Diego Espinoza

Period: 0 10/30/2019
Personal Statement
#6 Think about an academic subject that inspires you. Describe how you
have furthered this interest inside and /or outside of the classroom.

There are many academic subjects that interest me and inspire me. One
academic study that I used to be interested in was social studies. When I was in
ninth grade I used to be really into social studies, I would watch tons of articles
and videos about protests, certain events, controversies and more. I used to
watch videos about politics and pollution and shootings and stuff. I was always
aware of current things. So when my mom told me about a program during the
summer about social studies I had to say yes. The program was called “UCLA
Summer Institute”. This program allows students to go to UCLA and actually stay
there for 5 days 4 nights so that students can experience what college life is like.
They also put us into groups of 5 or 6 and we had to complete a college level
project and the project was a presentation about a concept that we think should
change and we had to say why and how it should change, ours was on pollution.
I liked this program, they gave us awards and I got to see what college life was
like which was really cool. And by working with others with similar interests I was
able to get their opinions on stuff. I also liked that you get to socialize with other
students. I am also interested in computers. Things that have to do with
computers like computer science and cybersecurity. For my entire tenth grade
year I was in a club called Cyber Patriots. Cyber Patriots is the National youth
cyber education program, this program teaches kids stuff about computers that
would be important if that student decides to pursue a career in cybersecurity. In
the club we would meet up every friday so that our director would update us on
upcoming events. On scheduled Saturdays our director would take us on a Boys
and Girls club van to a university and that’s where we learn about cybersecurity.
Every so often there will be these simulations that you run on a computer to test
our skills and what we have learned in the program. We would come in on
Sundays for those, you really have to give up some free time to be in
cyberpatriots. I would then later take an AP Computer Science class in eleventh
grade to further my knowledge and interest in computers.