Sand Trap

From the very first time I was given a Tonka truck, with its movable dump bed and dozer blade, I was hooked on civic planning. At my grandparent’s house, I would spend hours in the sand box that had been made when I commandeered one end of a horseshoe pit for digging. Massive highways stretched across the pit as sand castle skyscrapers rose and fell; cities of my design grew and crumbled. In the years before high school, football and marching band, tests and grades, that is how I spent my time, in a world of my design.

I have never really let go of my civil engineering ambitions. No longer do I spend the road trip to my grandparent’s house planning the next great, grainy masterpiece, but I do envision how things can be better. Backed up traffic intersections and bungled construction projects send me into thinking about how the projects could progress faster be cheaper and safer, and how I could makes them that way. Hours of time in that sand box, and even more sitting on my bicycle watching as the houses around mine were constructed, have left me with a desire to control the plans our society is built upon. It impressed upon the need to work to shape our physical infrastructure into optimal condition.

In school, I have always excelled in math and truly enjoyed science, and especially history. My high school years have had a slew of challenges, between balancing homework and football, and dealing with a broken writing hand a month and a half before I took the SAT’s. Even so always I strive to improve the quality of my homework, and every semester is better that the next. This is the first year I am confident enough to write AP essays, to be what I am as a person in the real world, and that growth should continue into my college career.

As my life has progressed, I have learned always to stick with things that I get right. I make friends perhaps less freely than some, but once someone is my friend, I am loyal and trusting of them, and they to me, and we have a real, lasting friendship. Football tested me, honors classes overworked me, and band hurt my ears, but I stuck with it, just like I still hold my childhood fascination with civil engineering. This strength of character, the power stay with it till my efforts reach fruition, will, I believe, make me and excellent college student. That, combined with my longstanding curiosity about shaping our world, is what will make me a great civil engineer some day soon.