I’ve always thought Main Street in my hometown looks like something out of a Hallmark movie. The streets are wide from when they used to accommodate wagons, and there are steel rings attached to the boardwalks for tying up your horse while you’re in the tack and feed store. It’s rustic and charming, but living in such an ethnically and politically homogeneous rural area has presented some significant challenges to expanding my worldview. I’m dying to discover more beyond the ranching culture of Shasta County. I’m looking for a school with a perspective even bigger than preparing for a career–a school that shares my vision of serving my community by the work I do, and has the resources to teach me how to do that. Because of my limited opportunities, I haven’t yet discovered a specific passion or vocation that aligns my skills with the needs of society, so one of my highest hopes for college is to encounter more opportunities to expand my knowledge of possibilities for my future, and to help me develop a more well-rounded worldview.

The 2022 VEX Robotics World Championship was one of the high points of my life, but not in the way you might expect. The best moment was reading the game manual introduction in the hotel room. I had been impressed all day by the robots and the hype of the event, but it was the game manual that expressed why all of it really mattered. It described how the skills competitors develop while building their robots actually apply to all STEM work. Since then, one of my primary goals has been to continue hands-on STEM work in order to develop both the knowledge and the soft skills that I’ll need in an engineering career. My high school’s robotics program has given me a great start in this method of learning, and as I move beyond high school, I want to find a college that prioritizes a hands-on approach to learning STEM and can give me real-world experience before graduation.

A fair amount of my growing up has been marked by a desire to be alone because I felt less lonely by myself than I ever did in my rural Northern California school full of people I was supposed to be like. Having a different set of values created a rift between me and my peers that I didn’t know how to bridge, leaving me with pretty extreme social anxiety. During my freshman year, as I began to understand what was causing the divide between me and those who feel at home in my community, I became more confident that these unique traits were actually good. Valuing diverse perspectives was worth the cost of not fitting in. Embracing failure as an opportunity to learn was worth the cost of any perceived social status. Staying curious and asking my questions was worth the cost of appearing less confident than others. I am more convinced than ever that the values which originally made me different are actually the foundation for the impact I want to have on the world. Realizing this has set me free from wanting an unhealthy amount of alone time to instead reach toward the horizon of my future. With this in mind, my final and most important goal in selecting a college is a school culture that shares these core values I came to embrace throughout high school—a school culture that values diverse perspectives, learning from failure, and putting curiosity first.