Please revise this to less than 500 words if you can. It is currently almost 700 I believe. Feel free to upgrade it and make it better but the most important thing is to get under that word limit! Try to improve the vocabulary if you can. Thanks so much in advance guys!
I remember the first time that I heard about Penn State. My friend (friends name) (who is a current student at PSU Mont Alto) was raving to me how excited he was at being offered admission on the way home from school that day. The week before he had been accepted into Towson. "So which will you choose?" I asked him. Travis proceeded to look at me like as if I had asked him what planet are we living on. "Penn State, of course! Is that even a question?". And so over the course of the next couple of years, I went on to attend several PSU campus visits and information sessions. Everything from the genuine enthusiasm of the students, to the #1 Wallstreet Journal Ranking, to the atmosphere of the sports events, and just the whole package has hooked me in. I honestly cannot imagine myself attending any other school.
As cliché as this will inevitably sound, my father has always been my greatest inspiration and is the the main reason that I am on a path towards higher education. He grew up in rural Ethiopia. Although his beginnings were humble, he accomplished an incredible amount. At the age of 17 (my current age!), he left his home country to Europe and eventually the USA. Education is what made him as successful and respected as he is today. For as long as I remember, he has always stressed to me the power of higher education and how far it can take a person in life. Today he has a family (my sister and my mother), he earned his Ph.D. which had been his childhood dream, and he is a proud Professor at Penn State York!
At an early age, I've been concerned by the negative impacts that humans have on the environment. I've realized that the way we fuel our society needs innovation and I want to be one of the engineers that make it happen. That's why I've chosen Energy Engineering as my major; so I can use the skills I acquire to become one of the next generations of engineers and businessmen to help humans live with nature, not against it.
Throughout high school, I've involved myself in various extracurricular activities. Throughout my high school years, I've involved myself in numerous extracurricular activities. One particular activity that impacted me significantly was a club in our school called the "Invisible Children" club. The club is based on a 2003 documentary film about the abduction and forced enlistment of children into fighting in wars in Uganda. The children felt as if they had no voice; thus the name "Invisible Children". One activity we did was sell paper hands which was a symbol we came up with to represent the children. We sold them and donated all the profits to the foundation. When the end of the week came, all of us hung all the hands on the school wall both as decoration and to make a visible message to the rest of the school. This issue really hit home with me because I lived in Haiti as a child. I will never forget the horrors I witnessed. The elderly would be begging us for spare change, and the children would plead to clean our car windshield for money. The hopeless faces on some of those people still haunt me today. Although later projects I would work on at school like fundraisers and charitable donations did help somewhat, I still realized that more must be done. Alleviating poverty around the world is something that will require acts of large-scale engineering and international cooperation.
This is why I am so passionate about my goal to become one of the engineers that make a tangible impact on benefiting the world as a whole. Penn State is my future. I look forward to remembering Penn State as the place I acquired the skills I needed to become not just a productive member of society, but one of the engineers that helped solve the problems of society.
