Books have had a greater impact on my life and goals more than any other type of media. From a young age—and though it is cliché—they could take me somewhere magical that was inaccessible in the real world. To begin in general, books, particularly those aimed at kids, take an ordinary character and have them achieve something extraordinary. A hero’s journey tale is one thing, but when a kid reads about another kid accomplishing an insurmountable feat, they feel as though anything is possible. This lesson of dreams being reachable, which appears time and time again, has shaped my goals in that I think they’re achievable—I feel like I can succeed at doing challenging tasks. This confidence stems from the books I read so very often as a younger student. More specifically, books help me fall in love with and draw from different aspects of life. When I was in first grade, it was the Magic Tree House series, which was how I first learned about many historical events that I later ended up studying in-depth. I then became enamored with Roald Dahl’s oeuvre: the wackiness with which he wrote his novels delighted me in elementary school and continues to inspire my humor today. A highlight of children’s books that stays with me is the obvious choice of Harry Potter, whose story and characters are some of the best in all the fiction I have ever read. This is a very limited list—I didn’t even cover Daniel Pinkwater, Stuart Gibbs, or Dav Pilkey—but I think the overarching theme is that whatever an author hits home in their book will stay with the reader, leading them to keep that lesson or value in their back pocket. I’ve read a lot of funny books in my day, and I often find myself pulling from their styles of humor when trying to make others laugh. Books like Harry Potter or The Maze Runner craft their characters in such a way that I use their example as a resource when attempting NaNoWriMo, a yearly, month-long novel-writing challenge. If these authors can cobble together a story that evokes real emotion from the reader, I figure, why can’t I? Indeed, the books I’ve read (and, frankly, continue to read) are rich with lessons and values while also providing highly entertaining tales. My goals are shaped twofold in large part due to my continued love for reading throughout my life thus far: for one, there’s a sense of making the impossible possible in many, an excellent lesson for any aspiring student to have. And for another, individual stories that I read spark new ideas for me to do. Maybe today I’ll try to invent something new, or tomorrow I’ll take up computer programming. Books insist that the sky’s the limit—the power they hold to inspire is immeasurable, which is pretty impressive for a bunch of ink on paper.

Computers make far more sense than life. In the real world, anything can happen, and it often does—even when it doesn't make sense. Illogical events happen all around us, and we're just meant to accept them. But in computer programming, everything operates with logic, and it just feels right. Writing and completing code is satisfying from this perspective—once it's done, you know you've completed something by forcing your brain to think, which comes with an incredible feeling of accomplishment. Computers are also a remarkable tool that we have at our disposal, for they can complete tasks in seconds that would take humans hours. Rather than taking this for granted, we can take full advantage of it, which is what I love to do in the STEM and computer-science world. I quickly discovered this when I took a Computer Science course this year for the first time. There was no other way to think through the assignments than with logic: each step led the next and layered on the previous, with logic dictating what was to occur. The steps ultimately created something I never would have thought I could do, yet here it was—STEM had made it happen. As a student who cherishes seeing these steps come together, it made me fall in love with computer programming, which is why I aspire to continue studying it at a higher level. Another aspect of coding that has made me grow to love it is how useful it is: as long as the writer can think about the problem at hand through a computational lens, they can write a program that goes through the steps of a real-world problem, turns it into computer logic, and returns an answer. I was able to do this when I found a website that can return sunrise and sunset times to my program—with a few calculations on the code's part, I was able to write a program where the user inputs a date and address, and they receive what time Shabbat (the Sabbath) starts that week. And that's something I was able to do in a high school course, which only further excites me for what my future in STEM holds. I anticipate building on these skills I’ve acquired in high school at the college level. I’ve already emailed with computer-science professors at several different institutions to get a sense of programs at different places, and the most exciting takeaway I gleaned is that outstanding computer-science departments exist all over the country, so I won’t be limited to a select handful of schools. Indeed, STEM—specifically computer programming—is no doubt my favorite subject to study. Its usefulness goes beyond the classroom, and I am ecstatic to pursue a degree in it.

I dream that in the future, I will have a rewarding job in the computer science field and, at the same time, start a family that values kindess and community.