Farmer's Dream

Farmer’s Dream

I belong to a family of hard working farmers in Pakistan. As a child I often accompanied my father to our fields. When I was older, I helped make the soil fertile, water the fields, plant seeds, take care of the crops and, finally, harvest them. This experience taught me that there is always a reward for hard work, and how to get the most profit out of investments. Moreover, it inspired me to manage my own business someday, yet I understand that the business world of today is more complex than my father's farms in Pakistan. This complexity demands a quality education, and with that in mind, I am looking forward to getting into a university that can provide me with the opportunity to be competitive in the future.

I grew up in a rural village of Pakistan where education is not considered mandatory by many families. Farming and feeding the animals is most people’s occupation. With the literacy rate so low, scarcely a few people manage to gain primary education. While in the fields, harvesting rice crops with my bare hands and a sickle under temperature of 115 degrees, it was hard to believe that a person like me would be able to pass 10th grade. It took an immense effort to maintain an A average until the 10th grade in Pakistan. Later, it took an even greater exertion to convince my parents to allow me to further my education in the United States.

I moved to the United States to complete my high school education. Unfortunately, I was not able to attend a high-quality high school. In fact, the school was given a "D" grade by the New York City Department of Education. The school I attend in the Bronx is not favorable to studying, therefore, sustaining an A-average here has been just as challenging as sustaining an A-average in Pakistan. The circumstances, however, are different. In Pakistan families put pressure on their children to leave school because working and making money for the family seems to be a more immediate concern than education. In the Bronx, the pressure stems from the fact that the majority of the students in school does not value or necessarily believe that working hard in high school matters. Consequently, in many classrooms, the environment is loud and chaotic, thus makes it hard for a student to continuously motivate himself to thrive.

Migrating to the US was a tough transition; it was hard to switch from one culture to a totally different one. But here in the US I also recognize that I have a lot of opportunities that I would have never had in Pakistan; perhaps this is the reason I came here. In the 11th grade, I was provided with the opportunity to intern Rand Engineering Firm. This