Leaving a positive legacy and lasting impact on anything is no simple feat. It requires focus, determination, sympathy, and kindness. I, for one, hope I’ve left a last impact on everything I’vebeen through. Whether in the church or on my high school basketball team, I hope younger children can look up to me and that I can be a good representative of how someone should act in their 

community. I aspire to be someone in my future that my present self would be proud to see.

My time in college has not been as easy as I had seen on television. On TV, everyone seems to be anging out in their rooms with friends and hardly ever doing schoolwork, when that is entirely the opposite of what college truly is. Don’t get me wrong, I love going to get smoothies with my friends after a cycling class, but that only takes up such a small amount of time in my week. For the most part, I am hard at work with my academics by myself so I can focus. This makes it hard to think of ways my education can leave a lasting impact on the people around me. One way I can think of is that I have had trouble figuring out what I want to do with the rest of my life, career-wise. I have now switched majors 3 times and I finally believe I found where I want to be. However, all the time I think to myself that I wasted the first year and a half of college on things that I now find unimportant. This is just one way to think about the situation. I could also think about it in a way where I had numerous obstacles in my path to success. It’s much more uplifting to think about it this way because I can use this motivation to succeed in ways to motivate others who might be struggling with what they want to do with their lives. There is nothing more unsettling than going into college thinking you have your life all planned out, but something like not liking your classes comes in and shakes everything up. I think knowing what I know now about perseverance in academics, I can show young adults who may be uncertain about their career path that it’s okay to go into college with uncertainty. Eventually, there will be some person or some professor or some class that steers you into the right direction. I hope that people can look at my story and give themselves more confidence for their future because I wish I had that sort of push when I was stressed out about school.

In my future endeavors, although I see myself as an Accountant at a business firm, I do hope to positively impact my community in many ways. When I picture myself in the future, one commonality that I see every time is attendance in church. No matter where I end up, I have always planned on finding a church around me that I can go to every Sunday like I have the past 20 years of my life. At St. Michael’s, singing in the choir with my family is something that I always look forward to. I have been in the choir for as long as I can remember in church. I look and see younger kids in choir now and it reminds me of where I started and how faithful I still am to going in choir now. I think this is just one of the many instances where having God in your life gives you such joy and compassion. I hope that I can leave an ounce of an impact on the younger kids in church now to keep coming up to choir because of all the wonderful memories I have made. Back to seeing myself in the future, I picture myself volunteering for an organization around me, while also donating to St. Herman’s and my dad’s friends in Africa who need things that I take for granted every day. I would love in my future to also volunteer at an animal shelter because I am of course a lover of dogs, and I would cherish being the person that would put a smile on the innocent puppies’ faces. I hope in doing this, I can leave a lasting impact on my

community by showing that there is never too much going on in someone’s life to volunteer to help others. Although I can easily say all of this now, I truly wish that my future self will abide by my plans for the future and, again, give my present self something to be proud of in my future.

To wrap things up, I know that leaving a positive impact on my life to even one person would be something that I would truly appreciate. I strive to be someone that others can look up to since I had such amazing role models growing up. I believe that the people and church community I surrounded myself with made me who I am today, and I want to be a person in at least one person’s group of role models that makes them into the person they turn out to be.