I grew up with my mother as my constant. My parents were not together, and my father spent years in jail, so the steady, everyday work of raising me fell to her. Growing up that way teaches you things early. You learn what it looks like when one person carries the weight of two, and you learn not to mistake that strength for ease. So much of who I am was shaped by watching her. I learned resilience not from a lesson but from seeing it modeled, in the way she kept going on days that had every reason to stop her. I learned that love often looks like showing up quietly and consistently rather than saying the perfect thing. And I learned responsibility young, because in a household held together by one person, you become aware that your choices matter and that you are part of keeping things steady, not just a passenger in them. That upbringing also gave me my sense of empathy. When you grow up watching someone hold a lot with very little fanfare, you start noticing that kind of quiet effort everywhere, in classmates, in neighbors, in strangers. It made me pay attention to the people others overlook, and that attention now drives almost everything I do, from mentoring first-generation students to the community work I take on at school. I serve the way I do because I know what it means to need someone in your corner and how much of a difference one steady person can make. Growing up with a single mother did not feel simple while I was in it. There were hard stretches, and there were absences I felt deeply. But looking back, I can see that it built the parts of me I am most proud of. It made me self-reliant without making me cold. It taught me to find strength in myself and to extend grace to others, because I understand that most people are carrying more than they show. I am the first in my family to take this path through higher education, and I carry my mother's example with me throughout it. Every time I push through a hard semester or take on more than is comfortable, I am drawing on something she taught me without ever sitting me down to teach it. The person I am becoming, driven, steady, and committed to lifting others, is shaped directly by the woman who raised me on her own. I am building the future I want as a way to honor the strength she first showed me.

I am Amesa Boaz, a rising senior at the University of Pittsburgh studying Media and Professional Communications and Law, Criminal Justice, and Society. I am also a first-generation college student, which means that a lot of what other students inherited as common knowledge, I had to figure out as I went. I learned how to read a financial aid award, how to ask professors for help, and how to believe I belonged in rooms no one in my family had been in before. That is exactly why motivating other first-generation students is not a side project for me. It is personal. I know how heavy the quiet doubts can be. First-generation students often carry a fear that we are not supposed to be here, that one mistake will prove we do not belong. I have felt that, and I have watched friends feel it too. What changed things for me was having people who treated my potential as obvious and my questions as normal. I want to be that person for as many students as I can. I already do this work. As a Provost Academy leader, I mentor incoming first-generation and low-income freshmen through their first year, helping with everything from academic habits to the unspoken rules of campus life. I do not just tell them they can succeed. I show them the specific steps because confidence grows fastest when vague encouragement is replaced with a clear path. I have also led community-building projects designed to make students feel like they are part of something, since isolation is one of the biggest reasons first-generation students give up. Going forward, I plan to keep building structures, not just give speeches. I want to create content and resources that demystify college for students who do not have anyone at home to ask, the kind of plain, honest guidance I wish I had earlier. With my background in media, I can reach far more students than I could one-on-one, turning what I learned the hard way into something the next student can simply look up. I also want to keep mentoring face-to-face because some encouragement only lands when it comes from someone who has actually walked the path. The most powerful thing I can tell another first-generation student is that they are not behind; they are just first. First in their family, first to figure it out, and first to open a door that will stay open for everyone who comes after them. I plan to spend my education and my career proving that to as many of them as possible, and making the road a little clearer each time.

My most useful talent is not loud. It is listening. Long before I could name it as a skill, I was the person who paid attention to the stories other people skipped past, and almost everything I do well now grows out of that. I tell stories, I build platforms, and I bring people into conversation, and all of it depends on first understanding someone well enough to represent them fairly. That is the talent I want to use to build a more empathetic world. I work in media and communication, so my main tools are storytelling and design. As Blackline Chair for the Black Action Society, I rebuilt our magazine and launched a podcast, The Sixth Floor, specifically to hold space for voices that rarely get a platform. What I learned is that empathy is not automatic. People extend it when they can see a full, human version of someone different from them, and that is exactly what good storytelling makes possible. A well-told story turns a stranger into a person you cannot dismiss. I want to keep making those stories for and about communities the wider world tends to flatten or ignore. My second skill is cultural competency, which I have built by working across very different groups. I have mentored first-generation freshmen, registered voters across a city, coordinated programs for my sorority and the National Pan-Hellenic Council, and served patients at a campus health hub. Each of those rooms asked me to communicate with people whose backgrounds were nothing like mine, and to do it with respect. That practice is how empathy becomes global rather than local. The habits are the same whether you are bridging two students or two cultures: you listen first, you assume dignity, and you make sure no one in the room is invisible. I plan to scale this through a career in interactive media and communication. I want to design experiences and tell stories that travel, that let someone in one place understand the life of someone far away, and that make difference feel like something to be curious about rather than afraid of. Technology now lets a story reach across the world in a day. I want to make sure the stories that travel are honest, human, and chosen by the people they belong to. A more understanding global community will not come from people being told to care. It will come from being given real reasons to, one story and one human connection at a time. My talents are built for exactly that work, and I intend to spend them on it.

I am studying Media and Professional Communications and Law, Criminal Justice, and Society at the University of Pittsburgh, and I chose that pairing on purpose. I want to use the first to give my community a voice and the second to understand the systems that too often speak over us. My plan for giving back is not abstract. It is built around the people I already serve. The community I am most committed to is the Black community in Pittsburgh, the one I have come to know through my research and my work on campus. When I studied the history of Black neighborhoods here and the effects of gentrification, I saw how easily a community can be reshaped and displaced when no one is telling its story or fighting for its place. That is the gap I want to fill. With my communications degree, I plan to build platforms that let people document their own histories and speak for their own neighborhoods, the way I rebuilt the Black Action Society's Blackline magazine and launched a podcast to keep Black student voices on the record. With my background in Law, Criminal Justice, and Society, I want to pair those stories with a real understanding of policy and process, so the advocacy I help create is not just loud but informed. I have already practiced this through Project 26, where I registered and engaged young voters, and through my mentorship of first-generation students learning to navigate institutions that were not built with them in mind. My degree gives me the tools to do that on a larger scale: to translate complicated systems into language people can actually use, and to put information and access where it has been missing. Concretely, I see myself working at the intersection of media and community advocacy, creating content, campaigns, and programs that inform my community about its rights, its history, and its options. Whether that looks like producing local stories, supporting civic education, or helping community organizations communicate clearly, the throughline is the same. I want my neighbors to be the authors of how they are seen and the decision-makers in what happens to them. Helping others has never felt separate from my education. It is the reason I chose these majors and the reason I stay involved even when my schedule is full. A degree, to me, is not just proof that I learned something. It is a set of tools I am responsible for using well, and I plan to spend mine making sure the people in my community are informed, represented, and impossible to overlook.

"Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil. But I who have seen the nature of the good that it is beautiful, and of the bad that it is ugly, and the nature of him who does wrong, that it is akin to me, not only of the same blood or seed, but that it participates in the same intelligence and the same portion of the divinity, I can neither be injured by any of them, for no one can fix on me what is ugly, nor can I be angry with my kinsman, nor hate him. For we are made for co-operation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth. To act against one another then is contrary to nature; and it is acting against one another to be vexed and to turn away." Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 2.1, translated by George Long Marcus Aurelius opens the second book of his Meditations with what looks like a strategy for tolerating difficult people, but the passage's real argument is far more demanding: he claims that no one can actually injure us, because the only harm that counts is the harm we do to our own character when we let another person's faults provoke us, and he secures that claim by redefining every human being, including the one who wrongs us, as part of a single cooperative body. The argument begins with a discipline, not a complaint. The instruction to "begin the morning by saying to thyself" frames the whole meditation as a rehearsed script, something practiced before the day arrives. He then lists the people he expects to meet: the busybody, the ungrateful, the arrogant, the deceitful, the envious, the unsocial. These are not villains or criminals. They are the ordinary frictions of any day. By naming them in advance, Marcus drains them of their power to surprise him, and surprise is exactly what makes irritation possible. His first move, then, is to locate emotional disturbance in expectation rather than in the event itself. The person who has already pictured the rude colleague cannot be ambushed by him. The next sentence supplies the reasoning that makes this possible. "All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil." This is the hinge of the entire passage. Marcus relocates the source of human wrongdoing from malice to ignorance. If people behave badly because they do not truly know what is good, then the wrongdoer is mistaken rather than evil, and a mistake calls for correction or pity, not rage. Anger needs a guilty enemy to aim at. Once the enemy is reclassified as someone who simply does not know better, the target of anger disappears. Marcus then contrasts that ignorance with his own knowledge: "I who have seen the nature of the good that it is beautiful, and of the bad that it is ugly." His immunity is built on understanding, and the language he chooses is deliberately aesthetic. Goodness is beautiful, and badness is ugly. This choice of words is not decoration. It sets up the claim that follows, where ugliness becomes the measure of real injury. He extends that knowledge into a statement about kinship. The wrongdoer, he says, is "akin to me, not only of the same blood or seed, but that it participates in the same intelligence and the same portion of the divinity." Here Marcus pushes past biology. The bond he describes is not family in the ordinary sense but a shared rational nature, the same reason and the same spark of the divine present in every person. The one who wrongs him is not a stranger or an opponent. He is kin at the deepest possible level. The consequence is severe: to hate that person is to hate a part of what Marcus himself is made of. From this, he draws two conclusions in a single breath. "I can neither be injured by any of them, for no one can fix on me what is ugly, nor can I be angry with my kinsman, nor hate him." The first conclusion depends on the earlier aesthetic language. If badness is ugliness, and no other person can "fix on me what is ugly," then no one else can make me bad. Only my own conduct can do that. Injury is quietly redefined. Another person's wrong cannot reach my character unless I let it, and the way I would let it is precisely by answering with anger, which would be my own ugliness, freely chosen. The second conclusion follows from kinship: to rage against someone who shares my reason is to make war on myself. The images that come next carry the argument to its most subtle point. "We are made for co-operation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth." The comparisons escalate. Feet and hands cooperate in the obvious way, as paired limbs. Eyelids cooperate more closely, two parts closing together over a single eye. Then comes the sharpest image: the upper and lower rows of teeth. Teeth work by meeting from opposite directions. Their opposition is the function. With this single example, Marcus answers an objection his reader might raise, that cooperation means the absence of conflict. It does not. The teeth are designed to come together, and that meeting is cooperation, not war. Even confrontation can serve the whole. The closing sentence names the actual offense. "To act against one another then is contrary to nature; and it is acting against one another to be vexed and to turn away." The violation he warns against is not violence or cruelty. It is being vexed, which is to say merely annoyed, and turning away, which is to say withdrawing. These small, internal acts are what break our shared nature. This loops directly back to the opening. The busybody and the ungrateful do not threaten Marcus with their actions. They threaten him only by tempting him to be vexed and to turn away, and that response, not their behavior, would be his real fall. Read closely, the passage is a closed circuit. It opens by anticipating offense and ends by identifying the true offense as the reader's own resentment. Marcus's underlying meaning is that the moral life is not the management of other people, but the refusal to let their faults become ours, and the foundation of that refusal is the recognition that we are one rational body, so that to turn against another is always, in the end, to turn against oneself.

For a long time, my relationship with the justice system was personal before it was ever academic. I grew up without my father. My parents were not together, and he spent years in jail, so the early version of him I knew existed mostly through phone calls. I learned to brace myself every time the phone rang, because it so often felt like the next call would bring bad news. When I finally got to see him again after so long apart, it was not the simple reunion people imagine. It was complicated and heavy, and it left me with a hard, conflicted relationship with the law. That experience shaped me in ways I did not understand until later. Growing up, incarceration was not a headline or a statistic to me. It was my family, and the quiet space where a father was supposed to be. I learned early that the justice system not only affects the person inside. It reaches the children waiting on a call, the parent holding the household together, and the families who carry the weight in silence. What I took from all of it is that my circumstances do not get to define my future. The same situation that once filled me with fear is now the reason I study Law, Criminal Justice, and Society at the University of Pittsburgh. I wanted to understand the system that shaped so much of my childhood, not from the outside looking in, but closely enough to question it and help change it. Pairing that with my Media and Professional Communications major, I have learned how powerful it is to tell these stories honestly, because families like mine are too often talked about and rarely listened to. My career goal grows directly out of that. I want to use both storytelling and the law to advocate for people impacted by incarceration and to make the system more humane for the families left behind. Through my campus leadership and community work, I already try to be the kind of support I once needed. Incarceration was part of my story, but it is not the whole of it. It taught me empathy, resilience, and purpose, and it pointed me toward the exact work I want to do for the rest of my life.

My name is Amesa Boaz, and I am a rising senior at the University of Pittsburgh studying Media and Professional Communications and Law, Criminal Justice, and Society. At the center of everything I do is a simple belief: people deserve to be seen, heard, and given a real chance. That belief is why I chose to pair storytelling with the study of justice, and it is the thread that connects every cause I give my time to. I plan to make my impact through media and communication. I have learned that the way a community is talked about shapes how it is treated, so I want to use storytelling to put power back into the hands of the people whose stories are too often told for them. As Blackline Chair for Pitt's Black Action Society, I rebuilt our magazine and website from the ground up and launched The Sixth Floor, a podcast created to amplify Black student voices. Pairing that work with my Law, Criminal Justice, and Society major lets me understand not just how to tell a story, but how systems shape the lives behind it. The causes I support most deeply are rooted in my own community. Through the Black Action Society, I lead community service, academic support, and advocacy efforts, and I represent student interests directly to university administration. As a Provost Academy leader, I mentor first-generation and low-income freshmen through their first year, because I know how much a single person believing in you can change your path. Through Project 26, I helped register and engage thousands of young voters, and my research on the history of Black neighborhoods in Pittsburgh and the effects of gentrification taught me that protecting a community means understanding what it has already lost. These causes matter to me because they are personal. They are about dignity, access, and making sure the next student does not have to fight as hard to belong. Addie James Hamerter's story speaks to me because she understood that quiet, intentional work changes the world just as much as the loud moments do. So much of service happens in rooms no one sees, in the listening, the planning, and the showing up again and again. That is the kind of impact I want to leave. I want to keep building platforms that let people speak for themselves, and keep using both media and the law to push for a more just and accessible world. Receiving this scholarship would help me finish my degree without choosing between my education and the community that shaped me. More than that, it would be a reminder that the path Mrs. Hamerter walked is one I get to keep walking too, in my own way and with my own voice.

Growing up, I’ve always known what it feels like to work hard for what you want. We never had plenty of funds when we were growing up, yet we were always creative, resourceful, and determined to get by despite those difficulties. I've had the advantage of learning from my family's struggles with finances, career changes, and personal disappointments, and this shapes the way in which I work towards what I want now. I am double majoring in Media & Professional Communications and Law, Criminal Justice, and Society at Pitt, and earning a certificate in Corporate Relations. It might look chaotic in print, perhaps, but to me, it is an indication of two of those passions of mine: creativity and advocacy. My parents never attended a four-year institution, so learning about higher education has been an exercise for our whole family. From figuring out FAFSA forms to juggling part-time jobs and internships, I’ve had to learn quite a bit of this process independently. Both of us feel a sort of pressure in being the first in our families to actually enter into environments such as those – an intersection of pride, duty, and constant adaptation. Financially, college has certainly not been easy. I have always juggled multiple internships – sometimes unpaid – alongside classes in an effort to gain hands-on experience in my chosen career. Volunteer when available, take every networking encounter seriously, and have taught myself graphic design, writing, and coding in an effort to become more attractive in competitive job environments. Most importantly, rather than earning A’s, I’m working towards creating a future in which I’m independently financially stable and can give back to family as they’ve always envisioned. My ambition extends beyond earning a degree. I am interested in working as a public relations specialist or in the communications industry, using creative strategy to assist brands, non-profit organizations, or social movements in communicating their message in an engaging, impactful way. I believe the power of the media can be used for good, to bring social justice causes to light, mobilize community engagement, or disperse aid to those who need it the most. Now, still, I continue to work toward that future. Late nights revising and editing, early mornings in lectures, weekends spent volunteering or working. It isn't always easy; some days, impostor syndrome hits us hard, or burnout creeps in. But every time I look back at what we've accomplished, I remind myself that tough times make us stronger. Perseverance is in our blood. These scholarships are not merely aid. They're an investment in us, in individuals like myself who labor at the ground level, not solely for our own benefit, but for our families and communities as well. I'm not merely seeking a degree. I'm seeking stability, creative expression, and the capacity to do good work using abilities that have taken so much tireless effort to acquire. With each barrier in front of me, I'm reminded of my "why", and this is what pushes me forward.

My mother, a single parent, was my guide in my world. The absence of a father figure throughout my upbringing denied me the insight of a father's perspective, leaving me empty from moments like cherished father-daughter moments and advice. Yet, it was my mother who took on both roles to nurture me into who I am today. Growing up without a father figure meant that I didn't have the privilege of learning firsthand the ways a man should treat me, nor did I have the chance to experience things like daddy-daughter dances. My mother, however, proved to be more than capable of taking on these roles. She was not only my mother but also my mentor, demonstrating through her actions how I deserved to be treated with respect and kindness. The lack of a paternal presence in my life didn't stop me from understanding my worth; instead, it was an ode to the strength and determination of my mother. My mother demonstrated the beauty and power of being a woman in this world. She encouraged me with the reminder that my gender was not a limitation but a source of strength. She empowered me to embrace my identity and stand tall. My mother's ability to guide me as both a mother and a father was beautiful. Even when we had our spats, when the day ended it was us against the world. What makes my mother truly special is the path she made for herself against everything thrown at her. Raised without her own father or mother figure as young as 13, she built her own path to become the extraordinary woman and mother she is today. She broke years of generational constraints! Her determination and courage became my inspiration, showing me how to overcome obstacles and to believe in myself! My mother's strength and commitment to me created a bond that I will hold dear forever. We were both wronged by men during our younger years. Which in a way made us weary of men. Yet, in spite of the challenges we faced, it just made us even stronger and closer. In conclusion, my mother is not just a single parent; she is a force to be reckoned with. She is my mom, my dad, and a boss of a woman. Through her, I learned the importance of self-worth, resilience, and breaking free from the constraints of societal expectations. My mother's journey from hardships is the reason I am the way I am today and I would not trade that for anything in this world. Not the most money, not the fanciest car. My mom is my father. She is my force.