The biggest lesson that coming from a low income household has taught me is advocating for myself. If I want to help my family I have to be the one to take the effort of reaching out or doing the research. Both of my parents are immigrants who don’t have the connections or the greatest understanding of English often making the unaware of the opportunities provided to low income families like mine. Ever since I’ve fully understood my parents’ financial situation. I would constantly search for ways that I can help them so that their lives of raising me and my sister to lead a better life would be a little easier for them. Just taking that first step to ask around adults in school, or really taking a look at the community board in my library has allowed my family to get access to incredible programs like a food pantry or a clothing donation stop has saved my family in desperate times. It’s the reason why I even volunteer at my local food pantry today because I’m going through the same things all these other people are going through and they deserve the right to know every single resource they can reach out to. Knowing how useful these programs have been for my family I want to help advocate for these free services to gain more funding, encourage more people to legitimately make a difference in their community, and most of all help educate everyone on the access of these opportunities. Learning about these programs should be extremely easy and well known to everyone even if a person doesn’t know good English or doesn’t have a safe space to go around and reach out.

This award would help me get the most important item for college: A laptop. 500 dollars is more than enough for me to get a functioning laptop for me to use for necessary school work for college. Whether it be typing up future lab reports of which I’m currently using my school provided iPad for my AP physics C&M class or to use as a place to organize files and use software like inventor or vex programming for possible future engineering classes. My family has an extremely low income with even our FAFSA SAI being -1500. Thus, my family could never realistically have a good chance to purchase a laptop. As a child to even now my family’s main way of dealing with a lack of a laptop was going to the local library to print or fill out necessary forms. My family has always supported my dreams for what I want to do even if me going to college severely disrupts their finances. My goal to help remove as much stress as I possibly can for them so gaining a chance to cross off a laptop from my list of necessary items for college will take off another factor my family has to worry about so we can focus more on the other costs of college like tuition and books.

My engineering major is mechanical engineering. While my dream engineering major is nuclear engineering. The university I’m going to does not provide nuclear engineering as a undergraduate program so my best path is to first do mechanical engineering then specialize into nuclear engineering by getting a masters or maybe even a PhD once I get my B.S. in mechanical. Mechanical engineering not only gives me a baseline for engineering as it is one of the most common engineering degrees which will help me discover if engineering is even the field for me but also thankfully gives me a streamlined path to the true engineering major I wish to do. However, why is it that nuclear engineering is my dream major? I wish to pursue nuclear engineering because nuclear energy has always been something I’ve been interested in as a child. The fact that while nuclear energy is simply another way to boil water and create steam to make energy. The process nuclear reactors do it and the method of splitting atoms. The very particles that make up everything we know are being destroyed into massive amounts of energy just to steam water and yet it’s so incredibly efficient and powerful. In my future, I want to be at the forefront of this. To be working in nuclear reactors and witnessing these incredible acts of science made from the labor from decades of research. I want to advocate for the investment of nuclear reactors and to help remove the taboo that was placed on it due to the mistakes and failures of the past. Nuclear energy has progressed so much in our current age and thousands of some of the smartest nuclear engineers and scientists have already developed ways and currently creating better ways to make nuclear reactors more efficient but most importantly more safe. Being given this chance in this life to go to college is such a incredible blessing thus I wish to use it to its fullest to learn about a field that could genuinely help so many more in the future from cleaner energy to cheaper bills for the general population.