I wanted to update you to let you know that I will be going to college next year! I will be attending Norwich University.  I also earned the Apple Distinguished Award, Presidential Community Service Award, and the American Legion Auxiliary EGS Award to help further my education. I want to thank you again for supporting me last summer in attending the Explore Engineering at the University of Connecticut Program.  I can't wait to continue working hard as a college student. Thank you again!

You never know when something can alter your plans for the future.  Attending Explore Engineering (E2) at the University of Connecticut opened my eyes for the future. Knowing that there are different engineering careers led me to think about what type could help society. 

At the program, I was able to attend classes on Mechanical Engineering, Electrical & Computer Engineering, Civil & Environmental Engineering, Materials Science and Engineering, Computer Science & Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, and Management & Engineering for Manufacturing. In each class, we were lectured on how the specific engineering helped society. The professors showed us the big picture of what could be accomplished with the certain type of engineering. 
After being placed in a Biomedical Engineering focus for the six days, I decided that I definitely want to major in Biomedical Engineering. In Biomedical engineering, the students were able to hold a pig heart and dissect it. I would have never thought that I would dissect a pig’s heart. The task was to take the aorta of the pig out and measure its circumference in order to know if it was a healthy pig or if it was a sick pig aorta. When the heart is from an older person, the aortas are classified and start to classify into bone structure. Learning this made me want to go out and save the patients who die every year because of this problem.