Today we’re featuring an excerpt from Jonah, an middle school student from Ontario who recently earned his Future Goals – Hockey Scholar certification. Jonah shares how Future Goals pushed him ahead of the game, challenging and preparing him for an exciting future as an aerospace engineer. Congratulations to Jonah for being one of our scholarship recipients!
Student: Jonah
Teacher: Mr. Grosskopf
School: Arborgate School
Territory: Manitoba
“Ever since I was four years old and designing and building new tracks for my Thomas trains, and creating original models and towns with Lego, my brain has worked in a way that imagines and invents things. Since then, I’ve wanted to be an engineer, even if back then, I didn’t even know what the word really meant. All I knew was that it was something that suited my passions perfectly.
My whole life I’ve loved the way helicopters and drones fly. They fascinated me. Not just the fact that they fly, but how they fly. When I was a young boy and bought my very first remote control helicopter, I just knew that I wanted to make things fly. Later, I got my first real drone and I flew it constantly that summer. Since then, I’ve asked for a new, more advanced drone every birthday because I realized for every drone that I learned to fly, I could push the boundaries of its capabilities even more, although with sometimes unfortunate results!
My current challenge is learning how to code and reprogram my latest drone to do things that it wasn’t even originally designed to do! I love the thought of building things that no one has seen before. Being able to combine this with my passion for flight would be the type of career that I have dreamed of.
Dreams for my future revolve around becoming an Aerospace Engineer. I had an opportunity to speak with an aerospace engineer last year at the RBC National Skills Competition. As he showed me his team’s helicopter engine designs, we spoke about some of the skills that are required for a career in aerospace engineering and the different categories associated with this field; such as aeronautics, astronautics and UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) design.
I am very intrigued to learn more about this remarkable career. I have been researching different ways that I can make my dream become a reality. I know I need to be prepared to study challenging mathematics and science courses in high school in order to have an opportunity to attend a great university.
To help prepare me for this endeavor, my first step was to complete my current grade 8 mathematics course early to then challenge myself with completing the EVERFI course, Future Goals – Hockey Scholar as an independent study.
This course taught me valuable skills such as the importance of working with angles and velocity and also calculating averages and data analyses. I also learned important lessons in working independently, motivation, and taking accountability of my own learning.
Having the opportunity to study this EVERFI course has helped me think more about my goals and dreams of designing and making things fly in a real way. Doing that has helped me put my future into real focus and help me realize that with hard work, my goals are within my reach.”