Paul
I am a first-generation student from immigrant parents from Vietnam who came to America around the same age as me. I come from a low-income community in City Heights. For my family and me, we lack the money and opportunities to focus on my passions or goals without having a price tag on them, stuff like STEM, sports, or music. If I wanted to continue the path of music I would need resources like private tutors, learning from music books, and instrument I love. It would inevitably hurt my family financially.
At school, I am involved in many extracurricular activities. One of the clubs I am in is APAC, a club that stands for Awareness and Preservation of Asians Culture, where we learn about different Asian cultures like their clothing, traditions, and food. In Key Club, we do community service hours and get together with other Key Clubs in other schools. In volleyball, I just started playing the sport this summer, and I want to commit myself to getting better at it and to being involved in it for the next three years in high school. A program I am a part of is Ocean Discovery, where we get involved in our community and did research when I was in Bahia when we counted different species of birds around the islands there and did a research experiment with fish cages to see if more fish would go inside a cage with a light inside then a cage without a light. In robotics, which is one of my current interests, it is one of the fields I am extremely passionate about. When I was in middle school, in the robotics club, I became interested in watching videos on YouTube to see how other teams scored points with their mechanisms. What amazed me was how much it pushed the limits of the robot competition with how they scored points and solved missions like seeing students from Japan using mechanisms that did missions without motors. Those videos inspired me to build and design these mechanisms to also push the limits with such great creativity in the videos, and also helped me learn how to build mechanisms as complicated as those in the videos. Orchestra is another extracurricular activity I am part of, where I am also passionate about. I loved playing music with such different moods and styles, and how much calmer I feel when playing my violin. What I committed myself to with the orchestra is to audition again for the high school honors orchestra to get in with a better chair placement and also be a part of the pit orchestra for my school’s Little Mermaid musical, which I am also excited about.
When I think of my future, I want to build a stable and happy life for myself, my family, and my community. In the future, I want to become a mechanical engineer because when I was in robotics, I enjoyed building robots and these mechanisms for my team, and also using my creativity in designing robots. I want to work in music and become a music teacher. After all, I want to teach my community music like an orchestra because I want to teach something that made me passionate about music, I want to make someone else passionate about music too and teach students how to play orchestra instruments.
The grant will enable opportunities I didn’t have before. The grant would support my goals by allowing me to buy music books like the Suzuki books, which are books to help learn the basics of violin, which can help me with learning the violin on my own time, and I could buy stuff like a mute, shoulder, rest, or even rosin. Another way the grant would support my goals is to help me buy shoes and other equipment for volleyball.