1st Year
For me, a global citizen scholar is someone who aims to expand their personal horizons as well as the horizons of their chosen field. Such a person can fulfill this definition in an infinite variety of ways.
For example, in the fall semester, I took part in LeaderShape and made many new friends. At LeaderShape, I learned so much about my own thought processes and how my past experiences in the world crafted how I view my current experiences. More importantly, however, I learned about other people who were there. I made so many friends and had in-depth and weighty conversations that showed me so many different ways of experiencing life that I had never thought of. LeaderShape assisted me in not only expanding my own understanding of myself but also my empathy with others. I hope to use the skills and experiences I gained during LeaderShape to assist me in navigating the workplace as I start co-ops next year and beyond.
Additionally, during the spring semester, I took a course called Social Justice Awareness and Global Health. Within this course, we explored global health and inequality with a focus on both subjects within the context of drug addiction in the US and Portugal. During the duration of this course, I faced much of my own prejudices and implicit biases surrounding drug addiction. Similar to the impact that LeaderShape had on me, this course allowed me to expand my empathy and increase my awareness of my own biases. As someone who wished to be a part of the medical field as a career, I plan to use the foundation built in this course to continue exploring the medical field with an open and aware mindset.
Also during the spring semester, I began my yearlong term as Grant Writing Chair for Engineers Without Borders - University of Cincinnati. In this position, I am in charge of finding and applying for grants with my committee. This has so far been a very new experience for me. While I have held leadership positions in the past they were usually positions that were an adjunct to a main leadership position. Due to the relative novelty of my position I have encountered quite the learning curve that has caused me to step far outside of my comfort zone numerous times. The leadership experience I have and will continue gaining in this position have enhanced my previous leadership skills and will help when I work on and perhaps lead teams in the future.
As a fairly introverted person, I typically attempt to develop my personal horizons using second-hand experiences like other's anecdotes and discourse online. Unfortunately, there is only so much that I can absorb using this strategy, therefore, as part of my ongoing goal to integrate an increasing amount of first-hand experience into my life I have set the following goals for the upcoming year. I'd like to continue exploring the intersection of social justice and healthcare by shadowing in places such as a needle exchange clinic or a clinic aimed at supporting those without health insurance. Additionally, bouncing off of my experience at LeaderShape, I would like to learn more about the barriers that people can face in everyday life such as microaggressions and systematic barriers, especially in regard to race, sex and gender, and disabilities.
2nd Year
The overarching experience that has had the greatest impact on my professional and academic goals is the co-op experience I had in the spring semester of this year. My co-op was with Sherwin-Williams at the Bowling Green, KY plant.
Everyday I woke up at 5 am, ate breakfast and got ready for the day. I left my apartment at 6:30 and got to work at 7. From 7 to 12 then 1 to 4 I would work. One of the fundamental pieces of this job was the amount my manager talked with me, or perhaps the complete and utter lack thereof. My manager was a nice man, but we talked for maybe 15 min a week on average after the first week.
As a direct result of this lack of oversight, I essentially ended up doing whatever I wanted to. I did whatever small tasks my coworkers asked me to do but for the most part I had to create tasks to complete. About halfway through the semester, I had created several automated spreadsheets for a coworker using VBA in excel. This saved him a lot of time that he could be better suited for.
Around the same time a regional continuous improvement manager came to the site to hold an event to increase productivity/effectiveness in the area of the plant that put the paint into barrels. Due to the nature of this plant being a Valspar acquire and making paint that was much more specialty (and also more flammable, hence no electronics on the plant floor) than other Sherwin-Williams plants, the Bowling Green plant didn’t have the infrastructure or training to have an electronic database tracking various metrics. These metrics are very useful to continuous improvement projects. As such, I was asked in the weeks preceding this event to gather as much data as I could from the stacks of paper we have recorded everything.
With the combined experience of using VBA elsewhere and having to manually record data from literal yards high stacks worth of paper, I came up with the idea and executed creating a form that floor workers could input when they dropped off the paperwork for each batch. The creation, execution, and troubleshooting of this took the rest of the semester.
In doing this massive programming project I realized very quickly that I enjoyed this so much more than I enjoyed any of the more chemical engineering centric tasks I had done before. Furthermore, I also realized in the process of learning how to do this project that I didn’t like the chemical engineering class I had been taking as much as I thought I did.
To explore these realizations, I have decided to keep track of my feelings about the chemical engineering classes I am taking this summer semester. Additionally, for my next co-op rotation in the fall I am going to ask to be placed somewhere, I can do more continuous improvement projects. While these are occurring, I am going to do my best to explore other careers that involve coding and continuous improvement-type projects.
By the end of 2021, I want to have decided if I want to stay in chemical engineering, have a plan for the spring semester if I do not, and have talked to at least three professionals in fields that I am interested in.
3rd Year
This year I have experienced profound personal growth in the recognition, acceptance, and accommodation of my personal health.
Since January of 2020, I have been doing the mental health equivalent of walking on a broken ankle. I feel that I have a duty as a citizen to keep on top of current events but keeping up with the events of 2020 and 2021 only exasperated my mental health struggles. During the end of the summer semester and the beginning of the fall semester, I decided and made a promise to myself that I was going to take a break in the spring semester. So, towards the end of fall semester, I took a medical leave of absence. The decision and follow through of taking a medical leave of absence is one of the things I am most proud of myself for doing.
I took three months after my co-op ended to take care of myself. I slept for at least 11 hours a night, I ate three meals a day, and I did nothing that caused me anxiety. My email, text messages, and anything resembling responsibility were unread and ignored unless absolutely necessary. Once I started sleeping slightly less, averaging about 9.5 hours a night, I started slowly phasing in thinking about my future.
In the fall semester, I figured out that I no longer wanted to be in chemical engineering as a major or career but had yet to pick a new major. Above all else, I had realized that I wasn’t going to graduate college if I didn’t have a major I enjoyed. So, I laid out my options and chose math over any more “marketable” major.
After I made this decision, I began to start doing more things, from talking to friends to setting up classes for summer. But through all of this tracked my stress and learned to organize my day around reducing stress. I had to fully accept and act on the fact that just because a routine or method works for everyone else that doesn’t mean I have to do it and there is no shame in making my own way.
The summer semester classes I took helped me through this process. I took a 2000-level English and professional development class. Over the course of the semester, I learned how to use my process for managing my to-do with class workloads.
To continue and maintain this growth I need to hold myself accountable for the basics I have built. I need to sleep 8-9 hours, eat 3-4 meals, and reduce stress. To accomplish this, I am going to try to set stronger boundaries for myself, let the people around me know, and ask that they help when I am struggling. The most difficult of these will be eating often enough. I am hoping to find a way to encourage myself to eat 3-4 meals. I still have prize money left on my bearcat card from protégé so I may use that to go to the dining halls a couple of times a week.