This topic is required for my UT application. The topic is: "Considering your lifetime goals, discuss how your current and future academic and extra-curricular activities might help you achieve your goals."
Just to preface, I am not doing many EC's this year, so I tried to expand more on what got me interested in my career, and tried to finish off with the last paragraph focusing on current and future activities, although that's the only part that really answers the question because I couldn't really think of what else to put to be honest. Anyways...
Many of my and achievements and the activities I've participated in throughout high school revolve around my idea of a perfect career. Like many people, I've always enjoyed problem solving and the mindset you have to put yourself in in order to think through certain situations. Naturally, I found mathematics appealing and fun, whether or not I was struggling through it in class. With this I joined the engineering program at my school which quickly became my favorite subject, and led to me leaning my interests towards becoming an engineer throughout my freshman and sophomore years.
Towards the end of sophomore year I discovered my passion for computer science and it quickly became my career goal in life. I found out that my school would be offering a computer science course the next year, which later became my favorite class. Although 80% of the class dropped out of it because it was too difficult, I pushed through and help good grades throughout the year. With the knowledge from this class as well as the knowledge gained from self-teaching, I and two other students became the only students on the computer science UIL team at my school. Although it was only the three of us, we each pushed each other to learn more and we were quickly becoming better at our subject. During the course of this year, I won a top 10 award in the singles test competition as well as winning 2nd place for the team activity portion at district, which is one of my proudest high school achievements.
Sadly this year there are not enough people to compete in computer science UIL, and so I will be focusing on mathematics related UIL competitions in order to become as fluent with mathematical concepts as I can, since many of the computer science courses through college will be based on mathematics. My ambition towards computer science doesn't end there, as I would also like to look into extracurricular organizations at University of Texas such as the Association for Computing Machinery and CS roadshow to help raise interest in the subject for younger students. As someone who enjoys problem solving and mathematics and catering towards these throughout my years in high school, I truly have passion for the field of computer science and I intend to pursue this throughout my career and ultimately my lifetime.
Michael, what is the maximum word count for your response? The reason I ask is because you don't really need paragraphs 1 and 2 of your essay, you can simply concentrate on paragraphs 3-4. We can apply some sort of spin on the paragraphs to make it seem like the activity is part and parcel of your current and future academic and extra curricular activity in relation to your lifetime goal.
Let us put a spin on how your second year student passion for computer science turned into your career goal in life. Rather than clearly stating that this all happened when you were a sophomore, just say that your interest in computers led you to become an active member of the UIL Computer Team. There is no need to tell the reviewer that there were only 3 of you. Instead, tell us about the competitions that your group joined and the awards and prizes that you won. Tell the reviewer that you did not even notice that your extra curricular activities were still academics based because you are a person who feels that learning is best done through extra curricular activities. Those are some ideas that I hope can help you direct the paragraph towards creating an extra curricular activity for you.
Let us use only 2 paragraphs to explain your prompt response. Going for more than 2 paragraphs will make it obvious that we are trying to redirect the attention of the reviewer. In the last paragraph, don't tell the reviewer that you won't be participating in other computer science competitions. Instead, inform him that you are also competing in Math related UIL competitions because it seemed like a natural progression of your computer science extra curricular activity. Then you can retain the part about your ambition in computer science not ending there.
Hopefully, these 2 paragraphs, when developed using a particular angle, can help create the necessary requirements of the prompt. I am looking forward to reading your revised essay so that I can help you better polish it for your needs :-)
