Designing a Future by Carrie

Designing a Future by Carrie - September 2017 Scholarship Essay

Beginning in freshman year, I had the opportunity to take the elective Design and Technology. I was never the artistic type of person, but this type of drawing seemed to spark my interest. I was very excited to start drawing and designing, in hopes that this could be used in my future career as a mechanical engineer. So because of this aspiration, I was already eager to learn where this class could take me.
At the beginning of the class, it started with drawing. I wasn't very good, but as my teacher told me to draw what I saw, not what I think I saw, things seemed to click. Soon my drawings began to improve and my confidence in myself did as well. There were exercises that involved drawing with your eyes closed and others that made you draw an object that was upside down. And I soon saw how to use the other, less systematic part of my brain. In addition to this, I saw how to use applications such as Photoshop and coding.
The best part of this course was the designing portion. I was able to see how the design process works and the drawings necessary for your ideas to come alive. With the ideas and the models, I was able to see how these transformations can be made. It made me realize how these problem solving skills can be used in the world and how this could apply to my specific field. But most of all, I learned that "Small minded discuss people, average minds discuss events, and big minds discuss ideas." If I want to be useful to the future and offer the best me, I want to be able to use these skills that I learned in design and technology to work to solve the problems that the world poses today. To design a better me, and a better future, is to design more possibilities to come.