John Maxwell once said that “leaders become great not because of their power, but because of their ability to empower others”. I argue that, while wealth and power can contribute to quality of life, I hope to identify my right career path in psychology and neuroscience and apply my knowledge to teach others about the social and biological perspectives of the brain to better understand themselves. and the world around me by the time I reach the age of thirty.
Life is like a box of chocolates, when you open a box, you never know what it will bring you. When my brother suffered from post-concussion syndrome from a soccer related injury at the beginning of my eighth grade year, my whole world was flipped upside down. Just looking at his pale face and glossy, disoriented eyes from the constant head pain frustrated me, because he was completely helpless, and looked as if he was trapped inside of an endless web of pain. Although his traumatic injury took a toll for the worst on my family’s happiness, it impelled me to realize how powerful the human brain really is, and how its health can affect not only the body as a whole, but can also affect the person’s social life and the people around them. This idea inundated me with endless curiosity about the human brain, sparking my interest in psychology and neuroscience.
Ever since my eye-opening experience, my lifelong dream is to be able to not only aid individuals who suffered through the same traumatic disorder that my brother did, but also educate others in this widely unknown subject matter. After my mother became a leading ambassadors of the Sports Legacy Institute in Florida, my goal is to work in the Boston University Brain Bank Center and study post-mortem human brain and spinal cord tissue to better understand the effects of trauma on the human nervous system. With this career, I hope that by the age of thirty, I will become a neuroscience professor and apply my love of the human mind to my fellow community and commit to developing the next generation of neuroscientists. Ultimately, when I eventually look back at my life I hope that I can say with certainty that I led a good life, a life in which I was personally happy and fulfilled.
I hope that by the time I am thirty years old, I can use my desire for knowledge of the human mind to discover a career path in which I can find a treatment for post- concussion syndrome. Through my personal experience, I have learned that the most difficult scars are the ones we cannot see, and I desire to share my story to teach the next generation of doctors, researchers, and individuals who are looking to make difference within the medical community that will positively impact society. Great leaders inspire greatness in others, and I aspire to fulfill my dream of spreading concussion awareness one step at a time.
