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Scholarship Essay: How The GI Bill Changed My Life

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When I realized that I was into my second week of spending my nights curled up in the back of a '91 Ford Escort hatchback, parked just a stone's throw away from the infamous Waimea Bay on the North Shore of Oahu, I decided that I needed to somehow drastically change my life. Though I had been working a new job as a cook at a local hotel, I had nothing tangible to my name and no concrete roof over my head. After many grueling years of working as a low paid cook, I devised a plan to completely change the direction of my life. This plan consisted of changing my career, focusing on learning new skill sets, and most importantly getting the education that I needed to make monumental changes. Fast forward almost an entire decade, and I have now served 8 years in the US Coast Guard, started a real education, and found a career …show more content…

The biggest hurdle that I have overcome in the past was figuring out how to get a shot at an education without burying myself in debt. I joined the military, and over the course of my 8 year contract I gained valuable teamwork, technical, leadership, and interpersonal skills. Most importantly, I earned 3 years of GI Bill benefits that would pay me to get educated. After serving as an electrician, I started taking college courses in electrical theory, which did not interest or motivate me in the least. It was through curiosity that I started taking online courses to learn to code basic HTML and CSS. When I took my first intro to programming Computer Science course, I was absolutely hooked and intrigued by taking an idea, and coding it into something functional. Over the summer of 2016 I took a

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