Growing up I would take a long drive to my dad’s house once a month. He would pick me up and we would hop into his car and take the 101 down to San Diego where I could spend the weekend with him. My dad always believed in getting me to think and these long car rides were the perfect opportunity to do that. Most of the time these conversations would drift towards him asking me about school. What I liked about it, what I didn’t like about it, how I would change it if I could, and getting me to think about all the different ways that education could be. It was through these conversations that the first seeds of my love for education were planted. Over the course of my schooling career in K-12 as well as in college, I dived deeper into these ideas and I started to water the seeds that my dad planted on those car rides. When I started to see those seeds grow, I was able to notice how my thoughts formed and shifted and changed over the years. At different points thinking different education systems were better than others or coming to different conclusions about how no system is perfect and it’s all about taking the good with the bad. Though this journey it has led me to a deep fundamental knowledge that I will be in education, and be helping students learn in some way for the rest of my life. Since middle school, I’ve wanted to be some kind of teacher or someone that helps education change into what it could be, and those daydream with my dad in the car opened me up to the optimism that can be found within education. I often think about how powerful education can be and especially to younger students how impactful one teacher or one tutor or one administrator at a school can drastically change the course of their life. My 5th grade teacher stands out to me as someone who changed the course of my life. On the first day of class he came in and scrambled together a math assignment having us write multiplication tables. He made it clear to us at the beginning, that our teacher was on maternity leave and he wouldn’t know how long she would be gone for. Throughout the year every day we didn’t know if he would be staying or if the woman who was supposed to be our teacher would come back. Needless to say she never did, and despite all of the challenges of being a first-time teacher when you don’t even know you were going to be he did a really wonderful job. He was a good teacher and would come into school every day and passionately put a lot of work into teaching whatever he could figure out, and it wasn’t that he was necessarily the best teacher ever, but it was the fact that he tried in spite that stuck with me. It is that optimism and dedication that inspires me to work harder. Becoming a teacher myself I hold that optimism tightly and try my best to put a little more into each lesson knowing I can make students lives a bit better.

My car rolls along the Midwest country side shaking slightly. My mom and dad are in the car with me and it’s the first time since court that they had spent more than an hour in the same space together. I am traveling to college and they are here to support me. They have been supportive of my going to school but my mom doesn’t really understand fully why. Especially why I picked a a school so far away from Boise where I spent my junior high and high school years. The simple answer is that I decided to go to college because the job I wanted required an education. There is always more than one reason though. More than the fact that I want to be a professor, i want to get out into the world. For me that means leaving the stability of Boise with its routine lifestyle and going far away which is why I ended up attending Knox College for my undergraduate pursuits. I did. this to try and better myself, but I could never have imagined the impact it would have on me though. Not only have I been able to come into my own as a person, discovering that I am bisexual, finding out about bad ideas I had in my head about the world and improving them, and beginning to understand my own interest at a fundamental level knowing the nuts and bolts of the life I want to craft for myself. I also could not have predicted the difficulty that comes with being a first generation student. Between not knowing little things about how college works to financial stress from also being low income, it is not easy. Programs and different resources have helped me get through it though. TRIO is a program that helped me ease into college and has continuously provided lots of resources, knowledge, and aide. Applying to TRIO has been one of the best experiences in my life and applying to the program has been one of the best choices I could have made going into college. They have shown me the life I could have and by showing me the life I could have it has been an amazing experience to give back to the program. This giving back to the program has become my why lately. Giving to people in similar situations to myself and helping people in my own way is the life I wanna forge for myself.

Renegade by Ballyhoo is a song about breaking the mold and being sick of the normal path in life. The normal path in this songs view is to do what everyone tells you to do and to do something just because it is what someone thinks is best for you. The song continuously rejects the idea of people making choices for someone else and the mass consumption media that has taken over everything. The point of the song for Ballyhoo is that they fighting against being told what music to play so they can play the things that they enjoy. This is why the song is also called Renegade since it is the band betraying the mass media and the music that music companies want them to make and is instead making the music they want to make. The music itself reflects that too since it is an older style of California rock that is hard to find in modern bands. The song even mentions clinging to the 90s to drive home this point.

I’m gonna take this world for all its got and I want to make an impact in it. I want to change the way education works around the world and I want to travel the world doing it. To do that effectively I want to learn about how the brain learns with topics surrounding Cognitive Psychology and meta-cognition. Learning about these topics is incredibly interesting to me and knowing that I can use this knowledge to help my community and the world at large learn better excites me and is why I wake up in the morning. I really like teaching as well and being able to teach and advise places on how to make learning more effective and fun seems like a win-win situation. I also want to learn about different places and cultures and understand how they think about learning and how important it is to them. The world is so big and has so much to offer it would be a regret of mine to not travel it. There are so many interesting places that have such different worlds than mine and seeing into those worlds sounds amazing. At the start of this year, I started learning German on my own and the amount that learning about Germany has expanded my worldview is more than I ever thought possible.

I want to get my PhD in Cognitive Psychology so that I can try and change the way education works in schools. Right now I think schools around the world are inefficient and not a lot of fun. There is a lot of science that has been proven over the years that hasn't been implemented into a lot of schools and where it is implemented it is often done overly cautiously. I want to try and push to get schools into a spot where when new science is proven students are one of the first people to hear about it. This would also mean a very adaptable school system where courses and teaching styles are able to change to fit the situation not a budget or department of education protocol. I'm not really sure how I am going to do that it might be through a non-governmental organization or it might be advising politicians either way I want to change education. I also want to work on the research side of Cognitive Psychology and want to find the best ways to optimize learning. This might mean I am a traveling professor and take a lot of jobs abroad because it is a prevalent issue in most places. In that sense learning about new places and how other cultures learn can also help me to realize what some do good and others don't. This would create a very nice feedback loop where I can show how aspects of certain schools work well to convince places to change.

My uncle gave me some very personal advice this summer on me going into college and his advice set the groundwork for my plan going into college. The first major thing that we talked about was his experience with college and how when his credit card hit its limit he literally went weeks without any money and had to starve or ask for favors just to get food for himself. Part of this he attributes to his father collecting him on his taxes which he said cost him thousands of dollars so his father could get one thousand. He also has a very strained relationship with his father and his sister because he had to take personal loans out with his family. The main lesson I took away from this is that I should try to get financial independence as soon as possible and a big part of that is doing my own taxes, not taking any loans from family (I told most of them that any money they give me for college I won't pay back), along with having my mom not collect me. The next part of his advice he got from a friend who does finance for a living. The advice he gave was about credit cards and he told me to get a credit card as soon as I turn 18 and to then use it just enough so it doesn't get canceled to try and build up credit and credit history which is important especially since I have neither. This will set me up so that I can apply for student loans when I need them on my own since I have some of my first year already paid off from working while going to high school.

For my entire life I have been in and out of counseling for various reasons. I think it was during one of these visits that I really wanted to learn more about psychology. It was after a really tough time in my life and my family had just gotten out of an abusive situation. I went to this free 1 on 1 trauma counseling session and I think it was the counselor there that helped me to see my own passion for psychology. She didn’t push me to talk about what happened and I didn’t want to so we got to talking about her job and the field of psychology. Seeing someone with that much passion for an academic topic had a profound effect on me. That was my first real spark of interest that led me to taking AP Psychology and learning about how the brain works. Through the class I not only learned about the brain but also the field itself and how much there still is to explore within it. From odd phenomena in social encounters to the complexity of mental disorders there is a lot still left to look into. It’s that this open world to explore that really pushes me to learn about psychology. I also think psychology is very helpful for a lot of daily problems to me psychology is as much a science, as it is a perspective on the world. Through psychology I can allow myself to step away from a problem, look at the big picture and see why certain things are happening. After that I can solve the problem since knowing how something might have happened. It gives me this bird's eye view on an issue and lets me see more factors within a problem than just the ones we can see from the ground. This allows me to then ask questions to get me closer to solving the issue. It’s all of these factors from the wide open field to the different perspective I can take that gives me a passion to learn psychology.