Month: January 2023

A cool, shiny gold medal is placed around your neck as hundreds of thousands of fans applaud wildly. Eventually, the applause decrescendos as the Star-Spangled Banner plays and echoes throughout the packed arena. Such a moment of immense personal pride and honor in representing your nation as a gold medalist at the Olympic games propelled my younger self into gymnastics and serves as continual motivation as I train for the 2028 games in Los Angeles. In that moment of the flag being raised and holding my right hand on my heart,  I also imagine myself undergoing deep reflection upon the sacrifices, tribulations, and experiences that undergirded my ever-evolving mental attitude towards achieving the success I desired. While I may or may not ever be an Olympian, I have no doubt that my life experiences in and out of gymnastics have led me to cultivate a formula that I believe gives anyone the potential to succeed in whatever aspect of life they choose. When I was young, I was under the misconception that success in athletics, academics, music, or any other skill-based activity was entirely dependent upon talent and natural aptitude. Within school, I defined myself as one who was pretty good with math but poor when it came to reading comprehension and writing. While I was also a natural athlete, I struggled in many sports due to my physiology and eventually stuck with gymnastics as the one sport that I found “natural”. However, I also fell in love with the sport, so much so that I was willing to do it even if none of my friends did, nor remotely understood a thing about it. When I reached high school, I began to see the sport not just as a hobby but as a lifestyle. I realized that aspirations for collegiate gymnastics, qualifying to national teams, and even making an Olympic team in the future would require serious work ethic and dedication, inside and outside of the gym. I adjusted my sleep schedule, nutrition, and training plan to optimize my skill and fitness development within practice, as well as prime me to reach peak performance at competitions. That year, I bore the fruits of my labor manifold over what I ever expected. After being a gymnast that, a few years earlier, had sloppy form, poor calisthenic strength, and unrefined fundamentals, I placed second in my age at the Junior Olympic Nationals and qualified to the Junior National Team. Filled with pride and excitement at the prospect of attending training camps at the Olympic Training Center and even potentially competing internationally, I was poorly equipped to deal with the sequence of events that followed. While my intense training and conditioning plan within the gym undoubtedly gave me the repetitions and confidence to perform so well at nationals, it came at the cost of a partially torn labrum and rotator cuff at only 14 years old. My mindset remained optimistic, but despite applying my work ethic to the rehabilitation and recovery process, my return to gymnastics was impeded by the cataclysmic arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic. To make matters worse, my gym closed down due to financial struggles and I was unable to continue training with the coaches and teammates that had been such a tremendous part of my previous success. Consequently, my position to get back to the same level of high performance in gymnastics after the pandemic was about as uphill as possible; I was severely out of shape, forced to adjust to a new coach and training environment, and had to adapt to a new body type (I had grown several inches and gained significant weight over the pandemic). For the first time in a while, I truly felt that I had lost my passion for the sport that I had once loved so much. While my discipline and habits remained, I felt that it was impossible for me to make progress, regardless of how much I conditioned, worked skill development, or even did extra drills to apply coaching corrections. The result was severe mental health struggles; I had made so much of my identity about gymnastics performance and the thought of not being able to live up to the expectations that others, including myself, had of my performance was sickening. As it was my junior year of high school, I had the additional pressure of it being the most important year for college recruiting, and it was undeniable that I would have to perform well at competitions and network well with coaches if I wanted the chance to make a college team. As I approached my first time competing in almost two years at one of the biggest competitions of the junior circuit, my coach shocked me with advice that epiphanized my perspective on why I was plateauing. He could sense my lack of confidence, stiffness, and poor mental attitude, and instead of giving me skill-specific corrections, he instead told me to “have fun” with the sport. Knowing that it was not my work/ethic or discipline that I lacked but rather the enjoyment of the sport that served as a mental, rather than physical, barrier to me achieving the level of performance I desired. While it took me a while to take his advice to heart and certainly didn’t perform as I wanted that year, I was lucky enough to get recruited to Penn State. Fueled with gratitude for the opportunities ahead of me, my senior year was one of my most successful yet. Moving into the college environment at Penn State where I was around a whole group of guys that loved gymnastics as much as I did and had huge aspirations was even more motivating, pushing me to compete at the U.S Championships, one of the first steps in being a Senior National Team Member. But while accomplishments like this and the ultimate hope of one day being an Olympian are nice externalities, they are no where near as important as the priceless knowledge I have learned in the process. While I initially credited my success as a high schooler to sheer discipline and commitment, my experience after COVID made me remember the importance of cultivating the passion and love for the sport that first got me in it. Knowing that my career in gymnastics will not last forever whether or not I make it into the Olympics, I hope to apply the same mindset in my career afterwards as an engineer. Since I was a young student, I have always had a love for problem-solving and analytical thinking, prompting me to consider engineering. With the same-work ethic and discipline I developed over my  time as a gymnast, I hope to change the world by using electrical engineering to improve sustainability and eliminate harmful environmental externalities by advancing efficiency. While engineering and gymnastics may be different on the surface, and in some ways they overlap more than it initially seems, success in either of these areas, or any area for that matter, can only be realized by consistent discipline, work-ethic and commitment that is grounded upon a true love for what you do.

After personal reflection and reviewing the feedback of my peers, I think that it would be really interesting to do my Passion Blog as a review of the previous week of competitions in Men’s NCAA Gymnastics. Many classmates mentioned not knowing much about collegiate gymnastics, and thus I believe that it would be cool to shine light on a sport that I believe is frequently underappreciated in our country. For each post, I would commentate on the performance of each team that competed that week (including results), highlight outstanding individual performances, and end with any changes to my own personal “power rankings” of the NCAA. For my Civic Issue Blog, I think it would be interesting to commentate on recent changes in monetary/fiscal policy and how they are affecting, or are forecasted to effect, the economy. As someone who is fairly interested in economics and has a decent deal of background knowledge about it, I think it would be a good blog topic to convey the concrete effects of policies that are often equivocated by the media. The economy is certainly of the most parts of our strength and coherence as a country, and unfortunately most people do not know much about it.