My journey to pursue a marketing degree began three years ago when I started my first job. I worked for a local company selling lawn mower parts online. My boss started his business out of his garage and has since expanded to over 14,000 square feet in space. Being an almost exclusively online business, my boss needed someone who understood the online space and knew how to promote and push products on the internet. With this, an idea was planted in my head. I decided to embark on a journey of entrepreneurship in marketing. It occurred to me that my calling is to own my own digital marketing agency. Watching my boss start from essentially nothing to being a very successful businessman flipped a switch inside of me, making me realize that I could do the same. This journey wouldn't just be for me. After further thought, I came to the conclusion that I could give back to my community with this dream life I so long for. I live in a small town with a small, but growing, economy. Not only do I want to be successful, but I would also love to give back to the community that was there for me my entire life. There are many small businesses here that deserve more attention and I want to be the one who allows their voices to be heard. That means assisting businesses in creating websites, driving more online customers to those websites, building up their social media presence, and more. The digital age is ever expanding, and I want my community to expand with it. My aim with this business degree is to give my community a chance to grow with the internet. I also plan to make the digital marketing industry more inclusive and diverse. I know and understand the importance of providing opportunities for groups of people that are often overlooked, making sure that everyone can benefit from the rewards of digital entrepreneurship. I would love to achieve this by setting up mentorship programs, internships, and reaching out to the community. My goal is to create a welcoming and safe environment that empowers people from various backgrounds to not only enter but also succeed in the field business/digital marketing. The more people who I can get to follow the same path I will, the more the community's economy will grow. With my degree and hopefully my digital marketing agency, I dream of utilizing the agency as a platform for social responsibility. By applying useful practices and supporting local initiatives, I will try to show that businesses can be successful while also contributing positive things to the environment and society. This is what I work hard for. This is my drive. I want my home to be the best it can be. I have always been a homebody and just imagining a future where my home can be successful is what I look forward to. Knowing I can be the person who changes a small town into something better, something great, is what motivates me.

From the very beginning of my life, I've felt an internal desire to support and uplift others around me. This inclination gradually transformed into a purposeful pursuit as I tried to navigate my way through my own stages of personal growth. My journey to helping others be their best started with my own self-reflection. I came to the conclusion that in order assist others I had to focus on my own skills and strengths first. So, I embarked on a mission of homing in on my skills and forever expanding my knowledge. One of these key skills I continued to develop was empathy. I recognized the importance of understanding others and their emotions in order to provide some sort of meaningful support. Being able to listen to someone and engage with them genuinely allows for one to develop a deeper connection with you. This allows me to push an agenda on people who trust me and will listen to me. That agenda being striving for excellence because everyone can be excellent if they try and have people rooting for them along the way. Throughout school, I've always tried my best to be the "hype man" for my friends. Never once have I not been rooting for them to do their best and apply themselves as much as they can. An education has been the most important thing to me since a kid and I've always tried to preach that mindset to my peers. My passion to helping others extends outside of school and followed me to the workplace. I was mentored and taken under the wing of someone who I have much respect for. He taught me everything I need to know about how to work efficiently and improve my work ethic every day. Currently, I have taken the role of the mentor myself. Every day I am pushing my protege to work harder and harder and to improve. As my days of being a mentor come to an end, I can successfully say that I've made an impact on someone's life. I can rest knowing I have done all I can for someone to do their best and make it in this world. My mother has always taught my brothers and I do help out in any way we could, to anyone that needed it. I am happy to have a mother who has taught us those values. Anytime I get personally close with someone, and they open up their emotions around me, I always find myself thinking that I want to help them. It has turned into an instinct to help others. It is just who I am. Helping others is what I would hope everyone would want to do, as I would love to know someone would do the same for me.

I grew up with four older brothers and split between two divorced parents. None of which graduated from college. One of my brothers did attend for a semester but quit after a semester. Most of my family has had the mentality of just working immediately to make money as fast as possible. They all thought, "Why go to school for any longer than I have to when I can just make money now?" Which doesn't sound too bad right? Well for me, my education has always been something I was serious about. Since a child my family knew I would go on to do greater things than any one in my family. They knew I had the drive as a kid to go to college and do what none of them could accomplish. So, growing up I have always had that ambition to follow through with their view of my future. After a while, it is what I wanted to. I wanted to make my family proud with my future. I knew a college degree would solidify me as a success story in my family. Obtaining a college degree has been my goal since a little kid because it means I am worth something, in my eyes and to my family. Now in college, I plan to pursue a Business Marketing degree. But it's not just a degree I plan to obtain. I plan to acquire the necessary skills to live a life I am happy with. I want to build relationships with people to have someone to lean on for years to come. College is something that I would consider to be a pivotal moment in someone's life. For many it is the first time they are being an "adult." That is the case for me. I want college to be that first step of many in the real world. Now, after becoming a "real adult" I would like to start my own business. I want to get into the world of digital advertising. I want to help businesses grow their brand and promote their products. Being someone's marketer has always striked an interest in me and has been in the back of my mind since early high school. I would like my own business that is successful for years to come and turn into something I can pass on to my kids or my successor. With that, I would also like a family. Some people might focus on their long-term financials, but I am definitely a family man. I would like to have a loving family who has just as much ambition and drive that I have. That is all I ask for my future.

In the words of Lin Manuel Miranda, a legacy is "Planting seeds in a garden you never get to see." That quote from Hamilton has always stuck with me for years. I want my legacy to outlive my family for generations. I want to make the difference in the world that lasts for years to come. I dream that my future business can achieve that goal. I am currently going to school to get my BBA in marketing. I want to use that degree to start my own advertising business. I mainly want to focus on digital advertising because we are in the digital age of businesses, and I want to be there for them. This is how I plan to create my legacy. I aspire to be that person who small businesses can look back to and say, "He was the person who helped grow this place to what it is now." Since high school, I have always enjoyed doing the projects where we have to create some sort of flyer or poster, make video ads, do video editing, and so on. That is what inspired me to want to pursue a digital advertising business. What really was the nail in the coffin was working for a business called Pro Parts Place in my hometown. My boss started his business from his garage and has grown it to do over 5 million in sales last year. He grew his business all online, which is the majority of their sales. Watching my boss grow his business from something small inspired me to want to do the same thing, but this time I wanted to exclusively do the online aspect of a business. Better yet, I want to do that for other businesses and make that my job. While working at Pro Parts, I made it my job to try and do the best I could and make people's lives better and easier. I've always tried to brighten people's day because you never know what could be going on in someone's life. Small things like just acknowledging someone can make their day better and I've always tried to do just that. I grew up in a broken home living with just my mom most my life. My grandmother died when my mother was just a newborn, so my mom never knew what it was like to live with a mother figure. So, she made it her duty to do right by my brothers and I. She has always spread positivity and would always brighten anyone's day. She taught me to do the same. Every day she reminds me to "fill some buckets" which was a metaphor from a book about filling someone's bucket with positivity. You don't want to put a hole in a bucket. Having a mother who leads you on the right path makes shining your light a simple task.

Growing up, my family didn't really see the value in college, especially since we lived in a low-income area of Georgia. They figured, why bother with more school when we didn't enjoy it in the first place? Unlike them, though, I always considered education important. I've had my eyes set on a business degree, focusing on entrepreneurship to make my dream of owning a digital marketing agency a reality. In this age of all things digital, I believe a business/marketing degree will equip me to make a positive impact in my community and the growing digital world through effective advertising and marketing. Living in a small town, there aren't many businesses around aside from the usual fast-food spots and a chunk of small locally owned businesses. With a business/marketing degree, I want to come back to my community and use what I've learned to help our local economy. That means assisting businesses in creating websites, driving more online customers to those websites, building up their social media presence, and more. The digital age is always expanding, and I want my community to expand with it. My aim with this business degree is to give my community a chance to grow with the internet. I also plan to make the digital marketing industry more inclusive and diverse. I know and understand the importance of providing opportunities for groups of people that are often overlooked, making sure that everyone can benefit from the rewards of digital entrepreneurship. I would love to achieve this by setting up mentorship programs, internships, and reaching out to the community. My goal is to create a welcoming and safe environment that empowers people from various backgrounds to not only enter but also succeed in the field business/digital marketing. The more people who I can get to follow the same path I will, the more the community's economy will grow. With my degree and hopefully my digital marketing agency, I dream of utilizing the agency as a platform for social responsibility. By applying useful practices and supporting local initiatives, I will try to show that businesses can be successful while also contributing positive things to the environment and society. This commitment parallels with my belief that businesses should play a very active role in addressing social challenges and working towards a more sustainable future. Overall, I feel like I will have the experience and knowledge to return to my community with my degree to turn our small town to a booming metropolis. That being starting small with local business to grow their brand to assisting larger companies in giving back to the community itself through things like inclusion and internship positions. My pursuit of a business degree is not solely rooted in personal ambitions but also driven by a trying to make a positive impact on my community. I dream of one day being able to help grow my local community, to help grow the world.