Environmental problems are often framed as technical challenges, but I’ve learned that they are even bigger challenges of engagement. People are more likely to protect the environment when they feel connected to it and believe that their actions have an impact. My interest in improving the environment comes from exploring how engineering, education, storytelling, and community involvement can work together to create that connection. This fall, at the University of Southern California, I’ll study mechanical engineering alongside filmmaking because I believe great design combines innovation with storytelling. I’ll prioritize sustainability, creating interactive technologies that both minimize environmental impact and encourage sustainable behavior. I want my work to prove that thoughtful design can inspire things like environmental action. For my Eagle Scout Project I restored an abandoned nature trail behind my elementary school, leading more than thirty volunteers to clear overgrowth, rebuild pathways, install eight nature-walk signs, and build a learning circle for students. Throughout the project, I watched younger students become excited about the plants and wildlife around them, which showed me firsthand that environmental commitment is most effective when it inspires curiosity and participation. As Head of Outreach for my robotics team, I organized an international collaboration with a team in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Together, we designed and built a robotic boat capable of collecting plastic from the ocean surface and metals from the seafloor. For months, we met on zoom, exchanged notes, and created designs before finally testing the robot together in Mexico. There, engineering became our shared language against ocean pollution demonstrating that environmental challenges are global problems, requiring collaboration across cultures and borders. While both projects focused on protecting the environment, they revealed a common obstacle in fighting environmental challenges: many people want to help but find it hard to become actively engaged. That inspired my most significant environmental project, the Eco-Arcade, an interactive recycling system that combines a Raspberry Pi, a weight sensor, custom software, and an educational game to make recycling fun. When someone recycles, the system launches a short game that rewards participation by giving “Eco Facts”. I spent months designing, coding, testing, and improving the system. During early demonstrations, I watched students gather around the machine, laughing and viewing recycling as exciting and meaningful instead of a chore. Today, the Eco-Arcade is installed at a local recycling center and has received a provisional patent. My goal is to expand the Eco-Arcade into schools, community centers, and public spaces, using interactive experiences to inspire as many people as I can to participate in sustainability efforts. I will prioritize sustainability in my field by designing technologies that make conservation accessible, engaging, and impactful. Whether that comes from developing educational sustainability systems, creating environmental monitoring technologies, or designing products that encourage positive environmental behavior, I want to bridge the gap between innovation and public participation. Through projects like my Eagle Scout trail restoration, ocean-cleanup robot, and the Eco-Arcade, I know that the most powerful environmental solutions are those that combine science, engineering, education, and community.

“Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim. But a certain difference is found among ends; for some ends are activities, others are products apart from the activities that produce them. Where there are ends apart from the actions, the products are by nature better than the activities. Since there are many actions, arts, and sciences, their ends also are many.” Essay Aristotle’s central claim in this passage is that human life is fundamentally structured around goal-directed activity, and that understanding the “good” requires recognizing a hierarchy of ends culminating in a highest, self-sufficient purpose. His underlying meaning is not merely descriptive—that humans pursue goals—but normative: he is building the foundation for ethics by arguing that all action presupposes an implicit orientation toward some conception of the good, and that philosophy’s task is to identify the ultimate end that makes all other ends intelligible. Aristotle begins with an assertion that appears almost obvious: every art, inquiry, action, and pursuit aims at some good. However, the philosophical weight lies in what he quietly assumes in this universality. He is not saying that people consciously reflect on goodness in every action, but rather that purposiveness itself implies value-structure. To act at all is to treat some outcome as worth bringing about. Even destructive or mistaken actions are intelligible only because the agent takes something—however distorted—to be desirable. This means that “good” is not an optional moral add-on to action; it is the internal grammar of action itself. Aristotle is reframing ethics away from rule-following and toward teleology: the structure of ends. This leads to his more subtle distinction between different kinds of ends. Some ends are activities themselves, while others are products separate from the activity. This distinction is doing more philosophical work than it first appears. Aristotle is isolating a tension between doing and making. In some cases, the value of an activity is exhausted in its performance—such as contemplation or understanding—while in others, the activity is merely instrumental, valuable only because it produces something external, like a house built by architecture or a statue produced by sculpture. What Aristotle is really establishing here is a hierarchy of value based on self-sufficiency. If an activity produces an external product, then the product is, in a sense, more complete than the activity because it persists independently of it. But when an activity is its own end, it cannot be reduced to anything beyond itself. This is where Aristotle begins to orient the reader toward his ultimate conclusion: the highest human good must be something that is not merely instrumental. It must be an end in itself, not a means to something else. The deeper implication is that much of human life is spent in pursuit of things that are structurally incomplete. Wealth, for example, is not an end in itself but a tool for other ends. Honor depends on recognition by others and thus cannot be self-sufficient. Even pleasure, if treated as an ultimate goal, is unstable because it depends on external conditions. Aristotle is preparing the reader to see that most commonly pursued “goods” fail his implicit criterion of completeness. Thus, when he concludes that there are many actions, arts, and sciences with many ends, he is not merely cataloging human diversity. He is setting up a problem: if there are many ends, then the pursuit of life risks fragmentation unless there is a highest ordering principle. Without such a principle, action becomes a disjointed series of local aims with no unified direction. Aristotle’s ethics therefore begins not with moral commandments but with a structural diagnosis of human activity: life is teleological, but its teloi are plural and potentially conflicting. The hidden force of the passage is that it forces the reader to confront an implicit question: if every action aims at some good, what unifies these goods into a coherent whole? Aristotle is not yet naming the “highest good” (eudaimonia), but he is preparing its necessity. The argument is architectural: if every action is a column pointing toward an end, then without a final capstone, the structure collapses into incoherence. This is where Aristotle diverges sharply from moral frameworks that treat ethics as obedience to external law. Instead, he treats ethics as an inquiry into the internal logic of life itself. Human beings are not primarily rule-followers but goal-seekers, and moral philosophy must therefore ask not “what should I do?” in isolation, but “what is the ultimate end that makes all doing intelligible?” The passage subtly redefines ethics as a form of rational self-understanding rather than constraint. Even the final sentence, noting that different sciences and arts have different ends, reinforces this structural pluralism. Medicine aims at health, shipbuilding at ships, rhetoric at persuasion. But Aristotle’s deeper concern is that none of these can explain why we pursue them at all. Each is intelligible internally, but externally dependent on a higher justification. This prepares the way for his later argument that there must be a highest science—politics or ethics—that organizes the rest by determining the ultimate human good. In this sense, Aristotle is not simply describing human behavior but diagnosing its incompleteness. The passage suggests that human life is rationally structured yet hierarchically unresolved. We naturally act toward goods, but we do not naturally know whether those goods form a coherent whole. Philosophy, then, is the attempt to resolve this tension by identifying the final end that is not subordinate to anything else. Ultimately, the meaning of this passage is that ethics is not a set of rules imposed upon life but an inquiry into life’s inherent directionality. Aristotle is arguing that to live is already to be oriented toward goods, and therefore the philosophical task is to determine which of those goods can serve as the ultimate organizing principle of existence. The “good” is not one object among others but the structure that makes action intelligible at all. In this way, Aristotle quietly transforms ethics into a science of purpose: not what we ought to do in isolation, but what we are always already aiming at whenever we act at all.