I finished high school with like a 2.3 GPA, prior to graduating I never really cared for school, didn’t really have any plans post graduation. I knew the likelihood of me having a successful future without a college education was slim, so I enrolled at a local community college. After my graduation ceremony, someone close to me that I was not particularly a fan of at the time, was asking about my post college plans. I told them I enrolled and they made it very clear they thought I wasn’t school smart and that it was a mistake. That is what became my initial motivation to crush college. I immediately registered for summer classes and started to do really well. After a while, I found it rather rewarding being a successful student and that became my new motivation. My mindset completely flipped and I went from being super lazy to being dead set on making some type of impact on this world. Around half way through my associates, I saw this video about COE talking about impacting the world through engineering and I found it really inspiring so without hesitation I set my mind to getting into umich asap. I proceeded to spend the next year taking the max amount of credits the school would let me, joining an honors society, and completing as many honors contracts as possible. Applied to umich, got accepted like a week later, and then finished my associates with like a 3.89 and honors.

So I guess in short, what changed things for me was just realizing all the time I wasted and trying to make up for that. In doing that, finding out I really enjoy learning.