Concluding Remarks

My GCSP experience had a profound impact on my college career and goals. When I started GCSP with FSE 150, I was immediately engaged in the grand challenges and the groundbreaking research in each area. I had never considered the ways in which my major could solve global problems and I was particularly excited by the theme of education. The Grand Challenge Scholars Program also led me to become an interdisciplinary student. Specifically, Inequality/Diversity in Education and FSE 301 affirmed my interest in Justice Studies and Entrepreneurship and led me to pick up a Justice Studies minor and Entrepreneurship certificate. 

Each of the five components helped me gain essential knowledge for being a successful, social justice driven engineer. For the interdisciplinary component of the GCSP curriculum, I dove into learning about the Grand Challenges and learning about the education system. FSE 150 taught me a lot about emerging technologies and strengthened my problem solving skills through hands on learning. Inequality and Diversity of Education gave me the context and knowledge in order to understand the education system and its weaknesses. For the entrepreneurship component, I learned about value creation and developing startups and formed a strong interest in being an entrepreneur. I greatly enjoyed the iterative design process and found the work to be very rewarding. As a result, I attended Phoenix Startup week events, added an Entrepreneurship certificate, and went on an innovation and entrepreneurship related study abroad, which satisfied my global component. The global component gave me a global context of health through ASB 100 and a global understanding of entrepreneurship through the European Innovation Academy. I found these experiences to give me a necessary boost in my global skills, which I have found useful during my internship and work experience. The service learning component of GCSP prompted me to engage with my community and employ my entrepreneurship skills and interdisciplinary knowledge in team work and innovation. Finally, the research component exposed me to the research mindset and led me to get CITI certification and hands-on experience with cutting edge equipment. Overall, these experiences have led me to become a more curious, driven, and knowledgeable person.  

My experiences in GCSP helped me develop my short term career goals. As a result of my experiences with GCSP, my goal is to gain technical experience over the next five years in order to strengthen my knowledge as an engineer. Through employing my entrepreneurship knowledge and interest in product design, I hope to transition to project management and utilize my leadership skills in order to facilitate team success at a software company. I also plan to work on open source educational technology in order to use my technical skills to advance personalized learning. 

Overall, I enjoyed the Grand Challenge Scholars Program and I am happy that I decided to join it my first year of college. The program helped me develop my interests and skill sets in an interdisciplinary way that most engineering students do not get. It helped me make connections with faculty at ASU and push myself out of my comfort zone. My experience has also increased my technical knowledge, leadership, and confidence. I look forward to working on the Grand Challenges throughout the course of my career.