All my life I’ve been pretty into nature and learning the ins and outs of the world, so it wasn’t really a surprise that I was always curious about almost everything. From this curiosity came attempts to create new toys out of old ones, and taking what I read in books to the extreme, trying to recreate anything from a robot to a crossbow for Nerf darts.
By the time I was in fifth grade at my elementary school, I had already started making my life plan, going to Stanford University, becoming an aerospace engineer, and making rockets, plus a boatload of money while I was at it.
Through middle school that plan solidified, giving me some pretty high expectations to live up to. As you get older, though, goals change and maturity grows; this could be said for me.
After my freshman year of high school, I had given up on aerospace engineering because it turned out I really didn’t like geometry, and aerospace uses a ton of it. I’ve always been good at math, though, so I didn’t give up on my goal of becoming an engineer; I just needed to figure out the type I wanted to be.
It wasn’t until my sophomore year chemistry class that I had a new idea in mind, chemical engineering. That class is what made me fall head over heels in love with science.
Junior year, I had the same feeling that I wanted to be a chemical engineer. It wasn’t until picking classes for my senior year that I thought about other types of natural science engineering.
I was planning on signing up for AP physics, AP chemistry, and AP biology to get a feel for what I wanted to do. Ultimately, I settled on signing up for AP chemistry and AP biology.
Sadly, when I got the schedule for my senior year AP chemistry wasn’t on it. I couldn’t take the class because the only open block periods for it were already occupied by other classes. As sad as I was, this gave me the opportunity to focus on biology to see if that’s what I’d want to do.
It turned out I love biology just about as much as I love chemistry. As my engineering wants changed, so did the place I wanted to go to further my education.
I learned about Colorado School of Mines through a friend and then from people who’ve had their own kids attend the school. The school became the perfect fit for me. I absolutely love Colorado, and the course the school offers has helped me fully decide what I want to major in.
When I am at Mines, I will be majoring in chemical engineering under a specialty biological engineering track, the best of both worlds.
This decision takes me back to a project parents had to make for their kids back in elementary school. In this project, they just had to write about the best things about you and make a pretty poster for it. All those years ago, when I was in kindergarten, my parents wrote, “She’s always building and creating, our own little engineer.”
As I’ve grown up and my likes and dislikes have evolved, one thing has remained a constant: this path I’m on might not be easy or always fun, but I know it was made for me.
