Raymond
My name is Raymond, I am a 10th grader at The Preuss School UCSD. I’m 15 years old, I live with my parents, my younger sister, and my older sister. By writing this personal statement, I hope to demonstrate the key components of my identity along with how the aid of A Bridge for Kids can help me continue to grow, both academically and personally. Before I was born, my family moved here to the United States due to the aftermath of the Vietnam War, seeking an opportunity for a better life for us. This did not happen as simply as just integrating into society. There were language and cultural barriers that greatly hindered their ability to communicate or find work. It was very difficult for them initially, but as time went on, they slowly started adjusting to it.
Growing up, my sisters and I also faced many of the challenges my parents faced. We had to adjust to different environments at school and home and learn to understand both English and Vietnamese. Eventually, we were able to overcome these barriers and slowly fit into the communities around us. I began to find hobbies, make friends, set goals, and improve at school.
Over the course of my life, I have developed many interests and hobbies, the most influential being swimming. When I was 13, my parents put me into my local YMCA’s swim team. Initially, I disliked it; I saw it as a monotonous chore that I had to do every day. Over time, I have begun to like swimming. I began to see it as an opportunity to work out and talk to people. Swimming has greatly developed my discipline, focus, and mental fortitude, pushing past fatigue and doubt to keep going. It has taught me how to set goals and improve through repetition. These are lessons that I can use not just at the pools but also in life and in school.
At school, I have nurtured a strong interest within the STEM field, specifically engineering, programming, and health sciences. I developed my interest in programming and engineering through video games and my robotics class at school. Learning how the AI processed information and outputted it intrigued me. I was fascinated by the idea of automating or speeding up monotonous or repetitive tasks using a computer. I later would go to a two-week summer program hosted by Young Echelon in 2025 to expand my knowledge about robotics and coding. This experience taught me many things about robotics and coding, such as how parts and batteries could be balanced out to allow for effective movement, especially in varying terrain and how code likes to break a lot. My interest in health sciences primarily sprouted from my mother, who became a pharmacy technician and my biology classes. My mother was an inspiration for many things I have done. From a young age, she taught me the basics of medicine and showed me how her job worked. As I grew and entered high school, I took a biology class where I learned more about how organisms grew and interacted with each other, whether it was from a cellular to a global level. Additionally, biology has taught me how to design experiments, along with collecting and analyzing data, developing my ability to transfer raw data into actionable insights that I can support with trends and evidence-based decision-making.
In both my academic and personal life, I’ve always tried to push myself, whether that means taking harder classes, picking up new skills, exploring new opportunities, or just trying to understand the world a little better. My family has played an instrumental role in who I am. My parents have always expressed the importance and significance of responsibility, hard work, and growth, and their expectations and examples have been a great contributing factor in defining my identity. As the middle child, being both an older and younger brother, I have learnt a lot about the importance of patience, communication, compassion, and accountability. Watching my parents work hard every day just to support our family has motivated me towards taking up responsibilities, along with facing challenges with resilience and determination rather than avoiding them.
Wanting to grow is not a statement of weakness or insufficiency. It is a statement of resilience and bravery, to look at your mistakes, to acknowledge it, to be proud of it, to learn from it, to improve it, to move forward, and to be a better person than you were the day before.