Trey Ballentine

How has your life experiences (family, culture, education, etc.) influenced your development as a person committed to pursuing your educational goals?

 

My life experiences have taught me that I am responsible for the state of the world around me, whether I want to be or not. Moreover, they have taught me to own my responsibility, to address my need to do some sort of good.

 

Specifically, I have learned to excise drama from situations. More specifically, I have learned to relinquish excuses in favor of action so that those around might be led to do the same.

I do not know at what point I began holding myself responsible for the world around me, or if I even have; but I do know that I have been blessed with much and that I have the capability to achieve some good in my life. Perhaps my sense of responsibility is internal, driving me to achieve this sense of abstract good. Perhaps my sense of responsibility is an instinct honed by the past twenty-three years of my life, leading me to appease the anticipations of others. In other words, I do not know whether I am a good person or just a person trying to be good in the eyes of those I admire. Either way, I suspect I have a measure of internal motivation.

 

What do you hope to achieve in your chosen profession or career field?

 

In general, I would like to be an asset in the liberation of every human mind from the mundane, to grant every person a greater measure of freedom. Less generally, I want to secure more efficient education for the masses.

 

Specifically, I would like to create better online instructional material so that more people might learn more things more cheaply and with less difficulty. To complement this wish, I would like to have a hand in the creation of an artificial intelligence that might have a limited capacity to not only learn material, but to teach it. Imagine an Operating System that tailors lessons for an individual human, a simple OS that can be downloaded for any particular person, that can identify personality types, learning styles, and more, and then personally, individually, quiz and tutor an infinite number of people for a cheap price. If I could so much as contribute to this idea’s creation, I would feel satisfied in having granted a measure of freedom readily accessible by anyone who wants it.