On Wednesdays, at least once a month, I try to volunteer at my local food pantry. During this, I help stock, organize, and distribute food to poor families. This helps the large community of struggling families in my small town, and it makes me feel like I am actually helping them to worry about less. Working with others at the food pantry is a positive experience. Everyone is committed to helping others and is very kind. They are very welcoming to me when I show up to volunteer, even though none of them know me. I believe if more people volunteered at food pantries and similar organizations, the world would be a better and kinder place.

My dream is to be an engineer at NASA. I would help design and build things such as rovers and rockets. This has been a dream of mine because I love working with physics and astronomy. I also would really want to help advance human civilization in some way during my life. At NASA, I believe I could help design something that could advance our efforts at space exploration.

I think it is very important to save money and put it in savings accounts. Spending money on temporary luxuries, such as food and services, might be nice, but saving that money would help you far more in the long run. Putting money in savings accounts will take that money that you almost threw away and multiply itself. It might not seem like much at first, but when you gain enough money in the account, the will start to see the interest on your money showing. Investing is an alternative to a savings account. You could make much more money off of investing as long as you are smart and careful. If you stay patient, you will most likely only make money off the stock market. The worst thing you can do with the extra money in your paychecks is spend it on useless things that will make you feel good for only moments. It is the wisest option to save or invest that money rather than waste it. The money you will gain from saving it will help you in the future or in your darkest times, so in all cases, saving money is a smart decision.

My favorite scientific discovery is gravitational lensing. I first learned about this while researching for a presentation on dark matter in my AP Physics class. Gravitational lensing happens when light bends around heavy objects in weird and abstract ways. While looking into the sky with a telescope, you can find some galaxies that look deformed and other galaxies that have three duplicate versions of themselves. This is caused by gravitational lensing bending the light of distant stars and galaxies while it travels to Earth, where we view it. I will not go into the reason that gravitational lensing occurs because it is too long and abstract, but we can use it to uncover more information about our universe. Gravitational lensing can lead to so many new discoveries. This one weird and unusual characteristic of our universe has been used numerous times to prove and discover new laws of our universe. Astronomers have used it to be the first ones to ever predict a supernova, which is thought to be a very spontaneous event. Scientists have used gravitational lensing to help prove Einstein's Theory of Relativity and to prove the existence of dark matter. We have also used gravitational lensing to calculate a more precise age of our universe. Gravitational lensing is an example of how our universe behaves in unusual ways and we use that to our advantage, which is what inspires me to study astronomy and physics.

Art and STEM are two complementary subjects. When they are used together, it can create something that can benefit the whole world. Art can be incorporated into STEM fields, such as engineering, by giving creativeness to new inventions. A great example of this is Leonardo Da Vinci. Leonardo used his art skills, such as being a painter and architect, and combined them with his engineering skills to draw up new inventions. It is a known fact that Leonardo Da Vinci created blueprints to a helicopter hundreds of years before the helicopter was first made. I believe his art skills are what made him so ingenious in his designs. Art can also be used in STEM fields to simply make things look much nicer. No one wants to live in a world where everything looks plane and boring. Combing art with disciplines such as architectural design can create something that not only functions to hold up a building, but also looks rather pleasant. Someday when I pursue my degree in engineering, I will be sure to incorporate art into my designs. I want my designs to be creative and special enough to improve the world and I believe using art is the best way to achieve that.

I am passionate about becoming an engineer because I love solving problems in methodical and sometimes creative ways. Becoming an engineer would mean I can use my knowledge to solve bigger problems in communities and help push efforts, such as building bridges and maybe even designing Martian rovers. In my community, there seems to be no push towards greener energy. When I graduate as an engineer, I could work with my village council to either find a more renewable option or even construct a new option that would work best for my village. An example of me solving this problem would be designing solar panels or windmills on the outskirts of my village which is mostly empty fields. Converting the village's energy into green would give the citizens a greater pride in their town and would positively effect the environment as a whole.

A great example of a time where I showed up to help the community is when I volunteered at my local food pantry. This experience showed me the value in individual efforts and how one person could impact so many others in a positive way. What I did to help the community was to pack boxes of food and distribute those boxes into the cars of people who need it. There is a large number of poor families in my community who desperately needed this food and it felt good to help them to not worry about spending too much on food. This was during the Covid lockdowns in late 2020 and many families were having an even harder time surviving on what they had, so it was a great time to work with other members of the community to give food to the families in need in a safe and proper way. I plan on volunteering at my local food pantry again because of my experience and I recommend it to my friends who need volunteer hours. It is a great way to help give to the community and it leaves you feeling proud at the end. This experience, I think, will inspire me to volunteer more often later in life in initiatives that will help communities and people.

In my community, I would want to see a greater focus in green energy and recycling. I think my village should work towards a cleaner energy source and promote recycling. I could help push my views by registering to vote when I come of age and voting for those officials who have the same thing in mind as me. The United States, I think, should work towards a more efficient political system. As it stands, the two-party system in the U.S. is counter-intuitive and works against eachother too much. If we somehow dissolve this party system it can cause a progressive change in American politics. We can work towards legislation that benefits the people and the country, rather than just one of the two party's extreme beliefs. I can work towards this by voting for political candidates who share the same goal, and maybe some day I can enter in an office to help spark the change. The main goal that the world should share is working to correct climate change. This means to help countries work together to convert poorer communities to more renewable energy sources. Another goal for the world should be to clean up the oceans. This task is important because as plastic in the ocean breaks down, it can enter into fish and other living creatures. This not only harms the animals, but it can harm us by tainting our food with microscopic plastic particles. I could work to attain these goals by voting for legislation and officials in my country that will help in these efforts.

It is greatly important for students to have relations with their community. Being involved in their communities can give students the social and economic skills to succeed in college and in life. Communities also give students the ability to donate their time in the effort to provide need to the poor. Communities teach students the true values of being a person and how they should interact with others. I have volunteered my time and effort at my local food pantry. This helped the poor families in my community and it gave me a sense of accomplishment. Especially during Covid, many families were struggling to even provide for their children, and my efforts gave these families one less thing to worry about in these troubling times. Working with the Crivitz Food Pantry has been one of my favorite experiences in high school. It allowed me to meet new people who care an incredible amount about the local community. These people have opened my eyes to the act of giving and volunteering and I believe I will volunteer later in life at food pantries and charities as a result. Someday I hope to get a job in engineering and possibly even work at NASA. One of my goals in college is to volunteer in a community initiative to build something that will help scientific research and study. I heard a story of a community effort to build a radio telescope. These people were volunteers who flew all the way down to Australia in the pursuit to help scientific understanding. As a result, the radio telescope they built was able to see further into space, and astronomers were able to discover more about galaxies. I want to be part of a volunteering initiative like this; it sacrifices my time and energy into the benefit of research. If more people helped out their communities like this, our society would be much more advanced and caring towards each other.

My playlist consists of classic rock and alternative rock songs. Ramble On by Led Zeppelin is a song that greatly inspires me to keep on pushing forward. The playlist also consists of songs from Nirvana, Guns N' Roses, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Pink Floyd, and the Scorpions, to name a few. I enjoy this genre of music because it comes from the heart and soul of artists. Much modern genres of music have prerecorded beats, in which the artist just sings over, which gives it less meaning, in my opinion.