Just like they say that a journey of a thousand miles starts with the first step, my first stage of life that I have to successfully pass, in order to step into the second stage of life-long education, is to finish the formal education. And the pursuit of formal education has definitely been an interesting journey for me since it brought me from one side of the globe to the other side with totally different culture and lifestyle. Although my father never forced me to study certain discipline of education, I have always wanted to become and engineer since my childhood. I had a passion for understanding of how things worked and also wanted to be of great service to the humanity. Although I did not know initially what kind of engineer I wanted to become, in my senior year in high school, I did hours of research and study on different fields of engineering and finally made a decision to go with mechanical engineering. I had read about the cost of the education and the problems that students had to deal with financially in the USA (Martin, 2). For all borrowers, the average debt in 2011 was $23,300, with 10 percent owing more than $54,000 and 3 percent more than $100,000, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reports (Martin & Lehren, pg. 14). But since my education was fully funded by the scholarship that I received back home, that would not be a problem.
One of my goals in life is to apply what I learn and provide valuable service to my country in order to improve the overall quality of the lives of people there. The way that I saw myself doing that was to work as an engineer for one of the companies that my family owns back home. I would like to be of assistance to my family in the process of providing the best engineering service possible to the general public.
I did not want to go to a big school because of the possibilities of getting lost in the crowd in all of the classes and not get the attention that I needed in order for me to progress especially having to deal with the culture change. Coming from another country and getting education in a language