"The worst thing you can do is waste time". My mother taught me many lessons growing up but some of the most important were based around service and time management. She used to tell me how time is a finite resource that we all get different amounts of and that when you waste it, you can never get it back. Growing up, this thought stayed with me. I knew that whatever I did, I wanted it to matter and I didn't want to waste however much time I have. This thought process is what has lead me to nursing. Nursing, and medicine in general, is all about helping people and improving others quality of life. As I thought about what to study and what I wanted to do with my life, I knew I wanted to make a difference and have a career that was about more than just providing for myself and my family. I know many of my friends feel as though they are wasting their time at their jobs, going through the motions in order to make enough money to be able to make the best of the rest of the time they have. I however do not want to have the mentality of working for the weekend; I want to feel like I am making the most of my time. Spending your time helping others is never a waste of time. I know that by studying nursing and getting into the healthcare field, even on days where I daydream about my next vacation or family holiday, that I will be spending my time rather than wasting it. By studying to become a nurse in college, I will be able to heed my mothers advice and fulfill the need I have to devote myself to a profession of service. It is my sincere hope that my college pursuit and future career choice will honor the words of my mother and help those in which I come into contact with. When I succeed in this, I will be able to look back and say that I did not waste any of the time I was given.

"What is the most important piece in chess?" my father asked me when I first began to learn to play. "The King" I responded with somewhat childish glee at knowing the answer. "Yes and no" he said, which not only elicited a somewhat hilariously puzzled look on my face but the beginning of a life long lesson which I still carry with me to this day. My father continued to teach me about the movement of every piece and how, although the King was the piece in which the checkmate and thereby the end of the game revolved around, it was one of the least mobile and least influential pieces in gameplay. As a child, much of the significance of this lesson was lost on me. As with many of my age, it was all too easy to get lost in focusing on the two king pieces rather than the entire board and all of the pieces in play. As I continued to play and grow older, I began to understand what my father was trying to teach me and how it pertained to my everyday life. To be great in chess, you must not only be able to think ahead and plan out your strategy but you must anticipate what you will be up against and adjust accordingly to unforeseen moves. Life in many ways mirrors chess in that aspect. We are all told from a young age that we have to figure out what we want to be when we grow up and strive to reach that goal. We all want to win at the game of life even if our strategy and endgame are different. We advance at different paces than others, choosing different ways of reaching our goals and sacrificing different pieces along the way. I wanted to be a soccer player and a rock star growing up but gave up on those dreams in order to pursue my studies. I made mistakes and missteps that left me scrambling to protect myself and rethink my strategy in getting ahead. I have worked in many careers that I thought would be my endgame only to have life (and to be honest my own feelings) throw me obstacles which have seen me go from being a teacher and a police officer to nursing school. The odd thing about comparing life to chess is that you are really playing against yourself. You have to decide what pieces of your childish ambitions you are going to sacrifice in order to create a winning strategy. Each sacrifice you make comes at a cost which you hope brings you closer to your goal. That cost oftentimes makes you vulnerable. I may have less pieces on the board than I did when I started but that is just part of the game. It also means that I value the pieces I have left more than when I started because I chose to protect them and value their use. My desire to help people and to be in a profession in which I can do that is a win for me. I have had to sacrifice many potential avenues and strategies while growing up to achieve this but sacrificing those gave me a greater appreciation for how I am playing the game and how to adapt to losing part of the protection we all start our life with. Although we all love winning, most people I have spoken with will tell you that the best games of chess they have played were the long hard-fought ones where you were constantly challenged and continually had to adapt to what was thrown at you. Nobody knows what pieces will be on their board at the end and what they will have to work with, you can only plan and adapt. It is with this that I have begun to understand what my father meant when he said "The most important piece in chess is the one in front of you". Yes, some pieces do more than others and can be more influential in given circumstances but my father knew that you can only play with the pieces on your board. Instead of lamenting over the loss of a piece you prefer, you adapt and utilize the pieces you have to reach your desired outcome. It is only through the support and utilization of the pieces you have that you can win the game. If you are too afraid to sacrifice, you will never be in a position to go after your goal. If you don't appreciate the value of what you have in front of you, it will be taken away without an equal trade-off. It is only through appreciating the pieces around us and knowing their value that we can advance through the game of life and win. It is through playing and learning from our mistakes that we begin to understand how to go for our goal without leaving ourselves vulnerable. If my father taught me one thing about life through the game of chess, it was that there is more than one way to win and many more ways to lose, but the important thing is learning and understanding the process so that we can begin to appreciate what is most important; what we have left in front of us.

“Look at the people around you and find something about them that you admire. Then, strive to appreciate and emulate those qualities in people that you admire”. This advice was given to me in my sophomore year of high school by my role model. It is funny but most of us go through our lives without thinking about who our role model is except for the occasional grade school project. Maybe this is due to the fact that growing up, we have not had our “sonder” as defined by John Koenig. The truth is, when I was receiving this advice that would unknowingly change my life's direction, I did not realize it was coming from my role model. Despite the fact that I had lived most of my life trying to emulate and gain the approval of him, I not only blew this comment off at the time (not knowing it would be one of those statements that sticks in your head forever), but I never told him how much it changed my view of the world. A few months later, my brother went to the US Coast Guard Academy and essentially left me to sail my own boat rather than following his wake. This period in my life became one of the hardest for me. My brother was a straight A student, quarterback on the football team, team captain, eagle scout and my role model. Growing up, I followed his every step because it seemed like every step he took was the right one. This, as you can imagine, became very frustrating for him. The reason however was not because nobody wants their younger sibling playing a lifelong game of copycat, but because he wanted me to be me, not him. By leaving, I was left without the self-assured, determined and likable figure I had seen in the kitchen each morning and I had to figure out who this person in the bathroom mirror was. It was only through much hardship over the next few years that I slowly began to realize that the things I loved and emulated about my brother had become things that I ingrained in myself as well. The desire to help others, the belief that there is good in everybody and the fact that, even though you may not see it, there are vast depths in people's lives that we do not and may never understand about them. It is those qualities, among others that are distinctly mine, which lead me to over seven years of service in law enforcement and my current goal of finishing nursing school in order to do healthcare work in impoverished nations. When working in both the emergency room and law enforcement I was often asked by people if I like my profession. I always answered them with the same answer “I am in a unique position to make the worst part of someone’s day, week, month or even year better. In my mind, there is nothing more rewarding than being able to make the low point of someone’s life a little better or at least more tolerable”. This devotion to not just service but to people is something that I learned from both my brother and that I found as a quality of every person I admired growing up. It stuck with me as one of the most noble things we can do in our lives and I have attempted to shape my life after that quality. I guess, even in this, I still emulate my role model, my brother Tom.

I heard a loud CRACK as I spun around from taking the trash out to the street. I turned around to see my father on the ground, a ladder and chainsaw by his side and a large section of a tree precariously hanging above his body. I sprinted over to my father who could barely move and was experiencing significant trouble breathing. I didn't think, I didn't worry, I just acted. I started yelling directions to my family and neighbors in the area who had came to see what the commotion was about. I dragged my father out from under the tree, administered oxygen and assessed him for wounds as I had been taught in my EMT training that the police academy had provided. I continued to work on my father, console my mother and manage the situation until the ambulance arrived. When the volunteer ambulance corps began having issues, I offered to ride with them to the hospital and provided care after the crew member not driving cut himself while opening the vial of pain medicine intended for my father. My father was diagnosed with seven broken ribs, a hemothorax and several minor fractures and contusions from the event. Sitting in the hospital for the next few weeks, I couldn't stop myself from thinking about how I wanted to have been able to do more. Nurses and doctors alike told me I most likely had saved his life and my family continued to thank me for being there and taking charge but all I could think about was how, if not for my limited training, my father could have died. My mind kept wandering to how ill-prepared I was and how lucky I was that my simple interventions were enough to keep my life-long role model alive. It was during his hospitalization that I decided that my brief training was not enough. Up until this event, I had always knew about my passion for medicine and even worked in an emergency room for a short time prior to entering the police academy but had never committed to life in the medical field. I had always told myself that I would be able to satiate my desire to be involved in medicine through the medical calls through the police department and that I would be serving the greater good in a different way. I was wrong. After seeing the fear in my fathers eyes and hearing the panic in my mothers voice, I realized that I couldn't just sit on the sidelines in medical emergencies. I made a decision that I would go to nursing school and learn to not only be able to take care of those who needed it but provide the kind of competent yet empathetic care that both patients and family members require to help them get through traumatic events like these that happen to people every day. In the following months, I put in my letter of resignation with the police department, signed up for multiple prerequisite courses, took the TEAS and got accepted to multiple nursing schools. I then applied for and accepted a job at another emergency room that was affiliated with one of the nursing schools to further reinforce what I could learn in order to give myself the foundation to be the kind of medical professional I decided I wanted to be while sitting next to my father in the hospital. Why did I choose to go into nursing? I didn't. Nursing called to me and I answered.