Growing up, I struggled with homelessness and foster care. It pushed me to strive for financial independence to avoid experiencing that again. Because of my housing instability, I saw how structural barriers impacted my community. I noticed patterns in low-income housing, unsafe infrastructure that failed to represent them. These experiences showed me that my struggles stemmed from systemic issues and didn’t exist in isolation. Presently, I am low-income, trying to support my family. This scholarship would impact me by helping me pay rent, allowing me to save, and pay off my student loans. Currently, I’m pursuing a degree in Civil Engineering at City College of New York. I’m driven by the desire to give back to the community that helped me. During my family’s displacement, several kindhearted strangers helped us along the way. One in particular, I met when I was 12. She was a young pregnant woman who noticed that I was separated from my family and offered me her last Lunchable. She deeply impacted me because I felt overlooked as I slipped through the cracks. She highlighted that no matter how bad things get, I always had community support. I strive to be like her by being supportive of my community through design engineering. My goal is to develop smart home technology that centers on traditionally overlooked communities. When I was 13, fresh from displacement, I used masking as a coping mechanism to avoid a reality thriving with bullying. I refused to accept my lesbianism and referred to myself as straight. This stemmed from a skewed worldview of lesbianism that didn’t align with reality. My only exposure to lesbianism was through the media that largely sexualized them, rarely portraying genuine coming-of-age stories. Believing their depiction reflected reality, I thought authentic relationships weren’t possible because they were always framed through sexualization. I envisioned myself with a woman, but feared the male gaze, so I succumbed to suppression. My lesbian awakening was that summer, when I watched a game playthrough of Life Is Strange. The game followed a teenage girl exploring her time-traveling powers and bonding with her best friend. This was influential because I got to see a youth coming-of-age story devoid of objectification, and I thought that I, too, could experience that. For the first time, I saw that genuine teenage love was possible outside of others’ sexualized perceptions. It was that moment I finally accepted myself. When I came out to my friends, the first thing I heard was a crude sexual joke that outlined the environment that I was navigating. Riddled with stereotypes, I felt unseen and humiliated because the experience reinforced that my identity was something to be mocked. I also struggled because my peers often romanticized my friendships with girls. Their assumptions about my friendships distorted authentic relationships. Closeness became uncomfortable because it was sexualized. Over time, these experiences reinforced my commitment to advocacy. To me, advocacy is a duty to give back to the community that raised me. To reclaim my dignity, I learned how to establish boundaries and affirm my right to genuine friendships, how to challenge stereotypes, and how to create a welcoming environment for LGBTQ youth. One way I do this is by advocating on panels for cross-cultural experiences to eliminate bias in the workplace. Additionally, I take the initiative to speak for queer representation in school clubs so that youth will understand that their lived experiences are worth hearing. Growing up unseen, both as a low-income youth and as a lesbian, has made me committed to creating a space that allows people to feel supported, dignified, and represented.

I write because I cannot speak. I open my mouth and all the words in the universe pour out before I can utter a concise sentence. My ADHD turns racing thoughts into rambling, making articulation a struggle. But my rambling ceases when I pour all the words from my head onto a page. When writing, the storm in my head slows down into a concise message. Journaling and reading help me articulate by teaching me precise language that can organize my scattered thoughts. This struggle became unavoidable during a presentation in high school. My favorite part of high school was working on projects because that’s where my voice could shine. In my junior year of AP English I was proud to present an immigration research project that I had spent hours studying. But when I began, my head swam trying to grasp when to start. As my body froze, I panicked, quickly getting overwhelmed as the words caught in my throat. I stumbled over my speech, and this dysregulation triggered a cataplexic attack rendering me paralyzed on the floor. I was ashamed I couldn’t regulate myself in front of my classmates. More than anything, I was frustrated and humiliated that I struggled with public speaking at my age. I used to be embarrassed to speak or read out loud because I kept going in circles. Over the past three years I’ve learned that it’s okay to make mistakes. I'm working on taking longer pauses before I speak to work out a concise sentence rather than chewing on my words. And I journal every once in a while to accurately articulate my current thoughts of my life. During my reconciliation I recognized that communication isn’t measured by speed or fluency, but by connection. I now volunteer when public speaking opportunities arise. Though I still struggle, I no longer see it as a personal failure, but as a part of my growth. So for now, I am a writer. I picked up journaling to practice concise storytelling. I was drawn to this because I wanted a proactive approach to improve my public speaking after my incident. This hobby opened a whole new world for me. It sparked an interest in advocacy, because I realized I had a genuine voice worth hearing. That summer I joined a youth advocacy program, Freedom and Citizenship, where our call to action was to increase youth employment programs in NYC. Because I found my voice I was able to pursue individual advocacy through student advocacy panels. Writing taught me that I didn’t have to speak perfectly, but that I could communicate in a way that was authentically me.