"Most Gen Z Human Alive" Scholarship

When I first wake up, I open Snapchat, send my streaks. Snapchat isn’t just an app, it’s my whole archive. Same with TikTok and Pinterest, where they’re my go-to’s for literally everything. Trying a new food? On Snap with a “good day” sticker and 2x speed. Senior tradition idea? Straight to Pinterest. TikTok scroll, obviously, and save any videos that I want to do, but will never have enough time to do all of the things I do. For school projects, I link my Pinterest account as part of my portfolio because it shows who I am creatively. My passion project I plan to do vlogging, recording myself like it’s a personal reality show. I have four private Snapchat stories. One’s for shopping hauls and “look at me” moments, one’s for vlogging, one’s just random chaos, and the last is my closest circle where I post the real stuff. Each social platform has a specific purpose. Snapchat is where I’m the most honest. My main Instagram is polished for public view, my spam Instagram is a weekly photo dump archive, and my spam stories are for the unhinged texts and random commentary live. It might look like all these apps do the same thing, but they each hit different. They all help me process life in their own way. It’s like organized chaos, yet in a digital format. Social media has become a daily part of my life and crowns for me the dub of Gen Z.

As a kid, I dreamed of being a YouTuber. I watched mermaid videos so often, I thought two ads in a row was YouTube punishing me. Then came my Minecraft phase. PopularMMOs practically raised me. And like every childhood YouTuber, they either got divorced, had allegations, or quit entirely. Naturally, I launched my YouTube career with a painfully botched version of Let It Go, directed by my sister. My mom found it. I was grounded. But that didn’t stop me. I started editing and made mini documentaries starring my cat like he was Taylor Swift on the Eras Tour. Then came the dark age: middle school with no phone. While everyone Snapchatted across the lunch table, I sat like an NPC. I couldn’t hang out unless my mom called their mom. But when I finally got a phone freshman year, it was like stumbling across a lake in the middle of a digital desert. That’s when I found fanfiction. Bad grammar? No paragraphs? Didn’t matter. The creativity was unmatched. I even wrote my own (and then ghosted my readers with a fake “family emergency”). It was perfect. Now I’m a full-blown Spotify detective. I’ve uncovered everything from classmates’ emo playlists to the football player’s “Cry My Heart Out” Olivia Rodrigo mix. Respect. Who doesn’t cry to "Hope ur ok"? These days, I’m in my final Gen Z form: scrolling TikTok at 2 a.m., flipping between ASMR, conspiracy theories, and space facts. (Did you know our galaxy is being gravitationally pulled in by something we can’t see? Same energy as my FYP.) I didn’t just grow up Gen Z…I fought my way into it! And now? I’m spontaneous, sleep deprived (it's 3:42 AM right now), unhinged in the best way, and powered by funny videos. I am Gen Z.

For centuries, teenagers have been looked down upon for being too immature, too loud, or too bold. But we, as a generation, have captured that confidence and made it completely our own. Gen Z has taken media and the internet to the next level, creating new, hilarious trends, relating to each other through shared experiences, and developing friendships across the world with people our age. For me, a sixteen-year-old girl, being Gen Z has given me the freedom to speak out. To stand up for myself and other girls and women just like me. Media platforms and the bold confidence that comes with this generation have planted in me the spark to share with everyone I can. I was brought up in a household with a sexually abusive, alcoholic father. For years I was afraid. Afraid to speak out. Afraid to be heard. Afraid to be punished. I grew older, discovering my passion as a way to share myself and my experience. Music was a way for me to express myself and be heard without the fear of judgment. I learned how to communicate best through the art of sound, which inspired me to begin to compose. I sat for hours upon hours in front of my laptop screen at twelve years old, writing and writing until I came up with something I was proud of. My generation is truly something special. The connections we have developed with each other through art are inspiring. My story is just one of hundreds of thousands of Gen Z students who, like me, are discovering themselves and their passions as a way of self-expression. So, I might not be the best of us, but I believe that's the point. We are a connected society, building each other up to better versions of ourselves.

I deleted Tik Tok a few months ago as a means to prevent myself from doomscrolling for hours and hours on end and I ended up just slowly becoming more and more addicted to Instagram reels. I realized I had a problem when summer break started so I promised myself I would stop rotting my brain to mold. Then my phone somehow read my mind and started giving me self-help reels on what to do instead of doomscrolling and I started saving a lot of those to a folder. I now have over four hundred videos, that are unwatched, telling how to stop doomscrolling as I continue to compile more, while doomscrolling. The irony is embarrassing me, and I've even put a screentime restriction on Instagram for an hour a day, and yes, I dismiss it each time. I am trying, I swear. I've now started looking for stimulation on Spotify instead of Instagram and I'll do this thing where I'll just go through my playlists and listen to the ten second song previews for, I'm not kidding, about one or two hours and pretend I'm in an edit. Having a boyfriend with no social media, aside from Pinterest, also does not help the embarrassment because he makes sure to let me know whenever I'm acting "too brain rotten" for the average person to understand, like when I called my APUSH teacher an opp to his face for seating me next to a kid he knew I didn't like because he thought it would be funny, and he asked me what an opp was and just walked away laughing. Also, that I constantly refer to just my boyfriend as "guys" when I'm talking to just him. I would for sure consider myself an extremely Gen-Z person.