Happiness Is My Ultimate Personal Goal

It is enormously difficult to sit down and write a personal goal that is concise and reflects who I am and what I am working towards. Many goals that I have do not have a concise finish line. Others that do have an ending point seem almost miniscule against the larger backdrop of my life.

Some broader goals that I have are to never let my life stagnate, constantly be learning, live happy, and to empathize with everyone I can. I have more than just these goals, but many other goals can fall under or fit within these previous four goals. In fact, these four goals fit within each other. For example, it may be my goal to empathize with other people so that I can learn something new from their perspective. In learning something new my life doesn’t stagnate, and the challenges that change can bring is something that can make me happy at times. I suppose if I really had to pick a singular goal that I live my life by I would say that I live to be happy. But happiness is such a difficult thing to concretely strive for so it helps to break goals into easier chunks to process.

Some more concrete goals I have, include finding a good research opportunity for me to work for over the summer, apply and get into a good graduate school, find and apply for scholarships to help pay for my undergraduate and graduate degrees, and get good grades. These goals are while fairly large all have fairly concrete steps and ways to meet them.

I have other goals that while are not terribly broad, are difficult to plan exact paths to accomplish them. For example I consider myself a feminist and I am someone who when I see inequality in the world want to do something about it. To this date the most useful thing I have found that I can do to promote equity in the...

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... polylactide reducing the cost of the overall polymer. When this semester concludes I will have had experience using a TGA, DMA, DSC, and SEM in a laboratory environment to characterize the properties of a polymer composite that I created.

When I am not researching in a lab I am usually in my dorm working as community advisor (also known as RA in some universities) talking to residents about various academic and personal issues they may have. When a lot of my life is very academically oriented, I really enjoy the chance to get to work with people seeing people develop in their first year of college.

To sum everything up I believe I would be an excellent candidate to work in the NASA LARSS program. There is a lot for me to learn from NASA, and with the opportunity to research in a NASA lab I believe I will get to experience a host of new and interesting challenges.