Remote Places with Great Potential by Cristian

Remote Places with Great Potential by Cristian - February 2020 Scholarship Essay

As I was growing up, my favorite hobby was playing around with technology. I have always enjoyed reading about how things worked and tinkering with motors, lights, gears, and other similar things I was able to gain access to by taking apart other appliances and toys. Even to this day, that is something that I still find enjoyable, and thanks to that hobby is how I decided to pursue an engineering degree. However, not only I want to create “things”, I also want to leave a positive impact on society. But how am I planning to do this with my own education? The answer: with more education.

I had an experience that motivated me to think about a fantastic project that I plan on bringing to life in the future. I spent all my childhood in a small town, which was almost like a rural area isolated from the big cities, meaning that the main activity was agriculture. When I was a child, an education program came to my town offering people classes so they could learn different skills. Some of them were: basic nursing, carpentry, livestock caring, there were even courses for people who did not complete high school (the vast majority of people never had a formal education or barely finished elementary school), etc. And there was a class that I was really interested in: electricity. The class basically taught people the basics to install, repair, and work with electrical circuits at a household scale. Because I was already interested in that topic, I took that class. Unfortunately those programs did not last for a long time, but I still recall that in the very final weeks of the course I was learning to repair refrigerators. How awesome was that! Best thing I did in my childhood.

Why did this experience impact me? I gained valuable knowledge that through the years I still use to this day, and I am sure that all the people who took the different classes did too. I learned the value of learning as a tool to create a better version of ourselves and keep looking for knowledge to overcome difficulties and ignorance, which in the end is one of the things that has made us, as humans, a successful species.

This is why as part of one of my future goals I plan to start a nonprofit organization similar to that. I will have as a main target those vulnerable, isolated communities that live in neediness. Benjamin Franklin said "an investment in knowledge pays the best interest." I strongly believe that one of the best ways to reduce poverty is through the gain of useful knowledge and the incentive to keep learning, creating and innovating, which I believe would be the spark that can lead people to be entrepreneurs and create jobs. Unlike physical things that can disappear in the blink of an eye, that knowledge, if well taught, can accompany them for years to come, opening new doors to improve their lives and those around them.

My future organization will focus on offering classes which will vary from the teaching of welding, carpentry, household electrical installation, to coding classes. My strategy is to start with only a few variety of courses, and then from that point on start adding other classes as the interest increases. The point here is to arouse in people an eager desire to learn new skills and show what they learn to others, which takes us to the next step of my strategy. Since the organization will focus on different small communities, a meeting will be organized (probably annually) so that they can compete and showcase what they have learned to other communities. For instance, a carpentry class will compete against teams from other communities. They will have to present a final project from their class, and based on that, a winner will be selected. A similar task can be done in the coding class as well. As I mentioned previously, the goal is to show them what they can accomplish and motivate themselves to keep learning.
The last step of the strategy is to continue to expand and make this a global project to benefit as many people as possible. I believe that this process will help to discover new talents and hopefully they will be able to inspire others just like I was inspired by a similar childhood experience.