Share the Dream: My Life, My Focus, My Goal Share the Dream: My Life, My Focus, My Goal: Marando, Aiden

Talent Merit Scholarship Recipient

My name is Aiden Marando and I am a first year student at Umass Dartmouth. Along with an alumni from Dighton-Rehoboth regional high school with a smaller graduating class of 144 people where everyone pretty much new everyone. Im a multi-sport athlete which is where I meet a lot of my best friends. I come from a Portuguese family as my grandparents on my mothers side both grew up in the Azores. I am the baby in the family due to me being the youngest of three. My brother is a 24 year old alumni of UMass Dartmouth along with my sister who is the middle child at 21 years old as a Senior at Western New England university.

UMass Dartmouth has been a school I've pretty much kept an eye on since a young age which is now the reason I am enrolled here now. I've always heard a lot of good things about UMass for many reasons. The first being my mom went to school here all four years and really enjoyed it and will often talk about her experiences here even one of her go to sweatshirts is still her old UMass one to this day. Very similar to the first reason is my brother came to school here and gave very similar reviews as my mom. With my brother being here I would see the school all the time and meet a lot of cool people as it seemed like a great community which is a huge thing for me due to growing up in a small town where it was just such a great community. The third reason which is the most simple is it is right down the road from my house, with it being just a thirty minute drive. With me being such a home body this really helped me with not getting too home sick. As I am at school getting all of the college experiences but always can be comfortable with my family only being a thirty minute drive when needed.

Two things I plan to focus on are first my grades and second basketball as a goal of mine is to transfer up a division or two for basketball. I plan on finishing my time at college with a business degree but I would like to do it at a very high level with a good gpa and having no regrets. I really believe I can do this because I'm really motivated to as in high school I kind of just scraped by with bare minimum as that is one of my biggest regrets and I won't allow myself to do that again. Walking out of college with zero regrets and just being very proud of myself is extremely important to me.

One of the most important things to me is contributing to the world that I am living in because everybody wants to leave this place knowing they didn't just better themselves, they bettered people around them. Whether it is putting a smile on someone else's face or getting food on someone else's plate the world improves when a bunch of good deeds get put together. One way I want to do this is being a basketball trainer or even just coaching a team part time. The reason being is growing up I had a basketball trainer that helped teach me a lot of different qualities and made me a better human and I feel like this would be the best way for me to impact the world in my own way. Some things I was taught is you get no where without hard work basketball training really helped me notice this because my trainer would really help me push my limits and when time goes on I can look back at those times where I wanted to quit and kept going and am so thankful for it because I wouldn’t be anywhere close to where I am today without it. Making myself better is very important to me which is a big reason why I would want to help make other people better. I would really want these qualities transferred to my future kids and for them to learn it at a young age.