A turning point in my personal and professional journey came when I made the deliberate choice to prioritize my physical health—not through dramatic changes, but with small, intentional steps. As someone passionate about integrating musical theatre and psychology in my future work, I knew that maintaining physical fitness was essential. If I wanted to perform and connect with others both on stage and in therapeutic spaces, I had to begin with discipline—body and mind. That integration of the arts and psychology began years ago with personal loss. When my older brother died during my childhood, I turned to music and performance to cope. Singing, dancing, and acting gave me space to express what I couldn’t put into words. Over time, that emotional outlet became a calling. I began to wonder not only how music helped me, but why. What was it doing to my brain, my emotions, my ability to heal? This curiosity led me to study psychology, sparking a desire to understand how creative expression supports emotional health, especially in children and adolescents. My resilience, paired with this inquiry, led me to pursue a future at the intersection of mental health and performing arts. One of the most meaningful ways I’ve prepared for that future has been through committing to my physical health. I began with small goals: 15 minutes of exercise and 15 minutes of stretching each day to maintain basic fitness for dance. Rather than underestimating these efforts, I trusted the process. Over time, I incorporated ballet formations to build my technical foundation. The results—improved posture, flexibility, and muscle tone—came gradually but meaningfully. More importantly, I experienced an internal transformation; I learned not to shrink back from small beginnings and discovered the value of consistency. That mindset has shaped every other part of my growth. In psychology, I started by learning to conduct basic assessments, write clear reports, and manage a small caseload. As my experience grew, so did my responsibilities. I eventually became fluent in working with clients in both English and Spanish, took on higher acuity cases, and began mentoring others in report writing. Just as in dance, I built my skills through daily discipline, learning to meet challenges with steady progress rather than rushing or becoming overwhelmed. I’ve come to see that prioritizing health—mental, emotional, or physical—is not separate from preparing for the future. It is the preparation. The habits I’ve formed through dance, study, and personal growth reinforce a core truth: big goals begin with small steps. I’ve learned to value discipline over motivation, presence over perfection, and to trust in the power of showing up every day. Looking ahead, I hope to carry these lessons into a career that helps others grow in the same way. My goal is to start a musical theatre group specializing in drama therapy—using performance as a tool for mental, emotional, and physical wellness. Just as I’ve built my own skills incrementally, I want to help others do the same, supporting their development in social skills, emotional regulation, and problem-solving. By creating a space where growth is nurtured and progress is celebrated, I hope to guide others—one small, meaningful step at a time—toward lives of confidence, creativity, and resilience.

I am a clinical psychologist with a background in musical theatre, and I have spent much of my life pursuing a passion for both the arts and mental health. My journey into the field of psychology and my desire to help others has been shaped by personal adversity and an understanding of the healing power of music. I work with children, adolescents, and young adults with Autism and/or ADHD, and my mission is to use my unique combination of expertise in mental health and the arts to make a positive social impact for individuals with special needs, particularly in underserved communities. My love for musical theatre began in a time of great personal loss. After my brother’s life was tragically taken, I turned to music to cope with grief. Music became my emotional outlet, a space for me to process my feelings, find meaning in the midst of tragedy, and build resilience. This experience taught me the immense power of the arts in emotional healing. The stage became a place where I could express myself, connect with others, and experience a sense of belonging. Recognizing how impactful music had been in my own life, I sought ways to give back to others through the arts. I began teaching instrumental music to young girls from an underserved community, helping them build confidence, learn teamwork, and develop a sense of accomplishment through music. This experience solidified my desire to merge the arts and mental health to serve individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders, particularly those with Autism and ADHD. I realized that music and storytelling are not just forms of expression, but powerful tools for building emotional resilience, social skills, and a sense of community. In my career as a clinical psychologist, I have focused on supporting individuals with Autism and ADHD in developing essential life skills, including emotional regulation, organizational strategies, and the ability to form meaningful relationships. I see great potential in integrating musical theatre as a medium for achieving these goals. Musical theatre combines elements of storytelling, collaboration, and emotional expression, all of which can be incredibly therapeutic for individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders. Through musical theatre, individuals can practice and reinforce essential skills such as communication, empathy, self-awareness, and problem-solving, all within a supportive and creative environment. My goal is to use musical theatre as a tool for developing mastery, self-efficacy, and belonging for individuals with Autism and ADHD. By engaging in performances and collaborative projects, these individuals can experience the joy of achievement, gain confidence in their abilities, and develop a sense of connection to others. Beyond the personal growth of participants, I aim to bring awareness to the challenges faced by individuals with special needs, particularly in underserved communities, by using theatre and storytelling to share their stories. This outreach will not only help reduce stigma but will also provide much-needed resources and support to these communities. I am committed to making a positive social impact by serving individuals with special needs through a unique blend of mental health care, musical theatre, and community outreach. By working with those with Autism and ADHD, I hope to empower them to develop the skills necessary for emotional well-being, personal growth, and meaningful social connections. Through my work, I also hope to foster a greater understanding and appreciation of the abilities and potential of individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders, while also raising awareness and providing resources to those in underserved communities. Ultimately, my goal is to create an environment where individuals with special needs can thrive, feel valued, and find a sense of purpose through the transformative power of the arts.

As an adolescent, I played the flute in bands and pit orchestras and taught myself foreign languages as a hobby in my spare time. In my senior year of high school, I discovered that I wanted to explore how these activities impacted brain development and my experience of music and language. Therefore, I decided to study the broad field of psychology, due to that enthusiasm for language acquisition and the impact of music on the developing brain of adolescents. In my psychology thesis research, I investigated specifically whether social interaction helps youth with Autism Spectrum Disorder learn various tasks. That research question became my most immediate impetus to pursue a doctoral degree in Clinical Psychology and to ultimately work with people with disabilities. However, two other major events steered me in the direction of Clinical Psychology long before I had ever contemplated that question. I have a passion for musical theatre that was born out of tragedy; when my older brother was murdered, musical performance became my coping mechanism. Out of this coping strategy came a passion and talent for instrumental music and musical theatre. I plan to provide interventions for children with Autism and start a theatre company for people with disabilities, to create an expressive space and improve their quality of life through therapy and theatre. My efforts to integrate the arts and mental health started with my Girl Scout Gold Award service project. For my Gold Award, I taught an instrumental music workshop to girls from low-income families. As a flutist and performer, I mentored girls aged 5-12, teaching them how to read music and play simple pieces in front of an audience, which culminated in a performance during which the girls took the lead. Through my passion for music, I empowered young girls from an at-risk population to creatively express themselves, learn a new skill, and ultimately, to make a positive difference in their community through the arts. Together, my coping with loss and my community service as a Girl Scout led to my choice of field. I have performed on several stages for charitable causes, including awareness and resources for people experiencing homeless, orphans, and those with mobility impairments. I will continue this work as a clinical psychologist, not only by performing on stage myself, but by inviting others into the project—others who are often seen as the ones who receive service, not provide it. Community service led me to become a person who wants to include and empower. Community service, through performance, has enabled me to positively impact the lives of others while telling a story. My previous community service and my future goals to continue to impact my community are what move me to do psychological assessments and interventions with children and adolescents with disabilities. I want to co-create opportunities with them to share their voices, address the needs of vulnerable populations in their surrounding communities, and effectively cope and succeed in their goals.

Designing card games is one of my favorite ways to be creative; it combines digital art and game development with humor and strategy. When I am designing a game, I am creating an experience, with a story, a mission, and a reason to work with (or against) other players. After I created my first card game, I got to witness others across the nation and internationally enjoying what I created. It felt amazing to see what was once a quirky little idea that popped into my head while I was falling asleep turn into an exciting experience for people I had never even met—all in a year’s time. Not only do card games bring people together across the world, but they also allow individuals to test the social limits in a safe and controlled environment. Since I study Clinical Psychology in order to work with individuals who struggle with social interaction and communication, I hope to bring my love of card game design to the therapy room in the form of card games and board games that allow clients to learn social skills in a fun way. In the upcoming academic year, I will be working at a therapeutic day school in which I will be doing therapy with children and adolescents; I cannot wait to teach empathy, emotional awareness, and assertiveness to youth through tabletop gaming. Within the next five years, I plan to launch my game company to sell games that teach these topics and more to people of various developmental levels. Overall, I enjoy designing card games not simply because it is fun, but because it creates an imaginative and formative social experience in which anyone can completely immerse themselves. I hope to share my future games—and the skills and experiences they impart—with my community and the world.

I am a performer studying Clinical Psychology to become a child therapist and start a theatre outreach organization for youth with disabilities. My efforts to integrate the arts and mental health started with my Girl Scout Gold Award project; I taught a music workshop to girls from low-income families in my community. Through my passion for music, I empowered young girls through creativity and the arts. Similarly, I plan to provide interventions and start a theatre company for people with disabilities in my community, to create an expressive space of empowerment and improve their quality of life through therapy and theatre. Ultimately, I am studying Clinical Psychology to co-create opportunities with people with disabilities to share their voices and make a positive impact on the community. As a performer and aspiring psychologist, I dedicate myself to this goal because I know the therapeutic effects of being part of a production, as well as the unfortunate fact that people with disabilities are sometimes excluded from full participation. I will be a force for change in the context of musical theatre and mental health advocacy.

Every morning on the way to high school, just a few blocks away from school, my brothers and I would ride past a man who would walk up and down the sidewalk holding up a Bible, smiling and waving at the cars passing by. We called him, “Bible Man”—as did our friends and classmates. Virtually all the students and faculty knew who Bible Man was. After all, he was an expected part of our morning route to school—someone we could count on seeing, a guaranteed wave and a smile. We never wondered if we would see Bible Man; we took it as a given. And though he went unnamed (at least, among us), he never went unnoticed. When Bible Man was killed in a hit-and-run, on the same sidewalk he had always walked, my school community came together to mourn and reflect on who he was to us. As echoed by many, I remember him most for his faithfulness. Though his faithfulness was not specifically to my school, we were naturally impacted by his fidelity to the larger community. Bible Man was evidence of the importance of keeping commitments and remaining steadfast in one’s purpose and calling; he did so even unto death. I don’t know if he was aware of the full extent of his impact, but remembering him keeps the importance of remaining faithful to the day-to-day commitments at the forefront of my mind and heart.

I want my life to tell a story of hope and compassion. As sung in the Broadway musical, Once On This Island, “out of what we live and we believe, our lives become the stories that we weave.” For me, this quote encapsulates my approach to the future and my goals to positively impact the world around me—I want to tell stories that reflect humanity and emanate from the dignity I place on creativity, advocacy, and the expression of the human experience with all its joys and woes. I plan to do this through Clinical Psychology and musical theatre, working primarily with children and other people with disabilities (PWD) in the communities in which I live and work. Lorraine Hansberry, playwright, author, and the first Black female to have a play performed on Broadway, is particularly influential to me in my method of reaching the greater society with artistry and activism. For Hansberry, art was activism. Hansberry put her life experiences, and those of other Black Americans, into her books and plays. Her most famous work, A Raisin in the Sun, reflected her childhood experience of residential segregation in the early 20th century United States. Lorraine Hansberry, by her life and work, demonstrated what it means to use artistic expression to give voice to the oppressed and marginalized and change the atmosphere of society. I, too, want to bring light to the experiences of at-risk populations. I am currently studying for my doctoral degree in Clinical Psychology to become a child therapist, in addition to starting a musical theatre company for people with disabilities. My company will allow people with disabilities a platform to express their own creativity and shed light on at-risk populations, such as the homeless, orphans, and abuse victims. I will not stop at raising awareness; my company will involve organizations that support these populations to make a real-world, tangible difference in the lives of the vulnerable. Like Lorraine Hansberry, I will use artistic expression to give others hope and a voice. As an adolescent, I played the flute in bands and pit orchestras and taught myself foreign languages as a hobby in my spare time. In my senior year of high school, I discovered that I wanted to explore how these activities impacted brain development and my experience of music and language. Therefore, I decided to study the broad field of psychology, due to that enthusiasm for second (and third) language acquisition and the impact of music on the developing brain of adolescents. In my psychology thesis research, I investigated specifically whether social interaction helps youth with Autism Spectrum Disorder learn various tasks. That research question became my impetus to pursue a doctoral degree in Clinical Psychology and to ultimately work with people with disabilities. I have already reached out to the community—I have connected with parents of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder and Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, as well as taken class notes and proctored exams for students with academic accommodations. In addition to psychology, I enjoy musical theatre. This passion was born out of tragedy; when my older brother was murdered, musical performance was my coping mechanism. Out of this coping strategy came a passion and talent for instrumental music and musical theatre. For my Girl Scout Gold Award, I taught instrumental music to elementary and middle school aged girls from low-income families. Through my passion for music and my willingness to turn my pain into progress, I empowered young girls from an at-risk population to creatively express themselves. Similarly, I plan to provide interventions for children with Autism and start a theatre company for people with disabilities, to create an expressive space and improve their quality of life through therapy and theatre. Ultimately, I am studying Clinical Psychology to create opportunities for people with disabilities to share their voices, impact their communities, and address the needs of at-risk populations. My degree in clinical psychology will enable me to do psychological assessments and interventions with children and adolescents with disabilities while I create opportunities for them to share their voices, address the needs of vulnerable populations in their surrounding communities, and effectively cope and succeed in their goals. The stories we tell impact the world. Stories connect people, not only through shared experiences, but through platforms to share experiences that the world needs to hear about. Every person’s story is a thread in the weaving of our collective humanity. I want more stories told, more stories heard, and more stories resonating in the hearts of people worldwide. I live for a better world for at-risk populations, and greater inclusion for people with disabilities and the stories we tell through characters and scenes. If my life leaves the world friendlier and more receptive to the voices of people with disabilities, I will have weaved a story that I lived and believed.

Whatever success I do or don't have depends on me. That is independence. I am not simply at the mercy of circumstances; I am an active agent. I move on my own behalf to achieve my goals. This way of thinking about success—as dependent on my efforts, not on luck or other unstable—compels me to push myself and find the true limits of my capacity. I pushed the limits in my experiences performing in theatre and training in clinical psychology. When I first performed on stage, I didn’t realize that musical theatre would teach me anything about professional psychology. I knew that theatre, like anything creative, could be a way to cope. In fact, I used performance to cope after the unexpected death of my brother. I became interested in integrating psychology and musical theatre for youth after realizing how theatre helped me cope and develop my identity. When I started my doctoral program, I just knew that I would graduate and then integrate the two in my practice. Then, halfway through my assessment practicum, the world shut down. “The show must go on.” That was my first lesson in theatre—the first lesson I remembered when the world quarantined. Suddenly, how I had learned to assess was no longer how it was done; my practicum site moved everything online. When many could not see a way forward, I learned every test I could via tablet administration. Because of my intellectual curiosity and adaptability, I was equipped to optimize the assessment database at my therapy practicum, which streamlined the assessment process for other clinicians and interns. I took initiative because I knew that success depended on me. I learned not just that the show must go on, but that I must make the show go on.

I titled my playlist the "Lead Your Life" playlist because the songs contained within inspire me to reflect and reevaluate my choices. These songs motivate me to move, put myself to work, and improve the world by making my unique contributions thereto. The opening song, "This Is Your Life", includes the question, "are you who you want to be?" I want my answer to this question to always be "yes". When it's not, I know that I need to plan my steps to make a change. These songs motivate me to lead my life and take charge of my destiny.

What if young people could switch languages as easily as they can switch Snapchat filters? Worldwide, many people speak multiple languages and can easily switch between them to communicate. However, most native English speakers cannot; only 1 in 4 native English speakers can converse in another language (Devlin 2015). Accordingly, most native English speakers miss out on the career and brain benefits of learning a second language. Businesses often seek bilingual employees, pay them higher salaries, and prefer them for upper level positions. Bilingualism also facilitates cross-cultural business relationships, giving global appeal to bilingual individuals. Finally, bilingualism fosters better decision-making, encourages positive risk-taking, improves memory, and lengthens attention span (Alicia 2017; HR Digest 2016). I want more native English speakers to enjoy these benefits. That’s why if I could start an online business, I would develop a language learning social app for people aged 10-25—whose brains are still developing and who presumably will enter the workforce in ten years. For now, I’ll call the app, “lang.ly”. Why would I market lang.ly to people aged 10-25? At fifteen, I taught myself as many languages as I could. I kept notebooks for thirteen languages, studying with books and online lessons. In school, I breezed through advanced Spanish classes; I finished workbooks over the summer and worked ahead all year. My peers hardly bothered with languages outside of school. However, I encountered problems: I couldn’t afford most quality language programs and I hardly benefitted from content for young children, which dominated the internet. I found assorted material with no central location; I searched everywhere to compile an age-appropriate curriculum. Though language learning is a social task, most sites had no live conversational component. Other sites provided non-age-specific interaction, which left me conversing with mature adults—never my peers. If my experience is any indication, specific obstacles hinder youth from second language acquisition: expensive programs, irrelevant and dispersed content, foreign language classes that fail to foster fluency, lack of peer conversational tools, and peers’ lack of interest in learning a foreign language. My solution: lang.ly, for preteens (10-12), teens (13-17), and young adults (18-25). Lang.ly will consolidate diverse content and encourage picture- and context-based learning—the same way people learn their first language. The conversational component will match users by age, language, and skill level. Lang.ly will provide games and challenges, user profiles, and the ability to post with hashtags—all familiar staples of social apps. Naturally, lang.ly would make learning languages trendy and more efficient, allowing young native English speakers to freely take advantage of the benefits of bilingualism even before entering the workforce, without encountering the roadblocks that I did. I would market lang.ly on the youth-dominated app, Snapchat. The advertisement would feature young people switching filters and languages simultaneously, reinforcing the idea that changing languages is as easy as changing filters with lang.ly. I would also run this advertisement on other youth-dominated apps, such as Instagram and TikTok. For native English speakers from elementary to post-secondary, lang.ly is the new frontier. Alicia. “6 Benefits of Learning a Foreign Language for Career Growth.” Bilingua, 14 Nov. 2017, bilingua.io/benefits-learning-a-foreign-language-career. “Career Benefits Of Learning A Foreign Language.” The HR Digest, 27 June 2016, www.thehrdigest.com/benefits-of-learning-a-foreign-language/. Devlin, Kat. “Learning a Foreign Language a 'Must' in Europe, Not so in America.” Pew Research Center, Pew Research Center, 13 July 2015, www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/07/13/learning-a-foreign-language-a-must-in-europe-not-so-in-america/.