Teaching For The Future by Alyssa

Teaching For The Future by Alyssa - June 2017 Scholarship Essay

My name is Alyssa Mead, and my educational goals include attending the J. B. Speed School at the University of Louisville. I hope to study Computer Engineering and Computer Science, and eventually receive a position as a professor at my alma mater.
Growing up, I had always been a very curious child, fascinated with the pursuit of knowledge, as my mother can most definitely attest to. She was a former science teacher at a local high school, and at any given time, had a plethora of chemistry, biology, and physics textbooks strewn around the house. She would often discover her seven-year-old daughter scanning passages about ideal gas laws, or inspecting the diagrams of animal cells. Somewhere tucked into a family photo album is a picture of a toddler reading the Webster’s Dictionary, her face scrunched in concentration.
In addition, I always loved teaching. At a young age, I would regularly face my stuffed animals propped up on the bed, put on my Teacher outfit, and teach them basic math problems on my mini dry erase board. I vaguely remember creating copies of paper “quizzes” and distributing them among my “students”; my favorite stuffed animals would get good grades, while the ones I disliked would not. Toward the middle of my elementary school years, I was always the teacher when my friends and I played the game, House.
My mother also likes to tell the story of my introduction -- and subsequent fascination -- to technology. In a time when touch screen tablets were the new, exciting thing on the public market, I received a first-generation iPad as a birthday present. According to her, I locked myself in my room for three days, studying how the device functioned. Once I emerged, wide-eyed and with a determined look on my ten-year-old face, I claimed to know everything about it.
During high school, many of my classmates came to me for technology advice. Since my school was of a very small and private nature, there were no computer classes available to teach them about adjusting margins, spacing, or font style… despite the fact almost all of my teachers required papers with certain formatting. Funny enough, I even astonished a few teachers after showing them shortcuts on their laptops, allowing them to save time while writing assignments and tests.
It was also in high school when I began my adventures in computer programming. On my own time, I began using free, online references to educate myself about HTML, CSS, and JavaScript -- computer "languages" that help construct and design the layout of websites we use daily. Although I'm no professional, and there were many questions that I ran into during my studies, I sincerely enjoyed the subject. It was so exciting to build something so complex with just a few letters and symbols of code.
In my junior and senior years of high school, I was given several opportunities by my English and math teachers to teach lowerclassmen, as they recognized my love of teaching was as strong as my love of education. When my math teacher had to go out of town for family matters, she asked me to fill in and teach her classes (eighth through twelfth grade) while she was gone. In this span of three days, my duties included teaching the lessons for each class, assigning homework, answering questions, and assisting students in the math study lab.
Earlier in the year, I was also asked to teach two week-long Study Skills courses. The aim of this was to instruct lowerclassmen on how to take notes, prepare for tests, determine the best techniques and methods to study, etc. For both courses, I developed my own lesson plans, notes, assignments, a short and interactive game, and a quiz at the end.
Teaching has always been an amazing profession to me; you are educating the future generations of medical professionals, engineers, scientists, law enforcement, entertainers and artists, among many more professions. You are helping them develop their academic skills, whether at the elementary level with the alphabet and multiplication tables, or at the higher level with algebraic expressions and laws of physics. As a teacher, you can have such a positive impact on a student’s career and potential, and I think that’s extraordinary.
Even at age six, I loved teaching other people (and… well, maybe some stuffed animals, too) and sharing my experience or knowledge of a topic. Because of this, I am planning on getting my Doctorate in Computer Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Louisville. Hopefully, I will have the opportunity to become a professor of the subject, at my alma mater. My dream is to help college students achieve their dreams through education and guidance.
Thank you for your consideration in this scholarship, and I hope you enjoyed my essay.