The educational value of travel

I’ve been to all 50 states. But for me, travel has never been about checking boxes. 

When I was sitting in 8th grade bored out of my mind one day, my eyes began to drift around the room before settling upon a map on the wall. I looked at this map with curiosity and noticed something deeply disturbing. I had no idea what that chunk of land between Europe and China was. Much like the ancient Silk Road adventurers before me, I had just discovered India. After a quick Google search about this newly added region to my mental map, I decided that my lack of even a basic understanding of the world was a problem, and I vowed to make a change. I opened Google Earth that day, and I began to learn as I hadn’t learned in months. I became increasingly invested in subjects beyond basic geography. I studied history, geopolitics, art, and culture. I eventually could picture the world with all of its features, people, history, and future, so much so that I could pinpoint locations given only their coordinates on the earth’s surface. 

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With my newfound knowledge, I began looking at the world in a different light. I became civically active, with strong political beliefs from the global scale down to that of my own city and school. I became deeply interested in traveling the world and getting a proper understanding of all of the people I share this earth with. I’ve traveled across Europe learning about the arts, history, and peoples of the continent. I became much more intimately acquainted with the concepts I had previously only read about and was intellectually enriched in a way unique to the medium of travel. As mentioned, my quest for knowledge took me through all 50 U.S. states, after which I can truly say that the natural beauty of the USA’s diverse and varied landscapes is unparalleled in any other single nation on earth. 

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I gained innumerable insights about the world that I live in through this process of intellectual challenge and growth across a wide variety of disciplines. From a baseline of almost nothing, I now understand history, culture, politics, and many other intellectual pursuits. I also discovered that my exclusive focus on STEM to that point had been self-limiting and that I had greater intellectual aspirations. My unveiled passion for new fields made me reconsider my long-held beliefs about what I should do with my life to most benefit the world. While I still believe my highest calling for the betterment of mankind is to bring about nuclear fusion, I now understand that it takes more than plasma to change the world, and I seek a multifaceted education that will allow me to aid in the effort at any point of the process.