My senior year of high school, I applied to join the Newaygo county tech center's automotive program. I instead got put into construction trades. Nevertheless, I was excited to spend half of my school day working hard at something. See for me, working hard meant working well, and construction gave me that opportunity. The kids I worked with didn't care much for the effort they put into their work, meaning working with them became a challenge. I soon learned that having a good work ethic pays off. Everyone pays attention to work ethic. Employers, Teachers, Your parents. Somehow or another, work ethic will be a part of your life. It is a metric in which we measure people through, meaning its better to have it for your work life, your education, and even your social life. this belief shaped my thoughts on work ethic. To me, work ethic is a necessity that defines a person. To me it's not hard to have and it sets you apart in the work force. I have had lots of jobs, and I've been working since I was thirteen years old. Every boss I have ever had says the same thing. My work ethic makes me a fantastic employee. I started a new job four days before I wrote this essay and I'm already being told from the mangers that the woman who runs the store is extremely impressed with my quality of work. See, work ethic shouldn't be something that's hard to come by in a person. If anything, it should be rarer to find someone without a good work ethic. Unfortunately, we don't live in a world like that anymore. people who care about the work they do and want to spend time learning their craft are separated from those who lack that skillset. It has always been important to me and will continue to be important to me to be a man who cares about his quality of work.

When I first started playing tennis, I had a disdain for the sport. My reason was simple; I never won. I always felt cheated, in all honesty. I started playing tennis in my freshman year of high school back when I still lived in Florida. I did not join the sport out of eagerness to play, I joined the sport cause a girl asked me too. During preseason practice I grew to actually enjoy the sport. That was until the season started. we didn't have a large men's team, having only five people to bring to competitions. I was fifth, which I assumed meant I had a pretty good chance of winning. I could not have been more wrong. I was put against kids who had been playing since they were potty trained. They played in their country clubs and their rich parents paid for tutoring sessions every other day. I was definitely not that kid. It didn't help that our coach told us guys before every game that we wouldn't win and that we were just there for our competition to warm up with. My coach had no hope in me and God knows my parents couldn't afford to pay for tutoring. On top of that, any free time I had was spent working or doing schoolwork. The following summer, my family moved to a small town in Michigan. The school there had no men's tennis team. Despite my previous failure at the sport in Florida, I had still liked playing tennis, as did my brother who played on the same team in Florida. Together, we tried to get a team started at our new school, though we soon met a massive roadblock. The Athletic director at our new school didn't like tennis. He actually laughed when we mentioned starting a team, resulting in a lack of a team in my sophomore year. I didn't give up hope though. In my junior year, a middle school teacher offered to coach a preseason trial run for tennis. We got the athletic director to schedule us games and we got uniforms. Before our first game, the athletic director reached out to the middle school teacher, (our coach), and told him that our games were cancelled because we weren't worth the money. Needless to say, the hope for playing tennis in my junior year had been squashed. Senior year wasn't looking to good either. On the last day of my junior year, I asked the athletic director if there was a chance of a men's tennis team for my senior year. He laughed at me and told me that because nobody cares about tennis, that he hoped not. That was where my disdain began to set in. What was the point of playing a sport that I'm bad at that nobody cares about. It was a waste of my time, really. Senior year started and I began to save for a car and I'd rather be working then trying to start another false hope. that's when a miracle happened that I couldn't have seen coming. A team was started and played games. I won a game in my senior year, it being the only game of tennis I have ever won. The season was fantastic, and the waiting taught me something very important. Don't give up hope and keep trying. If it weren't for my shortcomings in tennis, then I wouldn't have had the confidence to apply for college, or even this scholarship. If I can endure four years of hard work just to win one game, then I can do anything.

I plan to pursue my passion for automotive mechanics, a goal I have had since I was young. I grew up watching pretty much anything car related, from Lightning McQueen going around a racetrack to Optimus Prime defeating the Decepticons. Growing up with those influences gave me one clear mission: To be a part of the car industry. I started to pursue that as a freshman in High School, back when I still lived in Florida. My dad had a friend at our church who did professional car detailing, and lucky for me, he wanted to teach me. I thought that it would be perfect for me, especially considering that at the time my only opinion on what makes a car cool was its looks. I learned very quickly that detailing was not what I wanted to do. It was boring and felt too much like a chore. But still, I was determined to be a part of the car world. That's when I met Eric, a man my dad had gotten close with through a ministry at our church. He casually told me at a barbecue once that he used to build thousand horsepower Dodge Neon's with his friends, and over the next few years, that story formed my interests in the heartbeat of a car: the engine. In senior year, I took a step towards learning more of what I didn't know. I applied to the automotive program at the Newaygo county tech center. I was excited and eager to start my journey. Unfortunately, the automotive program was full and there wasn't another option for me to learn. My solution was to continue doing what I had been doing, picking up as much as I could by watching YouTube and helping my dad with simple maintenance like oil changes. It was the best I could do with the resources available to me. Anytime my friends were working on their cars, I offered to help. When my dad's truck got a large scrape from someone in a parking lot, I learned how to fix it. I pretty much just did what I could until something better opened up. I thought I found that opportunity in a local dealership whose owner I met at a church event. I submitted an application and went into that building once a week for four months straight, and yet I was never given the time of day. This resulted in some really crappy ways of thinking. "Maybe cars just aren't for me" I told myself. I convinced myself that if I couldn't get any opportunities now, then I wouldn't get any opportunities ever. God had other plans, however, throwing me the curveball of a lifetime. That curveball came in the form of my best friend. He had already committed to going to WyoTech, a trade school in Wyoming that offers auto-mechanics, but also high horsepower mechanics. It was literally everything I was looking for. The application process was easy, and I was accepted to the school within a week of hearing about it. This opportunity has been a long time coming for me and I couldn't be more grateful of the foresight that God has. If I had been given any of the previous things I had chased, then I wouldn't have been given the chance to be more than just an average mechanic. To me, this opportunity means living into a childhood dream and fulfilling a goal. To me, it means looking at myself as a child and telling him that we did it. To me, this is the door to my dream.