A Brighter Future

By Ian Walck

For the past half-decade of my life, I have often seen what I consider to be consistent wrongs in our society. I feel that every day, I look at myself and find that I’m not a person who is able to contribute to society in the way I desire. I am going to change that. I also see our society as greedy and largely self-serving at the expense of the lives of so many. Because I believe in the greater good, I plan to help change that. 

The way I deem best to do that is to work towards making new forms of energy production and making the already existing forms more efficient. After all, scientist Nikolai Kordashev proposed the idea that the best way to measure how advanced a civilization is by observing how much energy they can harness, measured by a scale deemed "The Kordashev Scale." This means that if this idea is true, then by contributing to the overall ability of mankind to harness energy, I would be making the world a more advanced and hopefully better society. That is exactly what I intend to dedicate my life to the pursuit of. 

Contributing to our society’s energy production was not always what I had wanted to do, though. In fact, this only changed after the coronavirus-19 pandemic, when I began attending Saint John Neumann Regional Academy. Prior to this, I attended the LB Morris school in Jim Thorpe, PA, which I enjoyed. I would've preferred to remain at this school through my middle-school years, but since the prospect of only attending in-person classes two days a week upset my parents, I was forced to change schools. Therefore, I was sent to a school that offered in-person instruction all five days of the school week, leaving behind all my friends and everyone I was familiar with. Many days attending this school were miserable. Evident to me now, being a scrawny child with extremely liberal views compared to my surrounding company made me a prime target to be bullied, and vigorously so. Due to this, I started spending a lot more time keeping to myself rather than speaking to other people, which allowed me to explore more of what interested me in my personal time. 

One morning in science class, I recall reading about fusion technologies in my textbook. I was immediately fascinated, as the textbook described it as a potential source of nearly infinite, and clean, source of energy. Around this time, I also recall watching YouTube and discovering what the previously referenced Kordashev scale is. Having a lot of time to myself, I began to think. I thought about how, contrary to my classmates’ beliefs, accelerated climate change would one day displace millions of people. I thought about how a large portion of climate change is due to increased CO2 emissions from nations heavily reliant on natural gas. I thought about how I hadn't heard anyone speak about fusion technologies before. I thought, “If not me, then who?” 

American society encourages people to make money in their professional lives above all else, thereby encouraging people to be selfish. I don't want to be selfish. I want, above all, to help society as a whole, and contributing to energy production and efficiency is the way I can do that. Not only that, but it's a way that’s unique to me. It would finally make me good enough and make the world around us better. That's why I want to pursue an undergraduate degree in physics. I want to be a nuclear physicist to make the world better— hopefully by helping to develop the ITER fusion reactor in Switzerland. After all, you should be the change you want to see in the world.