Kirsten Linnabary's Portfolio

I have learned many different facts about myself this year. Since I am no longer living on campus, I have learned how to take care of myself and how to be a “successful” adult. I have learned that, in order to take care of myself, I need to be intentional in what I do. This learning is significant because I feel as though I am “growing up,” and that fact is not nearly as scary as it was before.

Another important fact that I learned this year is that I learned that I loved engineering.

This past spring semester, I took a co-op at Elite Biomedical Solutions (EBS), which is a

company that works with infusion devices for hospitals. I was scared about the opportunity

 at first, because it dealt heavily with quality and reverse engineering, which I did not think

I would like doing.

Thankfully, I was wrong with having those concerns. I loved my co-op, and I enjoyed what

I was doing. I learned that I would be happy going into the industry as an engineer. This

learning is significant because it has shown me what I want to do with my life, and it has

given me direction with my college career.

One thing that I would change about this year would be that I wish that I had not

overscheduled myself this past fall and spring semesters. Because I overscheduled myself,

I lost sleep, spent most of my time running from place to place, and hardly got any time to

take care of myself.

To prepare for the upcoming year, the advice that I would give to myself would be to take

it easy and build my relationships. Even though I am a member of Phi Sigma Rho, I feel as

though I have yet to really meet people. Life is about building relationships, and I have yet

to do that during my college career.

This past spring semester, I told myself that I had two goals for myself. I wanted to figure

out who I was, and I wanted to figure out how to best take care of myself. I had realized

that I was not really happy with how I was running my life, and I wanted to change it.

During the spring semester, I started asking myself what I wanted to do while I was in college.

My thoughts evolved because I stopped thinking about what other people would want me to do. Instead, I was thinking about what I wanted to do, and this change felt great.

This evolution in thinking will help me inform my next steps because I will become more independent with my thoughts. I sometimes tended to say things that people around me wanted to hear, and I would sometimes come to events even though I was stressed out because it was expected of me to do. Now that I have this different mentality, I hope to live my life more intentionally, doing and saying only things that I want to do, and not what other people are expecting me to do.

Lastly, it may sound silly, but I want to be able to run five miles straight by the end of the year. Since I came to college, I have shirked my physical health, and even though I have yet to gain my “freshmen fifteen,” I feel much weaker than I did before I came to college. Exercise is encouraging to me, and I want to set a goal to myself that challenges me physically. However, I have a bad knee, so even though it is good for me to exercise, I should not pick a goal that would hurt my knee (like running a half-marathon), so five miles is a good goal for me.