Ayman Rddad, Period 2, 4/29/21, Day A

Blog #3 – Goal Setting & Growth

           At this current point in my life, I have set both short and long term goals that I will be trying hard to achieve. In the short term, I intend to maintain good grades in the last term of the school year for my GPA not to be compromised. I have been accepted into the honors program of the college I will be attending, and I do not want my membership to be revoked in case I receive lower grades this term. I am also studying hard for the AP exams in order to get grades that would allow me to skip introductory college classes. If I do, I will be saving both money for my family and time for myself as I would be able to graduate in a shorter time. Another short-term goal I have set for myself is to start working. I feel it’s high time for me to hit the job market and start earning money. As for the long term, I intend to get a B.S. in biomedical engineering, then pursue graduate studies in the same field while working on the side. My choice of this major is due to the many opportunities the field of biomedical engineering offers. It is a highly interdisciplinary field that allows you to work at the intersection between different sciences and choose between a wide range of sub-branches. It is also a field that promises major breakthroughs in the health care sector that would, hopefully someday, make quality health care more affordable and thus more accessible to a wider section of society. It is also a field with a very good job outlook.

I am aware that resilience is necessary for achieving one’s goals, and I think I demonstrated it lately while trying to choose which college to attend among the many into which I was admitted. My initial plan was to attend a university that is ranked among the top ten in biomedical engineering nationally. I suffered some disappointments and was denied admission into a couple of such universities, but I made it into one of them. The total cost of attending such a university, however, was too high even after a decent merit scholarship. After much research and deliberation, I decided that it would not be wise to attend such a university since it would incur a high financial burden on my family. A major issue I considered while finalizing my decision is whether a degree from that top-ranked university would necessarily secure for me a job that is much higher paid than a job I would get with a degree from a lower ranked college. Since there is no guarantee that would happen, I ended up deciding that it is wiser to attend a cheaper college and focus on nurturing my academic excellence rather than the ranking of my prospective college.

The world around me definitely affects my goals and how I plan to achieve them. Witnessing the crisis with student loans, for example, has affected my decision to attend a cheaper college although I worked so hard over the years to make it into a top-ranked university. The idea of a student loan was completely out of consideration for both my family and me. At the same time, however, I don’t want to exhaust my family’s financial resources and endanger their financial security for me to attend college. Another way the world has affected my goals in life has to do with health care in our society. It is definitely very expensive and more accessible to the wealthier. This has always been obvious, but especially so during the COVID pandemic. Biomedical engineering is a major that would allow me to become the engineer I have always wanted, and at the same time contribute to improving health care in our society.