such important topics from age to getting old to the choices that we make in between. It displays life from the very beginning to the end of your life and how the choices and memories you make are sacred. The Giver is a dystopian novel that follows Jonas, a boy who has been chosen to receive all the memories from a man called the Giver. The rest of the town is plain old black and white. They are assigned their spouses, their houses, and their children. Everything is chosen for them. Now of course, once Jonas spends some time with the giver, and starts to realize that there is so much more to life than just getting assigned things and doing it because someone told you to. It opens his eyes that he has access to our God-given ability of free will. The choices we make create memories that we can savor forever. If we don’t have our choices or memories then we are simply just robots roaming the Earth. Choices, whether good or bad, are what we learn. We can not grow and evolve if we are not learning from our past mistakes from the choices we made. The fact that this book made it onto the banned books list is beyond me. I can understand how people wouldn’t want parents to expose their children to topics like sex or violence at a young age, but for teenagers, this is an absolutely great book to learn from even if we are not living the same lifestyle as them. It is estimated that humans make 35,000 decisions in a single day. That's about 958,125,000 decisions in an average person’s lifetime. Decisions shape the people that we are. It shows our ethics, morals, and how we choose to live our lives. The Giver is one of those books that shines the light on how every decision keeps us what we were meant to be, human.

To think about your greatness in the future sometimes you have to look back at your past. My wish in the future is to be a speech-language pathologist. I want people to be able to understand how important using your voice can be. My grandfather suffered from a stroke a few years ago and ever since then communication between the two of us has been iffy. It's very hard to transition from laughing with someone every day to not being able to hold up a simple conversation. This inspired me to pursue an education in speech-language pathology in the first place. Moving onto my past and now into the future I hope to accomplish making kids feel like they have a voice that is being understood and heard. Over the years I have already gained experience working with kids understanding the best way to approach them. Knowing kids have a lot to say I envision myself healing a lot of children's insecurities. Maybe they don't talk like their friends do, or are getting bullied for the way that they do talk. I would like to let kids know that nobody should get bullied for something they cannot control and are working on. After I graduate and work for a good amount of time there is a good chance I will open up my very own clinic. I would love to make a place that expresses my values as well as some others. It would be nice to set up a place that has special areas for each person to make their appointments with their clients. Something that is also very important to me is a flexible schedule. As long as they are responsible for keeping a reasonable amount of clients they can choose which days they would like them to come in each week. This place would be community centered always making sure to help out when we can. We would hold some events where people who want to become speech-language pathologists get to quietly observe others doing their job to gain some insight that a textbook couldn't give them. All of this is just to say that a good education could change a person's life along with the others that they choose to inspire. Whether I pursue this path that I am dreaming of now, or I am taking a different path down the line, I hope to always keep the passion of wanting to help people make their opinions heard.