Integration Three Integration Three Throughout my life I have been influenced by all kinds of people and these influences have shaped me into the person I am today. Beginning with my parents, I was shown what it means to establish a healthy loving relationship with others and how to put others before myself. They also taught me the importance of discipline and seeing things through even when they are especially demanding. I think this culminated in their decision to send me to SLUH, the Catholic high school I attended. While extremely academically demanding, I saw this education through and made the most of it, especially in my extracurricular activities. Through these, I was exposed to teachers that truly believed in me and gave me the academic support and challenge I needed to thrive in my field. Additionally, my high school experience brought me to many of the first good friendships I have developed over my life. Through spending time and connecting with them, I learned how to have fun in an informal environment and support them when it mattered the most. Now, I have entered into a new chapter in my life that is in many ways an extension and bigger version of my prior experiences. I am participating in bigger versions of similar extracurricular activities and meeting similar mentor-like figures, forging great friendships, and continuing to academically stretch myself. I believe that these experiences which have shaped me so much have had a large role in forming my personal convictions. My primary conviction is that of faith: I believe that I fundamentally have an inner desire to know and connect with the transcendent. I believe that this is manifest in my life through my Catholic faith. Over the years, my faith has become less of something that I choose to act on, and has become something that is integrated and woven into my everyday life. In every interaction with others, I think about their humanity and make a conscious effort to treat them with dignity and respect. One idea that has shaped this is the idea of sonder, the idea that every person you see, even distant people who you never physically interact with, have lives as vivid and complex as my own. When I was first exposed to this idea in high school, it honestly blew my mind. I had never thought about that in such explicit terms before. In that moment, I brought to mind all my struggles, friendships, triumphs, doubts, faiths, enemies, secrets, hopes, and desires and something clicked in my mind when I thought about some random kid in the hallway having all of that and more, but in their own individual way. This experience has stuck with me and continues to influence how I treat others, regardless of how well I know them or superficially like them. The next personal conviction that holds deep meaning in my life is my desire to be a lifelong learner. I never internalized or articulated this desire until I was interviewing with Microsoft and I was telling the interviewer how much I loved experimenting with new technologies and building things for the sake of building them and learning how to do it. He then interrupted me and said “So you’re saying you’re a lifelong learner?”, to which I responded: “Yeah, I guess I am.” While it was nice to have this compliment from someone I looked up to as an experienced engineer working at a large technology company, it brought some insight into the way I structure my life, time, and desires. I truly love learning, and it has made me the person I am today. It brings me joy to the point of “delight [even when] being dissatisfied” (Himes). Without it, I would not have resurrected my parent’s old laptop, taught myself programming, attended Notre Dame, or gotten my internship. This is what getting off the treadmill means to me. I do not learn because I am told to or because it is the next thing in a series of things to do, but rather because I am passionate about the subject matter, believe it is important, and find pleasure doing it, even when it is difficult. Additionally, this is what allows me to avoid being an “excellent sheep” (Deresiewicz, 2014). As described in his book, these “sheep” are excellent students that are very successful on paper. But in reality, these students lack fulfillment and joy because they jump through hoops in order to jump through more hoops. In addition to my passion for learning and building, I also love teaching others the skills I have acquired. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote and presented a talk to the Notre Dame Linux Users Group outlining something called “self hosting” – the practice of hosting private services on a server you control, rather than using the big-tech public cloud. This is of particular interest because it is in the intersection of data privacy and advanced technology, because the skills necessary for self hosting carry over into the corporate technology world. In giving my talk, I was able to share my personal passion for this subject with other students, and hopefully they were able to learn a thing or two from it. Another conviction that has stayed with me throughout my life is the importance of reflection and solitude. Finding time at the end of the day for prayer and to think about my day has been critical for organizing my thoughts and finding meaning in the things that I do. I also find personal reflection especially effective when working through personal or interpersonal issues. As part of this, it is critical to ask “what, not why” (Tasha Eurich, 2017), or rather “what, then why” to make sure your emotions do not run away from you. This form of thinking causes me to reflect more analytically about what has happened and what can be done about it. What is more objective, it is not an open invitation for any thoughts to creep in. Why allows any current emotion to take control and crowd your judgment. While Eurich’s point is critical for the immediate fallout, as it were, it cuts off a fuller understanding of why something happened that can be obtained by governed emotional feeling. Complimentary to this personal reflection is the importance of great friendships. Solitude as “the deep friendship of intimate conversation” (Deresiewicz, 2010) has been a great way to work through problems, but more importantly it has allowed me to know myself and others better. This is how I can truly be a meaningful reflective leader. If I can combine my experience in my professional field, my personal faith, and my solitude through reflection alone and with friends, then I can lead by putting others first while not compromising the business. This is the core: balance between seemingly incompatible objectives. Many people think that trying to grow a business’ profit while protecting your employees and preserving ethics is impossible, but they are wrong – it is merely difficult. In my career and in my personal life, I believe these convictions will allow me to rise to overcome these seemingly impossible challenges.