Share the Dream: My Life, My Focus, My Goal Share the Dream: My Life, My Focus, My Goal: O'Callaghan, Declan

Share the Dream essay by Declan O'Callaghan

My name is Declan O’Callaghan, and I am an Asian American hailing from Sutton, Massachusetts. I was born into a family of 4 with two older sisters that made my early life very competitive. My father is an Irishman from the county Cork, a distant cousin of King Callaghan of Munster. My mother on the other hand is from the other side of the world, more specifically North Vietnam. She was born in the waning years of the Vietnam war, in which her family fled to the United States in search of a better life. Something cool about my family heritage is as I mentioned before, my father is a very distant relative to a king, King Callaghan of Munster which is now known as Cork.  I have chosen to enroll at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth for a variety of different reasons. The first and most important to me is the option of many different majors. I am a Mechanical Engineering hopeful student, but if I decide that it is too hard for me, I can swap to just about any major I can think of me wanting. Another reason is the cost, as it was one of the best-balanced education and cost schools I could have attended. One of my goals here at UMassD is to make the Dean's list more than once. Both of my sisters have made it multiple times, so I want to join them.  I plan to use my education to contribute to society in the best way I know how, to make people’s lives easier. More specifically, mechanics. As someone who has spent a very sad amount of time under the hood of various cars for various years, I can wholeheartedly say that the older cars are way easier to do simple maintenance on. With that information in mind, I plan to attempt to secure a job in the auto industry and try and design parts of cars that aren't so niche or in confined spaces.