I hope to improve various aspects of myself throughout college. Personally, I will develop time-management skills, responsibility, and a strong work-ethic. I will have to balance school, friends, family, and extra-curriculars for the next three years, which will teach me time-management more than any other time in my life. I will also have to be responsible for my grades, and the harder I work, the better my grades will be. These lessons will grow me into a stronger person. Through my hard work, I will become a better student. In order to succeed, I will need to be passionate about and interested in the subjects I am taking. I need to maintain a positive attitude through being excited to learn, which I believe helps make you the best student you can be. If I then transfer this excitement for learning into my professional career, I will not only be a better student, but a better professional worker. Going into my professional career, I will be bringing an excitement for learning; a positive, hard-working attitude; excellent time-management skills; and responsibility to any company I work for. This will tremendously enhance my effectiveness as a worker.

                I will also be bringing lessons I learned through improving myself as a citizen into my professional career. I hope to be an OTEAM Fall Mentor, which would improve my leadership, teamwork, and mentoring skills. I will also grow as a citizen through volunteering in my community and reaching out to younger students in extra-curricular groups such as Campus Crusade.

                I believe all of the Principles of Undergraduate Learning (PULs) are important for me to succeed. However, there are three that stand out to me as the most relevant for my career path: core communication and quantitative skills, critical thinking, and intellectual depth, breadth, and adaptiveness.

                As a data scientist, I will analyze and interpret data and then communicate my findings to a group of people. This is almost exactly what the core communication and quantitative skills PUL is about. I will “comprehend, interpret, and analyze ideas and facts” and then “communicate effectively in a range of settings”. My job is going to involve a lot of critical thinking, which is why the critical thinking PUL is important for my future. Looking at big data involves challenging ideas that already exist from a non-biased perspective in order to find the truth. Finally, I will need a wide range of knowledge for my job, which applies to the intellectual depth, breadth, and adaptiveness PUL. My degree will have classes in math, statistics, economics, and business, which allows me to look at situations from more than one perspective.

                The two RISE experiences that are most interesting to me are international experience courses and service learning courses. The knowledge gained through these two types of courses is unlike the knowledge a science degree will teach me, so I believe the more experience I have in those areas, the better-rounded I will be. Unless I take a study-abroad course, I will never develop a knowledge or appreciation of another culture since I do not have enough elective space in my degree to allow me to take a cultural course. However, if I study abroad, I get to have an experience unlike any other. I would be able to have a greater knowledge of the world, which would give me a different perspective when making decisions. A service learning course would help develop me into the citizen I want to be. In a competitive major and field, it is easy to get caught up in yourself and how well you are performing. But, I must remember to step back from myself and look at those around me, and a service learning course would teach me just that. However, I can also gain this knowledge through extra-curriculars or volunteering, which I plan to do. Through these experiences, I will become the citizen I want to be.

                I really did not face many academic challenges when adjusting to college life at IUPUI. I had taken several AP classes in high school, so I had an idea of what the work load would be like. I came into college with a mindset of working hard every day so I wouldn’t have to cram, and it has paid off in the long-run. I have, however, faced social challenges in college. I wanted to get involved in clubs and groups and then make friends right away. I found out though, this was going to be harder than I thought with school taking up so much of my time. It also seems easier to be anti-social in college than it was in high school. To help myself, I went to as many fairs as I could the first week in order to find organizations I was interested in. Erin, my freshman seminar mentor, also helped me find groups that would work for me. At the end of the semester, I have found one organization, Campus Crusade, that I plan on being a part of for the next three years. I will continue to look for clubs that interest me next semester, such as the debate team.

                College-level learning has a higher level of accountability than high school, especially for a science major. I don’t have many assignments or papers, mainly quizzes and tests. My learning, therefore, is mostly up to me. I have found the best strategy is to study a little each day, when in high school I used to cram before tests (which will not work in college). I am excited for my future years in college, where I have a schedule full of classes that I find extremely interesting. I love that my next few years in college will be spent specifically preparing me for my future job.

                The biggest challenge I faced in succeeding this semester was time-management. I had a lot to do, and I was not used to being as busy as I am now. However, I made myself a schedule and stuck to it, and it has worked exceptionally well for me. In the future, I am going to be taking advanced math, statistics, and business courses. It will involve a lot of numbers and theories. I am going to have to be completely focused for hours each day then spend more hours making sure I understand the concepts. Currently, I can only be focused for a few hours before needing to take a break. In the future, I might not have this luxury. So, I am preparing now for this time by working on being focused for longer amounts of time. If I keep working, when the time comes, I will have no trouble focusing for long periods of time.