Personal History Statement
Since I was a child, I always was curious about how things are built. My parents have educated me through creativity, and that is why I found a hobby I liked a lot: to play with puzzles. Who has not ever played with puzzles? However, my curiosity went beyond that. It was not until the day that I was introduced to ‘Lego’ that I began to dream about big things, big projects. I remember that my first experiments made me feel proud of myself, especially because I did something that I had previously imagined or in other cases because I improved a previous defective model. My learning process based on trial and error helped me to understand the basics of physics, such as inertia, strength and stability. But I intuitively knew that it was not enough. As time passed, I learnt that there were other factors involved in building projects: the efficiency in the use of resources, security and quality. Nevertheless, the most important thing I realized was the fact that projects are made by people and for people. This certainly brought out the factors that marked my formation as a person, which are ethics and commitment to society and to the environment.
Along my life, I had the chance to see and analyze many realities since I visited different places in my country and some other places abroad. I am aware that Peru is a developing country and therefore there is a lot of work to do. I think that my generation has a big challenge to overcome. Every day, I see people struggling to go ahead with their lives, but with few education resources available and lack of opportunities, their dreams are difficult to accomplish. Most importantly, there is a necessity for infrastructure projects, such as transportation, water supply systems, aqueducts, hospitals and schools. By seeing this reality, my passion to change things aroused.
‘Make things happen’ is for me a personal slogan. I can say that I followed it in my personal life in a small scale: from winning drawing, spelling and science contests in school, to changing important policies in my university to the welfare of my comrades. Obviously, I think it is important to accomplish our personal goals and cover our own needs. However, I firmly believe that by covering a need to be satisfied by many people is far more valuable. I was fortunate to apply the latter on a relatively small scale: as a student representative at my university, apart from organizing cultural events and conferences, I had a narrowing social approach by helping my colleagues to solve their problems due to their disability disadvantages, by collecting food and clothes for people living in extreme cold areas in my country and by doing humanitarian work in a hospital for children. In addition, I was a teaching assistant, and due to this, I discovered that teaching is one of my vocations, since I successfully helped some students to overcome their learning problems. These experiences have helped me to understand that not only we must appreciate what we have, but also we must take advantage of the opportunities that life brings to us.
At this stage in my life I feel that I must take the opportunity to change things on a wider scale. I feel that in a near future I will be able to contribute to my country by properly managing projects, by using resources in a good manner and by focusing in priority issues such as sanitation and transportation. I believe that by getting a graduate study I will receive the necessary training to improve my personal and professional skills to change the way of how the projects are managed. ‘Change’ and ‘improve’ may sound different from each other. For me, both are summed up in one word: innovation. But innovation cannot be possible if we don’t deeply know how things work. As mentioned earlier, I have always been curious with things; that is why I think that this attitude, summed with my practical personality, set up the framework for me to be committed to research.
There are many people who say that ‘faith moves mountains’. I like this concept because it represents the passion and determination that one has to do things, regardless of his or her religious belief. After having analyzed it I think that a practical perspective of that phrase could be: ‘knowledge and willingness move mountains’. I want to move mountains. I want many people in my country and in other emerging countries to have the same opportunities that I had in order to be properly educated, to have a profession and to be committed to society as I am, as an endless virtuous chain. In my case, I think the best way to achieve this is to apply my knowledge and experience to lead the construction of infrastructure projects so that people’s welfare is reached. Due to this, it was very important in my life to find this link between my civil engineering career and my commitment to society.
