Nickolas Roy & Scott Laverdure Scholarship

My name is Naseem Johnson Byah. I was born in Boston, but a chunk of my childhood played out in Morocco and Turkey after my mother was deported. She was a legal immigrant with a work permit, but she was also loud about immigrant rights, and that made her a target. When I was eight, police came to our apartment and took her. I landed in foster care while she fought the system for years. Eventually we reunited and moved across continents, rebuilding life from scratch more times than I can count. I finished school online, my mom as my only teacher, teaching myself to code in whatever room we could rent that month. Education mattered to me because it was the one thing nobody could take. Our housing, our money, our family unit, all of it could disappear overnight. But what I learned, the skills I built, those stayed. I wanted to understand why the systems that were supposed to protect us failed so completely. How could child welfare, immigration enforcement, and the courts all exist in the same city and never once coordinate to keep a kid out of foster care? That question pulled me into computer science. I started to see code as a way to design structure where none existed. At Purdue, I'll study Machine Learning so I can build tools that don't collapse under pressure, tools that might actually catch people who are slipping through gaps. Basketball entered my life for just one season, my freshman year, when I lived in Maine. I played point guard for the Gorham Rams. I was never the best player on the court, but I loved the role. A point guard has to see everything at once: who's open, who's gassed, where the next pass needs to go. You learn to scan for what others miss, and that mental habit has stuck with me. When I debug a project or manage a team spread across time zones, I'm still scanning, still trying to see the whole floor. I also served as the team nutritionist, which surprised me because it meant teammates trusted me with their well-being. I learned that leadership can be handing someone a meal plan and checking in later to see if they stuck to it. That season gave me something rare during those years: consistency. Practice was on Tuesday and Thursday. Game was Friday. Expectations were clear. After the chaos of moving between countries and learning in four different time zones, the structure of a sports team felt like relief. It taught me that I work best inside clear systems with defined roles. That's a big reason I chose Purdue, a place built around engineering structure, where expectations are direct and I can focus on building. My background isn't neat or linear, but it has given me a sharp eye for what holds people together when everything else falls apart. Education, for me, has always been a way to turn that insight into something useful. The discipline I picked up from sports keeps me moving when motivation fades. I'm building toward a future where I design tools that provide the stability I once had to scrape together for myself.

They always say, "Don't judge a book by its cover." Being 5'6" in sports always put me at a disadvantage — I always had to prove that I could be there, while kids who were over 6'0" had to prove they shouldn't be cut. This has been the story of my life. My name is Anthony, and I am from Sudbury, Massachusetts, where I've spent most of my time on a field, a rink, or someone's lawn. I'm a senior at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School, where I play varsity lacrosse and varsity hockey, and outside of school I run my own landscaping business. Between practices, games, and mowing lawns before the sun goes down, I've learned how to manage my time, show up for people who are counting on me, and push through the days when I'd rather just sit still. I have always wanted to run my own business. Before starting my landscaping business, I started my own clothing line and built an online store. I did that for almost a year, but unfortunately it ended up failing, as I learned my idea was too focused on a small niche market. Pursuing education after high school matters to me because I want to keep building on what sports and running my own business have already taught me: hard work pays off, but only if you're willing to put in the reps nobody sees. I know a college degree will open doors that hard work alone can't, and I want to study in an environment where I'm challenged in the classroom the same way I'm challenged on the field. I've worked hard to bring my GPA up to a 3.32, and I've put real effort into strengthening my weaker academic areas, the same way I'd work on a weak stick-side move or a slow first step. College is the next rep, and I don't want to skip it. Lacrosse has shaped nearly everything about who I am. Playing sports has taught me how to read a situation quickly and adjust. This year, playing for a team that reached the state championship but lost, I finished with 40 goals and 18 assists for 58 points over 20 games — but the stats only tell part of the story. What I'm proudest of is how much I grew as a leader. Younger guys started coming to me for advice, and I realized that being good at something isn't worth much if you're not also lifting up the people around you. Hockey taught me a different kind of toughness. It's a sport where you get knocked down — literally — and the only option is to get back up before the play catches up to you. Doing both sports at a high level meant learning to manage soreness, tight schedules, and the mental grind of never really having an "off" season. It also meant learning to prioritize: What practice do I need most today? What does my body need? What does my business need? If there's one thing sports have given me that I'll carry into college, it's this: I don't back down from hard things, and I don't expect anything to be handed to me. Despite my size, and because of my work ethic, I've earned the opportunity to play college lacrosse at several Division III schools — proof that the kid who always had to prove he belonged has done exactly that. I want to bring that same mentality to a new team, a new classroom, and a new chapter.