It's Not About Doing It Fast, It's About Doing It Right by Elizabeth

It's Not About Doing It Fast, It's About Doing It Right by Elizabeth - May 2025 Scholarship Essay

I would do several things upon obtaining these two items. With my current education I would fund and help complete Dean Kamen's Slingshot project. Which is to provide easy to use, compact, energy efficient water filters to every community that doesn't have access to clean water. He wants to make this filter a thing you expect to see everywhere and think it normal. To save the many people dying from consuming unclean water. His idea is well polished, his goal clear and well done, and to top it off he's made a wonderful product. He only struggles with his water filter being able to be shipped and set up properly in those many remote communities, and the costs of building them in the first place, the design is much more affordable than the prototype, but any time you can save money without lowering the quality of or cutting corners on a product is a win.

His invention is something I learned in my Contemporary World History class. He inspired me to take on a problem of my own that's in the world. He's the entire reason I learned about Hydroponic farming. My solution to the lack of healthy food being affordable and provided to low-income communities and minority communities. These communities are often overlooked, under-represented, or even intentionally left alone by retailers all because of either the lack of money, the stereotypes, crime rates, and or because they feel it impractical to bother with such locations where instead they can set up shop in a rich community and be assured a high profit. Hydroponic farming helps take care of that, it's a method of vertical farming where you can have the tops of the plants exposed to sunlight, and the bottom sit in a system of flowing water with all the necessary nutrients and oxygen to let the produce grow. This style of farming while yes is better, isn't commonly seen because most businesses that wish to start up a farm like this fail at the financing/planning stage. I want to bridge that gap and make them a common sight for every rural area, suburbs, towns, and cities. Because this kind of farming doesn't have to take this huge plot of land in the countryside.

Additionally, I would have our trash and recycle waste that is just being thrown away put to use to. From what I have learned and seen. There are people way smarter out there than me, I understand I don't know everything. I would pull a team together and provide all the funding to set up a way to turn our garbage into clean and new cool/freshening storage facilities/containers for the influx of fresh produce. This way we can counteract the problem of produce spoiling due to lack of space or because of it's perish-ability as a whole.

I would also help fund public non-profit, volunteer, and donation programs that help better our communities and our planet as a whole. They deserve all the help they can get because they do a lot of good for the world. I would help with their advertising, providing supplies, and giving them money for their organizations missions/goals as a whole.

And as a final touch, I would spare no expense in having a well educated team help me conduct experiments on building highly effective solar panels on the moon, and building a transmitter machine that bounces the energy collected there to "catcher" machines to put it simply, that would receive and transfer that energy wherever it's needed throughout our planet. Forever putting to rest the problem of where we pull our energy from. It can easily help those who don't get constant sunlight, or those in smaller communities where energy is a luxury, turning it into a commodity.

These are the first major thing I would do to make a difference, an impact on our world, to humans. If I have more time, if I live longer? Then I would set my heights even higher, for now though these mentioned goals seem like a lifetime of work that I'd be happy to take on. In the instance of infinite time I would do much more, fix climate change, change the housing market, restore natural habitats, help endangered species, improve mental health, change the society expectation of how we work so we can be healthier as a whole, build a Dyson sphere around a part of the sun for more energy, build a new engine for space to make it more affordable and safer for travel, make education free, make more public services in general along with bettering the services as a whole, and much much more. However I am just one person, all I ask for is some time to get it all done. Which I am aware I have, sadly though all of these things just won't happen in your lifetime.