RAD Scholarship

I am passionate about infrastructure. I care deeply about the way my town is designed, the way systems impact everyone around me. I first developed an interest in civil engineering and design three years ago after seeing the differences between European and North American streets. I discovered that Amsterdam, despite being a major city of over 800,000 people, had an incredibly low number of traffic-related deaths compared to American cities of the same size. Indianapolis, which also has a population of about 800,000, had nine times the traffic deaths of Amsterdam. This shocked me. My findings made me consider the state of my hometown. Over Covid, I began to walk and bike in my area and realized how dangerous my town is for those outside of a car. Wide roads encourage drivers to speed and lull them into a false sense of security. The lack of sidewalks or bike paths forces pedestrians and cyclists right up to the road. The commercial area consists of big-box stores connected by a four-lane highway. It is a place people go because they have to, not because they want to. I realized that things in my community needed to change. I wanted to do something. Since then, I have begun working as an intern in the town hall and advocating for smarter road design while creating connections within local government. I help with both big-concept projects and smaller tasks and have gained a lot of perspective about how change happens in local government. It is a slow process, but change is coming to my town. Sometimes the biggest improvements for pedestrians and cyclists are the ones that seem small. One of my goals is to add a walkway across the river separating the school district from the surrounding neighborhoods so that kids can walk to school safely without using the dangerous bridge used for vehicles. This will not only encourage healthy habits but also relieve our already strained bus service of significant stress. I want to have a plan in place for the bridge before I graduate so that my younger brother—and countless others—can benefit from it. After graduating, I am hoping to major in civil engineering and go on to help improve infrastructure on a state or national level. I will advocate for traffic calming measures such as road narrowing, an incentive program for cities and big towns to improve their public transportation system and bike path network, and educating the public about what needs to be done. Infrastructure is not flashy. It is not exciting. To many, it is simply a matter of where the government decides to put concrete. But it is infrastructure’s seeming invisibility that makes it so important. There is no day in American life that is not affected by it. No second spent sitting in rush hour traffic or waiting for a late bus that cannot be explained by a decision made by someone in the business of infrastructure. These are everyday problems, assumed unavoidable, because many do not know anything different. Our infrastructure is crumbling, but change is possible. I plan to be part of that change.