Tyrell Academic Profile 

By Colin Wright

Tyrell is a third-year student at Georgia State University. I got the pleasure of interviewing him to learn about his academic self and history. In the early portion of Tyrell’s life, he lived in Brooklyn with his family. He attended St. Marks Daycare as a young child. He then moved to P.S. 073 for elementary and middle school. This is where his academic career started off, and it started off strong. When he first started elementary school, his mother was very strict. He wasn’t allowed to watch children’s television shows, he was only allowed to watch jeopardy or animal planet periodically. In his free time, he read books. He studied and worked on homework every day. and he was a very competitive student, and wanted to pass his other classmates academically. He would be a step ahead of his other classmates by reading ahead in books they were reading in class. As he got older and he moved up in grades, the school material started to become more difficult, and the high confidence he had in previous years of school started to pull him back. He started to not study because he felt like the material was easy. This proved detrimental to his confidence in school since his grades started to go down. The school was then shut down which moved Tyrell to his next school, Brooklyn Collegiate school by College Board. Because of the difficulty of the school, he began to feel burned out because he had trusted his natural talent for learning too much without realizing there was still more for him to learn and do. This caused a major drop in his grades. Despite his hardships, he graduated high school. The day he graduated, his mother enrolled him in college classes to take over the summer. These classes were taking away from his summer. He didn’t want to take the classes but his mother told him he can either go to college or join the military, and that made college the only possible option for him. His family moved to Georgia where he planned on going to GSU in the city. However, due to the expenses of the city campus, he was advised to take his classes at a different campus and move into the city campus later. Fast forward three years later and he is still a GSU student and he enjoys it. During this English 1102 class, he has enjoyed the reading “Strong Writers and Writing Don’t Need Revision” by Laura Giovanelli. He understands the concept of writing more from it and feels more comfortable in his writing abilities knowing even the biggest writers don’t write something perfect by the first draft. Over this time he has found what academic self words fit him best, not just for college but for his whole academic career. He is studious because he is a good studier and he dedicates a lot of time to his education. With this studiousness comes anxiety about school, so he is also an anxious student. He’s very hardworking and has done a lot of work to get him to where he is today. However, after 3 years of college and 15 years of school total, he is exhausted. 

Tyrell’s passions include biology and cultures around the world. He is intrigued by how people live their lives compared to his way of living in America. Tyrell’s passion for foreign cultures has led him to have a minor in foreign language. Diving deeper into why he has decided on this minor, he learned it would give him an advantage in future jobs to be able to communicate with people of other languages and travel to different parts of the world. He got the idea to have a foreign language minor when he applied to get a job with GVI (Global Vision International) which is a community development organization that would require traveling to less fortunate places around the world and helping them. His uncle got him in with GVI, and he is following in his footsteps to get his foreign language minor so he is prepared and qualified for working at GVI as a plan for when he graduates. Tyrell has a STEM major in Biology. This major will bring him to his career goal of being a genetic engineer. He has always been interested in biology and plans on being a genetic engineer for the majority of his adult life. He also plans on using his foreign language minor to work in labs not only in the US but abroad. His bilingual talent will help propel him into having more reach and more knowledge about genetic engineering internationally. This career was inspired by his own interests in STEM and he is excited about what the future has in store for him. 

Above all, Tyrell is focused on his life now more so than the future. His goal is to finish up this semester with ease and with good grades. He also wants to find a new hobby since he strives to find something new to learn and do each year to keep his mind active. His past hobbies have included gardening, cooking, and baking. Next up, he might get into cocktail mixing. Anything that is interesting to him he will strive to do. He is a very respectable student and I am appreciative of the time I spent talking to him.