In the future, I see myself as an aerospace engineer. How I would get there is first through the aerospace program, going through Everett Community College and getting an AMT degree in aviation maintenance, which is airplane maintenance.
I was introduced to the Seattle Goodwill Aerospace Program. One day I was just having lunch at my high school and a friend of mine, whose name is Oscar as well, came up to me and asked me if I was interested in aerospace. He knew I was interested in aerospace, so naturally I said yes and without second thought he kind of just grabs me by the shirt and pulls me into our college career center where I’m introduced to the program supervisor Mark Mendez.
I sat down there with his talk about the Youth Aerospace Program and it did spark my interest, so I naturally applied. The summer that we were enrolled there, which was last summer, it was mainly focused on volunteer service, so we volunteered for groups (Housing Hope, the Tulalip Tribes and the Marysville Parks) where most of the time we kind of just did a lot gardening, pulling out weeds and stuff.
And after that, it was a really good way to get volunteer hours for my school and throughout my senior year just checking in every two weeks on a Saturday, making sure we got enrolled into a college which right now I’ve been accepted to both UDub (University of Washington), Seattle and Bothell, but I think I’m going to go with the community college in Everett because financially it is cheaper; plus, I could transfer out with the credits I get there.
We are learning a lot about aerospace in the program, but that’s not the only thing that we’re learning. We’re also learning important soft skills. Examples of this would be knowing how to give a good handshake, how to give good eye contact, how to talk to a person of business. Goodwill has definitely been very important to put me in this path because without them, my track to finding a job would be slowed down, but with Goodwill, it has sped up the process.
And not only that, it’s actually helping me to gain a better education.
