My Inspirational Journey of Mild Enthusiasm: The Generic Essay Though I know my life has been completely normal and I haven't had to ever think critically or go through anything worse than rain at a birthday party, I still think that I am better than everyone else and that I am very unique and spewshal. 🤓 I am white, middle-class, and I call my parents by their first names. I was born in [insert small town here] USA, full of hard-working, friendly people exactly like me. My parents taught me that I am better than everyone else and to have unshakeable self-confidence. My parents are my besties! However, one time, they abused me and hit my fist with a rubber ruler after I called Chelsy (my mom) a bitch and set fire to the garage. I will never recover from the trwauma of my parents' harsh discipline, and I too am a victim of domestic violence. I once scored slightly higher than the rest of my third-grade class on a math exam, it was from that moment that I knew I was destined for grweatness. 🤓 I love Chelsy, my mommy. She is the best mommy in the world. My mommy, Chelsy has helped me discover my true passion in life, helping people. Chelsy helped me discover my true passion in life when she encouraged me to help the neighbor's dog cross the street without getting hit by a car. It was this defining moment that taught me that leadership is about taking bold action. My teachers have described me as "nice," "punctual," and "who is that?" which I take as the highest of compliments. I am involved in many extracurricular and charitable activities. 🤓 I was the treasurer of the yearbook club, where I learned the importance of managing a budget, teamwork, and the power of friendship. We were basically the Avengers. Ha, ha. Despite my many privileges in life, such as being an only child and never having to share anything with another person and getting all the bland chicken nuggets I could ever want, I have faced serious hardship and discrimination in my life. There was one time I got a C in geometry, but I turned that major setback into a comeback by doing the homework for the next exam. I also have a serious medical condition. There was one time when I was fourteen and Chelsy took me to the doctor and they took my blood. I had never seen blood before. I had never scraped my knee or scratched a mosquito bite or had a bloody nose, ever and I fainted. The doctors call it vasovagal syncope, and I'll have it for the rest of my life. I intend to go to college and study something boring like "Hospitality," or "Accounting," or "Business Leadership," where I will continue to grow as a leader, deep thinker, and group project freeloader. My goal in life is to "make a difference" without ever specifying how or in what capacity. I am sure there is a student out there who struggles with food insecurity, has a newborn baby, or is black, but I want you to know, I deserve it more than they do because I am not a DEI person, and I have nothing else to put on my resume. Thank you for your time and consideration. Hopefully, I have included enough buzzwords that the algorithm you are using to sort through essays doesn't throw it out.

There are few questions more obnoxious to a small child than "What do you want to be when you grow up?" It is obnoxious because it is impossible to answer satisfactorily. Though I am a scientist myself, I feel I would require a scientist to study my life to determine what type of person I am and predict what type of person I will be in the future. While it is easy enough to put words on a page, researching your own life as to how your beliefs and passions formed in the womb of misfortune and struggle, to answer the adult version of the question of what I want to be when I grow up, is obnoxious indeed. Based on my meticulous research into my own personality and lack of luck in life, I have a few predictions for how my life might unfold. First, I might die in a car crash or mass shooting, or other tragedy, and meet an untimely end. This is how most people my age in America die, and it is always a possibility. Death comes like a thief in the night and doesn't discriminate between those with passion and skill and those without. My potential, like the potential of so many people, would never mature. The next possibility is that despite my relentless skills, education, and tolerance for stressful and unpleasant environments such as grad school, I could be forced to flee my home country and start from the beginning somewhere else, the same way my ancestors did when they were forced to flee their homes in Bohemia. Like many people, I have same sex attraction, a condition I'm not sure how I obtained, but for reasons beyond my comprehension, many governments (including the present one in America) strongly dislike. It is unfortunate to have to leave one's place of birth forever, but believing it could never happen is like believing the Titanic will never sink. Alternatively, I could finish my master's program and be presented with several options that are hopefully more pleasant. I would like to get my doctorate and spend several more years in a cramped, somewhat dusty closet I am using for an office, where I am currently typing this essay. I have an idea to use a particular chemical found only in cranberries to make a solution that would rid meat and poultry products of both pathogens and food spoilage organisms. Potentially, it could be used to sanitize surgical equipment and other tools we don't want contaminated. I am interested in entrepreneurship, and I would like to make a biotech company that sells inventions made by me and my colleagues. I've thought of other career paths, such as going into the legal profession and using my background in biotech to help people protect their inventions from the prying hands of greedy organizations. As I am sure you can guess by the cadence of this essay, I have a knack for writing and persuasion as well, and while it might sound strange, legal professionals with a biotech background are actually very competitive and adequately compensated. These are the things I want to do when I grow up, which sounds silly because I am already an adult, which often leads me to wonder if success will ever come at all. But if the whole world hated me, but my own conscience absolved me from worthlessness, I would not be without friends.

If I could do anything with my life, right now I would really like to make a start-up company with my graduate project as my first product. For my graduate project, I am working on a device that standardizes meat grading. Meat gets sold for various prices depending on the quality, but there isn't a standardized way to grade meat; most of it is subjectively done by USDA meat graders. My device standardizes the process, and I would really like to make a startup company with similar products for the food industry if I had the funds and the support from my university. However, with the economy not doing very well at the moment and universities getting defunded, that dream of mine feels very out of reach at the moment. As everyone knows, graduate students don't get paid a livable wage. Broke people don't start companies; people who can afford to go bankrupt and pay loan interest start companies. It's not feasible right now, maybe in the future, when I am in a better financial position, it would be more practical. To me, stating motivation sounds really cringey. "I wanna make the world a better place!" But it sounds especially cringey to me now as an adult who doesn't make enough to live off of. How am I going to make the world a better place? I don't even have enough money feed myself, how am I going to make the world a better place? I donated my hair to women with cancer the other day and realized that hair and plasma donation are the only charities I can afford to donate to. I would love nothing more than to engineer practical things that help people struggle a little less, and I would love to have the option and the bandwidth to donate to people who need money and resources when I have those things to give. My dream for my company is to help reduce food insecurity with items that can standardize grading cameras or test for food pathogens so people don't get Listeria or botulism and die. I am an extremely practical person, which is why talking about how I want to make the world a better place is uncomfortable to me, because there is really only so much that one broke grad student can do. There is a bit of an expectation with this type of essay to be ambitious and want to change the world, but I'm too practical to say something cheesy like that. I read somewhere that most Harvard applicants in their admission essays write about how they want to be doctors or engineers or lawyers, basically their own version of the 'make the world a better place' essay. However, most Harvard graduates go into finance. At some point, all of those motivated and industrious kids said to themselves, "Forget the world, I want to make money for myself." I think there is a dissolutionment that happens in college where people start thinking less about the world and more about themselves. The world looks very hopeless at times, and one person wonders if it is even possible to make the impact in the way that they wanted to. But that's the problem. People think that if you can't donate thousands to charity, then you might as well not donate at all. People think that if they can't be a doctor, then they can't help sick people at all. I had a friend who didn't get a 3.75 GPA in college and dropped out senior year because it wasn't high enough to apply to vet school. A problem that I see with our culture is that everyone thinks they don't have the means to be more decent people. Undergrads think they aren't smart enough to be a heart doctor, might as well work for a heartless company, but we all have a little that we can give. For broke grad students, it might not be money, it might be hair and plasma, but we all really do have something to give. That's what I try to tell people. People try too hard to change the world; they don't realize they could change their neighborhood, or their town, or a specific part of their field or industry. Realizing that you're just one broke person with limited time and energy and that you can't change the world like you wanted to is part of maturing into an adult, but people shouldn't become hopeless adults and think that they're powerless to do good. There are way too many people who are thinking like that right now. That was really challenging for me for a while as a student who struggled with poverty and food insecurity. It is easy to get selfish when you only have the money and resources to take care of yourself. There is so much anxiety and fear in feeling like you can't help other people and that all you can do is do the best you can for yourself. It's a stressful way to live. I don't know if I have the whole solution to that, but I do know that giving to other people and working for something bigger than myself makes it easier. I'm not a religious person, but there's this story from the Bible that I really like. It's about an old woman who goes to the temple and all she has is two coins, that's the only money she has in the world, and she gives it away. Jesus says that she gave more than any of the rich dudes who really thought they were something because she gave all she had.

They say that life will repeat the same lesson until you're ready to listen to it. Some cultures and religions call it karma, fate, or the divine hand of God. For those of us who know we have a mental illness, we've at least learned to recognize this truth. There are many, many people who never even get to the recognition stage. They are like an ouroboros eating their own tail, a reincarnated soul that gets born and suffers the same pain again and again. There are also a lot of people who only get so far as the recognition stage, they are like an ouroboros eating their own tail, a reincarnated soul that gets born and suffers the same pain again and again. All of the major religions in some way tell us that the unpleasant things in life are there to teach us. Perhaps they only say that so that people can find meaning in their suffering, a child's safety blanket to our fears of meaningless existence... but perhaps it is true. Perhaps mental illness is an inability to believe this, we are apostates to the hope of finding meaning in our suffering. But there is always redemption for apostates, that's just how the story goes. I'll have to tell my story in true Midwestern fashion, every Midwest story starts with the main character seeing an animal or wildlife, and that sets the tone for the rest of the story. It is like an omen but more folksy. I saw a doe, a deer, a female deer drinking out of the pothole in my apartment parking lot when I got up early to go to work. This morning I was going to go to the packing plant in Omaha, sometimes they make us go on trips like this. However, my thoughts were completely consumed with what I had said in an email to my karate Sensei the day before. She had snubbed me for some time, in fact, I felt like I was dead to her or like she died, and her last words to me three months ago were "Where is your uniform?" I was thinking obsessively about those words while I was riding to work. The email I sent to her was about me wanting to connect with her more, that was what it was about but that's not what I said. What I said was some crap about how the studio wasn't a community and how I thought she didn't really like interacting with her students very much. I spent the rest of the day in a haze, thinking too much. I was unable to let go of my anxiety and she never messaged me back even though I waited for months for a reply. Months later she sent me a short email, only a sentence long saying that she thought I would be happier with another instructor. I think in that moment life was trying to teach me something about my anxiety. Even though it is rude to not respond to people, I was too attached to what she had to say, and what her response would be. I was angry at first but maybe she was right that I would be happier with someone else. Life was teaching me about relationships, to stop drinking out of a pothole. Just because it has water in it doesn't mean you should drink out of it. They say that life will repeat the same lesson until you're ready to listen to it. Some cultures and religions call it karma, fate, or the divine hand of God...

I once had a girl praise me for being "so diverse," there were little stars in her eyes like a girl crushing on a celebrity. "Yes...lucky me!" I said somewhat sarcastically. The people who make heroes out of disabled or fiercely queer individuals would be underwhelmed by my mundane and inconvenient life. I had to walk several miles to the nearest bike shope the other day because a thorn had punctured my tire and I can't drive due to an epilepsy condition. I wonder if they would admire me now, pushing what I am now realizing is an excessively heavy bike in the cold. Do I look fierce in that moment? I do not often experience the exciting aspects of being a minory such as being harassed for having a girlfriend by crazy moms at the park, or being treated like a child for having a disability. Stories that would make me famous on social media in an instant. Those experiences are too exciting for me. They've happened occasionally but the most inconvenient things about life as a minority are the mundane and hilarious. I work as a graduate student for the Animal Science Department, affectionately nick named "cowboy scientists" a name that fits us remarkably well. The department, bless their heart, is composed primarily of Ag kids who all have an unmistakable "I'm more country than you" vibe. The FFA nerds and the aspiring vets all live there. With real horse crap on their boots as a mark of pride an status. I love them dearly, and I love no moment more than when I casually mention that my girlfriend is waiting for me, or that I don't have a driver's license. Ag kids are somewhat sheltered, most of them grew up in tiny Nebraska towns with one whole intersection, however they poses a practicality of mind that is so endearing to me. While city folks might have read more books and visited more gay bars as worldly tourists, they could not keep themselves alive in the real world if they tried since they don't know where water or beef comes from. They know, but they don't understand, not how ag kids do. While I have received curiosity and interested looks after mentioning my girlfriend or epilepsy condition, I've realized that most of them aren't judgmental, they're just interested and maybe a little uncomfortable because they've never meet someone like that before. They are like a heard of cattle with a new hat or a blue ball that was left in their pen. They are interested, they sniff it, they get close to it, and for no reason buck away suddenly as if they thought it had moved. People are no different. You can't drop the blue ball of "I'm gay" on them and expect them to absorb it right away, you have to allow them to get used to something new in their life. Let them sniff you and get close and buck away, trust the learning process. Most people are not homophobic, they just haven't gotten used to the idea of gay people, and the distinction is critical. I have to make sure I'm not judgmental of them either or how they were raised or judge them for not being accepting right away. I'm confident that any of my concerns of how culture might treat people like me can be soothed with proper education and allowing people time to get used to an idea.

I work in both human and animal nutrition and health care. I am getting my master's degree in Animal Science with a focus in meat and muscle biology. I study both human and animal nutrition determining what nutritional eliminates are best for humans and which are best for animals. Whenever I explain what I do and what I study, I think I sound like I don't really know what I'm talking about. People will ask me if I study food science or veterinary science or human nutrition and the answer is all of them. My lab and I are particularly interested in studying human malnutrition and how high quality meat and other foods can substantially improve people's health. Typically in malnourished countries and certain neighborhoods and cities in the US what people eat a lot of is carbohydrates and they aren't getting enough fats and protein as well as micronutrients, which are all things that meat contain. I think sometimes as Americans we consume a lot of propaganda that tells us we are the best nation on earth that we don't always realize that some of our neighborhoods and cities look exactly like those in the developing world. A lot of our people are malnourished too and they need doctors and scientists to address their problems. A colleague of mine created a start up company that made cricket protein powder and chips and other ingredients specifically to solve this problem. Crickets contain healthy fats, proteins, and very significant levels of micronutrients that could reverse the symptoms of malnutrition. I worked as a volunteer for that company for a while. Sadly, eventually the company didn't turn out and my friend went on to do other things. But the university was very supportive of her, she was a food science and entrepreneurship double major so the university understood that not every start up company makes it. It was a valuable learning opportunity for both of us though and it showed me exactly the kind of mentality we all need to solve these problems. Maybe we won't try crickets again because eating insects is taboo in America and we weren't able to make enough sails, but maybe as a culture eating weird foods is something we need to challenge. That was a valuable learning opportunity. I also volunteered at the Nebraska Supreme Court because I was thinking about going into law and international food trade. I didn't work there for very long because I started my master's degree and I got too busy for it but learning about how the law works and how our government works will be really useful to me in the future. My career choice isn't easy to understand, and trust me it's less easy to do, it's at this weird intersection of agriculture, public health, law, and trade but I think life is very connected and having someone who understands how things are all related is going to be valuable.

I work in both human and animal nutrition and health care. I am getting my master's degree in Animal Science with a focus in meat and muscle biology. I study both human and animal nutrition determining what nutritional eliminates are best for humans and which are best for animals. Whenever I explain what I do and what I study, I think I sound like I don't really know what I'm talking about. People will ask me if I study food science or veterinary science or human nutrition and the answer is all of them. My lab and I are particularly interested in studying human malnutrition and how high quality meat and other foods can substantially improve people's health. Typically in malnourished countries and certain neighborhoods and cities in the US what people eat a lot of is carbohydrates and they aren't getting enough fats and protein as well as micronutrients, which are all things that meat contain. I think sometimes as Americans we consume a lot of propaganda that tells us we are the best nation on earth that we don't always realize that some of our neighborhoods and cities look exactly like those in the developing world. A lot of our people are malnourished too and they need doctors and scientists to address their problems. A colleague of mine created a start up company that made cricket protein powder and chips and other ingredients specifically to solve this problem. Crickets contain healthy fats, proteins, and very significant levels of micronutrients that could reverse the symptoms of malnutrition. I worked as a volunteer for that company for a while. Sadly, eventually the company didn't turn out and my friend went on to do other things. But the university was very supportive of her, she was a food science and entrepreneurship double major so the university understood that not every start up company makes it. It was a valuable learning opportunity for both of us though and it showed me exactly the kind of mentality we all need to solve these problems. Maybe we won't try crickets again because eating insects is taboo in America and we weren't able to make enough sails, but maybe as a culture eating weird foods is something we need to challenge. I was also an officer in oSTEM wich is a queer people in STEM organization. That roll was challenging for me because...well it is common knowledge that the queer community can be overly politically correct at times, and they can stay in their own bubble. That's not the vision I had for this club. The vision I had since we were a Midwest school was to engage a lot of the ag clubs and the religious clubs to try to make educational moments for both sides. I wanted to build bridges and connect people who might not have any close friends or relatives from the queer community. Eventually I had to step down from that position because the other officers didn't agree with my vision. I wanted to do an event that involved egg painting for spring that was open to anyone on campus to attend, but the other officers shot it down because they saw it as a religious activity and it could be triggering. My career choice isn't exactly easy to understand, and trust me it's less easy to do, it's at this weird intersection of agriculture, public health, law, and trade but I wouldn't have it any other way. I think life is very connected and having someone who understands how things are all related is very valuable.

When I was a little girl and people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would tell them that I wanted to be a spy. I typically got a lot of cute chuckles at that and I even laughed at it myself when I was a little older, but considering my family's long history in the military and that a few of my ancestors actually were spies it wasn't as silly of an idea to work in intelligence as people made me feel. As a kid I was fascinated with the idea of pretending to be someone else. I took acting classes and I tried my hardest to learn Russian from watching the subtitles of their six hour long movies. I ended up picking up some words but I was so fascinated with the idea of what it would be like to be someone from another time, another country, another culture. What would it be like to grow up the way they did, to believe all the things they believed? I think it was my strong sense of empathy and fascination with other people as well as my tendency for method acting my favorite archetypes that landed me in the undiagnosed odd ball category of my neurologists office. I had an epilepsy condition which is why I had a neurologist in the first place, an excentric man himself who had to be at least eighty years old at the time. Thinking is a dangerous pass time, acting can turn into habits in real life and a too vivid of an imagination is a person's worst enemy. We are all our worst enemy. It seems my neurologists knew this taking one look at me. He was one of those people I felt almost naked around, as if he could hear my thoughts. We struggle our whole lives primarily against our own minds and bodies. The only thing that surpases the ocean in depth is the vastness of the human soul. I've been in existential identity crises my whole life. While I never took the idea of being a spy seriously as an adult, the fascination with the "what if" had its clutches on me. I experimented with my sexuality just to know what dating a girl would be like. I took the most difficult major at my university along with four minors because...because i wanted to know what it would be like to be an over achiever. I am not an over achiever, i was just caught up in the game of pretending to be one. My extreme curiosity is the positive side of the coin of my thoughts, the other side is anxiety. Anxiety is obsession with one's own thoughts and feelings, an inability to retreat from one's own mind and go somewhere more pleasant. Managing it is hard because I don't know how to do it. The things one doesn't know how to do tend to be quite difficult, but I think that if anxiety and curiosity are two sides of the same coin, one must be reduced to reduce the other. In other words, one must have fewer thoughts. Western religion is a system by which people anchor themselves to the bedrock of hope, Eastern religion does not attempt to way anchor, it attempts to set sail smoothly and bravely facing uncertainty. I was always into fighting and I happened to join a karate club in undergrad. While I wouldn't consider myself a Buddhist, karate do, the art of facing one's self as their greatest opponent, is my way of life.

I work in both human and animal nutrition and health care. I am getting my master's degree in Animal Science with a focus in meat and muscle biology. I study both human and animal nutrition determining what nutritional eliminates are best for humans and which are best for animals. Whenever I explain what I do and what I study, I think I sound like I don't really know what I'm talking about. People will ask me if I study food science or veterinary science or human nutrition and the answer is all of them. My lab and I are particularly interested in studying human malnutrition and how high quality meat and other foods can substantially improve people's health. Typically in malnourished countries and certain neighborhoods and cities in the US what people eat a lot of is carbohydrates and they aren't getting enough fats and protein as well as micronutrients, which are all things that meat contain. I think sometimes as Americans we consume a lot of propaganda that tells us we are the best nation on earth that we don't always realize that some of our neighborhoods and cities look exactly like those in the developing world. A lot of our people are malnourished too and they need doctors and scientists to address their problems. A colleague of mine created a start up company that made cricket protein powder and chips and other ingredients specifically to solve this problem. Crickets contain healthy fats, proteins, and very significant levels of micronutrients that could reverse the symptoms of malnutrition. I worked as a volunteer for that company for a while. Sadly, eventually the company didn't turn out and my friend went on to do other things. But the university was very supportive of her, she was a food science and entrepreneurship double major so the university understood that not every start up company makes it. It was a valuable learning opportunity for both of us though and it showed me exactly the kind of mentality we all need to solve these problems. Maybe we won't try crickets again because eating insects is taboo in America and we weren't able to make enough sails, but maybe as a culture eating weird foods is something we need to challenge. This product had a lot of potential to help people's lives but people said no because eating insects is icky. That was a valuable learning opportunity. I also volunteered at the Nebraska Supreme Court because I was thinking about going into law and international food trade. I didn't work there for very long because I started my master's degree and I got too busy for it but learning about how the law works and how our government works will be really useful to me in the future. My career choice isn't exactly easy to understand, and trust me it's less easy to do, it's at this weird intersection of agriculture, public health, law, and trade but I wouldn't have it any other way. I think life is very connected and having someone who understands how things are all related is going to be valuable.

I work in both human and animal nutrition and health care. I am getting my master's degree in Animal Science with a focus in meat and muscle biology. I study both human and animal nutrition determining what nutritional eliminates are best for humans and which are best for animals. Whenever I explain what I do and what I study, I think I sound like I don't really know what I'm talking about. People will ask me if I study food science or veterinary science or human nutrition and the answer is all of them. My lab and I are particularly interested in studying human malnutrition and how high quality meat and other foods can substantially improve people's health. Typically in malnourished countries and certain neighborhoods and cities in the US what people eat a lot of is carbohydrates and they aren't getting enough fats and protein as well as micronutrients, which are all things that meat contain. I think sometimes as Americans we consume a lot of propaganda that tells us we are the best nation on earth that we don't always realize that some of our neighborhoods and cities look exactly like those in the developing world. A lot of our people are malnourished too and they need doctors and scientists to address their problems. A colleague of mine created a start up company that made cricket protein powder and chips and other ingredients specifically to solve this problem. Crickets contain healthy fats, proteins, and very significant levels of micronutrients that could reverse the symptoms of malnutrition. I worked as a volunteer for that company for a while. Sadly, eventually the company didn't turn out and my friend went on to do other things. But the university was very supportive of her, she was a food science and entrepreneurship double major so the university understood that not every start up company makes it. It was a valuable learning opportunity for both of us though and it showed me exactly the kind of mentality we all need to solve these problems. Maybe we won't try crickets again because eating insects is taboo in America and we weren't able to make enough sails, but maybe as a culture eating weird foods is something we need to challenge. This product had a lot of potential to help people's lives but people said no because eating insects is icky. That was a valuable learning opportunity. I also volunteered at the Nebraska Supreme Court because I was thinking about going into law and international food trade. I didn't work there for very long because I started my master's degree and I got too busy for it but learning about how the law works and how our government works will be really useful to me in the future. My career choice isn't exactly easy to understand, and trust me it's less easy to do, it's at this weird intersection of agriculture, public health, law, and trade but I wouldn't have it any other way. I think life is very connected and having someone who understands how things are all related is going to be valuable.

I work in both human and animal health care. I am getting my master's degree in Animal Science with a focus in meat and muscle biology. I study both human and animal nutrition determining what nutritional eliminates are best for humans and which are best for animals. Whenever I explain what I do and what I study, I think I sound like I don't really know what I'm talking about. People will ask me if I study food science or veterinary science or human nutrition and the answer is all of them. My lab and I are particularly interested in studying human malnutrition and how high quality meat and other foods can substantially improve people's health. Typically in malnourished countries and certain neighborhoods and cities in the US what people eat a lot of is carbohydrates and they aren't getting enough fats and protein as well as micronutrients, which are all things that meat contain. I think sometimes as Americans we consume a lot of propaganda that tells us we are the best nation on earth that we don't always realize that some of our neighborhoods and cities look exactly like those in the developing world. A lot of our people are malnourished too and they need doctors and scientists to address their problems. A colleague of mine created a start up company that made cricket protein powder and chips and other ingredients specifically to solve this problem. Crickets contain healthy fats, proteins, and very significant levels of micronutrients that could reverse the symptoms of malnutrition. I worked as a volunteer for that company for a while. Sadly, eventually the company didn't turn out and my friend went on to do other things. But the university was very supportive of her, she was a food science and entrepreneurship double major so the university understood that not every start up company makes it. It was a valuable learning opportunity for both of us though and it showed me exactly the kind of mentality we all need to solve these problems. Maybe we won't try crickets again because eating insects is taboo in America and we weren't able to make enough sails, but maybe as a culture eating weird foods is something we need to challenge. This product had a lot of potential to help people's lives but people said no because eating insects is icky. That was a valuable learning opportunity. I also volunteered at the Nebraska Supreme Court because I was thinking about going into law and international food trade. I didn't work there for very long because I started my master's degree and I got too busy for it but learning about how the law works and how our government works will be really useful to me in the future. My career choice isn't exactly easy to understand, and trust me it's less easy to do, it's at this weird intersection of agriculture, public health, law, and trade but I wouldn't have it any other way. I think life is very connected and having someone who understands how things are all related is going to be valuable.

I work in both human and animal nutrition and health care. I am getting my master's degree in Animal Science with a focus in meat and muscle biology. I study both human and animal nutrition determining what nutritional eliminates are best for humans and which are best for animals. Whenever I explain what I do and what I study, I think I sound like I don't really know what I'm talking about. People will ask me if I study food science or veterinary science or human nutrition and the answer is all of them. My lab and I are particularly interested in studying human malnutrition and how high quality meat and other foods can substantially improve people's health. Typically in malnourished countries and certain neighborhoods and cities in the US what people eat a lot of is carbohydrates and they aren't getting enough fats and protein as well as micronutrients, which are all things that meat contain. I think sometimes as Americans we consume a lot of propaganda that tells us we are the best nation on earth that we don't always realize that some of our neighborhoods and cities look exactly like those in the developing world. A lot of our people are malnourished too and they need doctors and scientists to address their problems. A colleague of mine created a start up company that made cricket protein powder and chips and other ingredients specifically to solve this problem. Crickets contain healthy fats, proteins, and very significant levels of micronutrients that could reverse the symptoms of malnutrition. I worked as a volunteer for that company for a while. Sadly, eventually the company didn't turn out and my friend went on to do other things. But the university was very supportive of her, she was a food science and entrepreneurship double major so the university understood that not every start up company makes it. It was a valuable learning opportunity for both of us though and it showed me exactly the kind of mentality we all need to solve these problems. Maybe we won't try crickets again because eating insects is taboo in America and we weren't able to make enough sails, but maybe as a culture eating weird foods is something we need to challenge. This product had a lot of potential to help people's lives but people said no because eating insects is icky. I had to work throughout my entire undergraduate degree because I was very low income. Some months all I had was $300 for all of my expenses and I had to think very carefully if I could afford toothpaste, cleaning supplies, or groceries this week. Challenging is an understatement, traumatic might be a better word. Now I consider applying for scholarships to be something of a part time job. At least now I get paid a stipend for being a graduate student, it's not a lot, I still have to apply to fellowships and scholarships every week but at least I'm not as food insecure as I used to be. My career choice isn't exactly easy to understand, and trust me it's less easy to do, it's at this weird intersection of agriculture, public health, law, and trade but I wouldn't have it any other way. I think life is very connected and having someone who understands how things are all related is going to be valuable.

I work in both human and animal nutrition and health care. I am getting my master's degree in Animal Science with a focus in meat and muscle biology. I study both human and animal nutrition determining what nutritional eliminates are best for humans and which are best for animals. Whenever I explain what I do and what I study, I think I sound like I don't really know what I'm talking about. People will ask me if I study food science or veterinary science or human nutrition and the answer is all of them. My lab and I are particularly interested in studying human malnutrition and how high quality meat and other foods can substantially improve people's health. Typically in malnourished countries and certain neighborhoods and cities in the US what people eat a lot of is carbohydrates and they aren't getting enough fats and protein as well as micronutrients, which are all things that meat contain. I think sometimes as Americans we consume a lot of propaganda that tells us we are the best nation on earth that we don't always realize that some of our neighborhoods and cities look exactly like those in the developing world. A lot of our people are malnourished too and they need doctors and scientists to address their problems. A colleague of mine created a start up company that made cricket protein powder and chips and other ingredients specifically to solve this problem. Crickets contain healthy fats, proteins, and very significant levels of micronutrients that could reverse the symptoms of malnutrition. I worked as a volunteer for that company for a while. Sadly, eventually the company didn't turn out and my friend went on to do other things. But the university was very supportive of her, she was a food science and entrepreneurship double major so the university understood that not every start up company makes it. It was a valuable learning opportunity for both of us though and it showed me exactly the kind of mentality we all need to solve these problems. Maybe we won't try crickets again because eating insects is taboo in America and we weren't able to make enough sails, but maybe as a culture eating weird foods is something we need to challenge. This product had a lot of potential to help people's lives but people said no because eating insects is icky. That was a valuable learning opportunity. I also volunteered at the Nebraska Supreme Court because I was thinking about going into law and international food trade. I didn't work there for very long because I started my master's degree and I got too busy for it but learning about how the law works and how our government works will be really useful to me in the future. My career choice isn't exactly easy to understand, and trust me it's less easy to do, it's at this weird intersection of agriculture, public health, law, and trade but I wouldn't have it any other way. I think life is very connected and having someone who understands how things are all related is going to be valuable.

I once had a girl praise me for being "so diverse," there were little stars in her eyes like a girl crushing on a celebrity. "Yes...lucky me!" I said somewhat sarcastically. The people who make heroes out of disabled or fiercely queer individuals would be underwhelmed by my mundane and inconvenient life. I had to walk several miles to the nearest bike shope the other day because a thorn had punctured my tire and I can't drive due to an epilepsy condition. I wonder if they would admire me now, pushing what I am now realizing is an excessively heavy bike in the cold. Do I look fierce in that moment? I do not often experience the exciting aspects of being a minory such as being harassed for having a girlfriend by crazy moms at the park, or being treated like a child for having a disability. Stories that would make me famous on social media in an instant. Those experiences are too exciting for me. They've happened occasionally but the most inconvenient things about life as a minority are the mundane and hilarious. I work as a graduate student for the Animal Science Department, affectionately nick named "cowboy scientists" a name that fits us remarkably well. The department, bless their heart, is composed primarily of Ag kids who all have an unmistakable "I'm more country than you" vibe. The FFA nerds and the aspiring vets all live there. With real horse crap on their boots as a mark of pride an status. I love them dearly, and I love no moment more than when I casually mention that my girlfriend is waiting for me, or that I don't have a driver's license. Ag kids are somewhat sheltered, most of them grew up in tiny Nebraska towns with one whole intersection, however they poses a practicality of mind that is so endearing to me. While city folks might have read more books and visited more gay bars as worldly tourists, they could not keep themselves alive in the real world if they tried since they don't know where water or beef comes from. They know, but they don't understand, not how ag kids do. While I have received curiosity and interested looks after mentioning my girlfriend or epilepsy condition, I've realized that most of them aren't judgmental, they're just interested and maybe a little uncomfortable because they've never meet someone like that before. They are like a heard of cattle with a new hat or a blue ball that was left in their pen. They are interested, they sniff it, they get close to it, and for no reason buck away suddenly as if they thought it had moved. People are no different. You can't drop the blue ball of "I'm gay" on them and expect them to absorb it right away, you have to allow them to get used to something new in their life. Let them sniff you and get close and buck away, trust the learning process. Most people are not homophobic, they just haven't gotten used to the idea of gay people, and the distinction is critical. I have to make sure I'm not judgmental of them either or how they were raised or judge them for not being accepting right away. I'm confident that any of my concerns of how culture might treat people like me can be soothed with proper education and allowing people time to get used to an idea.

When I was a little girl and people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would tell them that I wanted to be a spy. I typically got a lot of cute chuckles at that and I even laughed at it myself when I was a little older, but considering my family's long history in the military and that a few of my ancestors actually were spies it wasn't as silly of an idea to work in intelligence as people made me feel. As a kid I was fascinated with the idea of pretending to be someone else. I took acting classes and I tried my hardest to learn Russian from watching the subtitles of their six hour long movies. I ended up picking up some words but I was so fascinated with the idea of what it would be like to be someone from another time, another country, another culture. What would it be like to grow up the way they did, to believe all the things they believed? I think it was my strong sense of empathy and fascination with other people as well as my tendency for method acting my favorite archetypes that landed me in the undiagnosed odd ball category of my neurologists office. I had an epilepsy condition which is why I had a neurologist in the first place, an excentric man himself who had to be at least eighty years old at the time. Thinking is a dangerous pass time, acting can turn into habits in real life and a too vivid of an imagination is a person's worst enemy. We are all our worst enemy. It seems my neurologists knew this taking one look at me. He was one of those people I felt almost naked around, as if he could hear my thoughts. We struggle our whole lives primarily against our own minds and bodies. The only thing that surpases the ocean in depth is the vastness of the human soul. I've been in existential identity crises my whole life. While I never took the idea of being a spy seriously as an adult, the fascination with the "what if" had its clutches on me. I experimented with my sexuality just to know what dating a girl would be like. I took the most difficult major at my university along with four minors because...because i wanted to know what it would be like to be an over achiever. I am not an over achiever, i was just caught up in the game of pretending to be one. My extreme curiosity is the positive side of the coin of my thoughts, the other side is anxiety. Anxiety is obsession with one's own thoughts and feelings, an inability to retreat from one's own mind and go somewhere more pleasant. Managing it is hard because I don't know how to do it. The things one doesn't know how to do tend to be quite difficult, but I think that if anxiety and curiosity are two sides of the same coin, one must be reduced to reduce the other. In other words, one must have fewer thoughts. Western religion is a system by which people anchor themselves to the bedrock of hope, Eastern religion does not attempt to way anchor, it attempts to set sail smoothly and bravely facing uncertainty. I was always into fighting and I happened to join a karate club in undergrad. While I wouldn't consider myself a Buddhist, karate do, the art of facing one's self as their greatest opponent, is my way of life.

When I was a freshman I bought into the idea that to be successful at something I had to devote all my time and energy to that thing. I neglected the dark shadow of the soul and took a swan dive into unhappy life of a wild, lonely human trapped in a meaningless cage of the COVID pandemic. We all began to express the same symptoms of mice being trapped in boxes. My brain in particular when it doesn’t have enough stimulation will stimulate itself in the form of an epileptic seizure. I’ve had them ever since I was a baby but the lack of stimulation from COVID was too much for an epileptic brain to handle and after a while I got severe brain damage from it, had trouble speaking and with mooted control. I’ll spare the majority of the details because it is heartbreakingly sad, all I wanted was to thrive at university the same way I did in high school, get a biochemistry degree, and live my life fully accepting that the worst part of my life, the part where I suffered in childhood with hundreds maybe thousands of seizures a day, was well behind me. Now, I had to suffer even worse. Now, on top of having a difficult childhood I have to have a difficult young adulthood as well. I was depressed because I had worked so hard, made so much progress, only to be kicked in the teeth and forced to relive my traumatic childhood and at times I wanted to give up. Life had been nothing but relentlessly cruel to me and I was so tired of fighting. I had what psychologists call complex PTSD, I had a therapist but therapy is far from being a one stop shop for mental health problems. I would go full months without being able to feel a shred of happiness or hope. There are few people in the world who can understand that kind of pain except maybe for veterans. There was a Vietnam veteran friend of my family who reached out to me and asked me to get coffee with him because he recognized what I was going through and wanted to help. I wasn’t in the mood for socializing at first and I even verbally abused him occasionally because poor mental health will cause people to do irrational things to their friends, but he was endlessly patient with me and never held anything against me. He had spent some time in jail after having a PTSD episode in public after he heard a loud noise that he thought was a gunshot. My friend encouraged me to find small moments of happiness wherever I possibly could. The happiness came as a literal ray of sunshine. It had been cloudy and cold for weeks before, spring was right around the corner, and the sun suddenly broke through the clouds and landed on my face. Looking back it’s a little sad that I found it to be so beautiful but nevertheless I did and after that point, happy moments seemed easier to find. My veteran friend encouraged me to get into martial arts because fighting helped him recover from PTSD too. I did and it helped me significantly. The martial arts community is extremely supportive and many of my PTSD symptoms completely went away after a while. Now I fight for life and I’m healthy enough to be ambitious again, I want to go to Stanford to study neurochemistry for my PhD.

(1,3) I just got off the phone with my mom, my grandma had just passed away from COVID. I was too shocked to say anything but at that moment my only thought was that I wished I had come out as gay to my grandma before she passed away. I hadn't come out to anyone yet except for my close friends and I felt more anxious than ever to tell my hyper-religious mom in case something should happen to her and then she would never know the real me. My epilepsy which had been dormant for a while was getting worse very quickly due to the stress. As a child I used to have around seven hundred seizures every day, it was a disability for me and I could barely walk or make a complete sentence due to how frequent my episodes were but my brain started to develop, and as the brain matures seizures tend to reduce. I was several years behind in school by the time my epilepsy became manageable, but afterward, I was extremely proud of myself for being able to improve my mind by reading and working extremely hard, one year, I went through three grades, it is incredible what the brain can do when it is finally free. About this time I fell in love with science, it was escapism for me outside of my family's severe fundamentalism. I would sneak off to the local library to read science and philosophy books that weren't allowed at home. I liked Darwin and Fydor Dostoevsky, they were free spirits as well and wrote about God and science in a way I had never heard before. I realized that science was going to be my friend in my fight for my mental and religious freedom. I was able to develop my critical thinking skills with the help of science and mathematics and to criticize some of the beliefs I was forced to affirm. I had no idea at the time how coming out would affect me mentally but my epileptic fits were becoming more frequent and the guilt that I felt about not telling my grandma before she died was starting to weigh very heavily on me. I came out to my mom, and I told her about my girlfriend who I had been dating for several months at this point. I knew it wouldn't go well but I didn't expect it to break my heart as much as it did. My parents didn't speak to me again for almost the rest of the pandemic, For two years I saw almost no one, all of my friends abandoned me or didn't want to be seen with me and my family, who I loved very much, cut me off from any financial help as well as from my five younger siblings. I helped raise my siblings, they were like my own children, but suddenly it was inappropriate for me to be around them. They said that my sleeping with my girlfriend was the same as sleeping with an animal. They saw gay people as animals. I grew very distrustful of all people, I didn't want to see them because I felt like I had to constantly try to convince them that I was a real human. I developed complex PTSD and the injustice of how my family treated me and how the world was treating me made me want to end things forever. I tried to commit suicide a few times, luckily I wasn't successful, but I didn't have a good childhood and I felt like I had no happiness to hold on to. This life was nothing but pain and injustice for me. The world would never change, they would only ever see me as evil even though I had done nothing wrong. I was being held accountable for all the crimes I never even thought of committing. All I wanted from the day I was born was to be treated like a human and to be free. Dealing with complex PTSD is no trivial thing. It is hard to get a bachelor's degree when struggling with thoughts of suicide and being without hope. I wanted to get better but it felt as though my brain was stuck in its habits of thinking. I had read some scientific papers about the effects of magic mushrooms on the brain of people with depression and PTSD and thought I would give it a try. It worked, and it worked extremely well. I still had to go to therapy and get help but that above everything else was the most useful for me. For people with complex PTSD, therapy isn't always very helpful, I needed medicine to kickstart getting better. (2)What inspires me most about STEM is the ability to help people. I want to be the person who can find a new medication for people suffering from brain damage or PTSD, I'm particularly interested in pharmaceuticals that help people with neurological problems. I want to be a helping hand to other people who have been through some of the same things that I have. I did a three-day fast a while ago to spread awareness for women in Iran because it's a topic that hits pretty close to home for me. For me, science is the best way to help people, a lot of people's lives can be improved with the right medicine. To me science is about freedom, there are some ideas in scinece that are less valid than others but there are no ideas that are formbiden, it is the oposite of having intelectual hostility, it's about the logical freedom to discover what the world really is.

Before I can remember, my ideas and words were interrupted by terrifying electrical shocks. I would briefly become unconscious, waking up several moments later in utter confusion, scarcely knowing where I was, and having lost track of my thoughts. These episodes made it hard for me to focus in school, and my resulting failure was painfully embarrassing. It became obvious that I had some mysterious learning disability. Eventually, I was diagnosed with Absence Epilepsy. I had to make several adjustments to my daily life. Once I was put on medications and changed a few things about my daily routine, enough seizures were controlled to begin improving my mind. I had to exert a massive amount of intense labor to bring my social and common-sense intelligence to where it needed to be, and I was in a hurry to make progress. I attacked my studies, doing whole grades over the summers and quickly losing my good eyesight straining my eyes over books late at night. I was very inquisitive and asked as many questions of my homeschool co-op science teacher as she would let me before becoming irritated. I engulfed myself in books, I was particularly interested in science and liked to research topics I had learned in school after class. Diversity is a double-edged blade that gives identity and originality as much as it does searing pain and trauma. Though I am still challenged by epilepsy and some of its inconveniences, like not being able to drive, as well as the challenges of being queer in my family environment, my love for research remains undaunted. Because of my hope to help people like me, I am pursuing a degree in biochemical sciences and forensic biology. I do not take for granted what a privilege my brain is to have and use or how precious it is to be able to love freely and openly. Since I’ve had those things restricted or taken away completely I take very few things in life for granted. People who waste such things as their time, their love, and their ability to use their minds haven’t learned the true value of life. Life is so precious I wouldn’t dare to waste an hour of it. My greatest hope in life is to help others with my career and my personal life. To do this finances are a necessity and I could not be doing it if it were not for people who have already had so much faith in me, so it is for this reason that I ask you to support me on my mission.

Before I can remember, my ideas and words were interrupted by terrifying electrical shocks. I would briefly become unconscious, waking up several moments later in utter confusion, scarcely knowing where I was, and having lost track of my thoughts. These episodes made it hard for me to focus in school, and my resulting failure was painfully embarrassing. It became obvious that I had some mysterious learning disability. Eventually, I was diagnosed with Absence Epilepsy. I had to make several adjustments to my daily life. Once I was put on medications and changed a few things about my daily routine, enough seizures were controlled to begin improving my mind. I had to exert a massive amount of intense labor to bring my social and common-sense intelligence to where it needed to be, and I was in a hurry to make progress. I attacked my studies, doing whole grades over the summers and quickly losing my good eyesight straining my eyes over books late at night. I was very inquisitive and asked as many questions of my homeschool co-op science teacher as she would let me before becoming irritated. I engulfed myself in books, I was particularly interested in science and liked to research topics I had learned in school after class. Diversity is a double-edged blade that gives identity and originality as much as it does searing pain and trauma. Though I am still challenged by epilepsy and some of its inconveniences, like not being able to drive, as well as the challenges of being queer in my family environment, my love for research remains undaunted. Because of my hope to help people like me, I am pursuing a degree in biochemical sciences and forensic biology. I do not take for granted what a privilege my brain is to have and use or how precious it is to be able to love freely and openly. Since I’ve had those things restricted or taken away completely I take very few things in life for granted. People who waste such things as their time, their love, and their ability to use their minds haven’t learned the true value of life. Life is so precious I wouldn’t dare to waste an hour of it. My greatest hope in life is to help others with my career and my personal life. To do this finances are a necessity and I could not be doing it if it were not for people who have already had so much faith in me, so it is for this reason that I ask you to support me on my mission.

Before I can remember, my ideas and words were interrupted by terrifying electrical shocks. I would briefly become unconscious, waking up several moments later in utter confusion, scarcely knowing where I was, and having lost track of my thoughts. These episodes made it hard for me to focus in school, and my resulting failure was painfully embarrassing. It became obvious that I had some mysterious learning disability. Eventually, I was diagnosed with Absence Epilepsy. I had to make several adjustments to my daily life. Once I was put on medications and changed a few things about my daily routine, enough seizures were controlled to begin improving my mind. I had to exert a massive amount of intense labor to bring my social and common-sense intelligence to where it needed to be, and I was in a hurry to make progress. I attacked my studies, doing whole grades over the summers and quickly losing my good eyesight straining my eyes over books late at night. I was very inquisitive and asked as many questions of my homeschool co-op science teacher as she would let me before becoming irritated. I engulfed myself in books, I was particularly interested in science and liked to research topics I had learned in school after class. Diversity is a double-edged blade that gives identity and originality as much as it does searing pain and trauma. Though I am still challenged by epilepsy and some of its inconveniences, like not being able to drive, as well as the challenges of being queer in my family environment, my love for research remains undaunted. Because of my hope to help people like me, I am pursuing a degree in biochemical sciences and forensic biology. I do not take for granted what a privilege my brain is to have and use or how precious it is to be able to love freely and openly. Since I’ve had those things restricted or taken away completely I take very few things in life for granted. People who waste such things as their time, their love, and their ability to use their minds haven’t learned the true value of life. Life is so precious I wouldn’t dare to waste an hour of it. My greatest hope in life is to help others with my career and my personal life. To do this finances are a necessity and I could not be doing it if it were not for people who have already had so much faith in me, so it is for this reason that I ask you to support me on my mission.

Before I can remember, my ideas and words were interrupted by terrifying electrical shocks. I would briefly become unconscious, waking up several moments later in utter confusion, scarcely knowing where I was, and having lost track of my thoughts. These episodes made it hard for me to focus in school, and my resulting failure was painfully embarrassing. It became obvious that I had some mysterious learning disability. Eventually, I was diagnosed with Absence Epilepsy. I had to make several adjustments to my daily life. Once I was put on medications and changed a few things about my daily routine, enough seizures were controlled to begin improving my mind. I had to exert a massive amount of intense labor to bring my social and common-sense intelligence to where it needed to be, and I was in a hurry to make progress. I attacked my studies, doing whole grades over the summers and quickly losing my good eyesight straining my eyes over books late at night. I was very inquisitive and asked as many questions of my homeschool co-op science teacher as she would let me before becoming irritated. I engulfed myself in books, I was particularly interested in science and liked to research topics I had learned in school after class. Diversity is a double-edged blade that gives identity and originality as much as it does searing pain and trauma. Though I am still challenged by epilepsy and some of its inconveniences, like not being able to drive, as well as the challenges of being queer in my family environment, my love for research remains undaunted. Because of my hope to help people like me, I am pursuing a degree in biochemical sciences and forensic biology. I do not take for granted what a privilege my brain is to have and use or how precious it is to be able to love freely and openly. Since I’ve had those things restricted or taken away completely I take very few things in life for granted. People who waste such things as their time, their love, and their ability to use their minds haven’t learned the true value of life. Life is so precious I wouldn’t dare to waste an hour of it. My greatest hope in life is to help others with my career and my personal life. To do this finances are a necessity and I could not be doing it if it were not for people who have already had so much faith in me, so it is for this reason that I ask you to support me on my mission.

Before I can remember, my ideas and words were interrupted by terrifying electrical shocks. I would briefly become unconscious, waking up several moments later in utter confusion, scarcely knowing where I was, and having lost track of my thoughts. These episodes made it hard for me to focus in school, and my resulting failure was painfully embarrassing. It became obvious that I had some mysterious learning disability. Eventually, I was diagnosed with Absence Epilepsy. I had to make several adjustments to my daily life. Once I was put on medications and changed a few things about my daily routine, enough seizures were controlled to begin improving my mind. I had to exert a massive amount of intense labor to bring my social and common-sense intelligence to where it needed to be, and I was in a hurry to make progress. I attacked my studies, doing whole grades over the summers and quickly losing my good eyesight straining my eyes over books late at night. I was very inquisitive and asked as many questions of my homeschool co-op science teacher as she would let me before becoming irritated. I engulfed myself in books, I was particularly interested in science and liked to research topics I had learned in school after class. Diversity is a double-edged blade that gives identity and originality as much as it does searing pain and trauma. Though I am still challenged by epilepsy and some of its inconveniences, like not being able to drive, as well as the challenges of being queer in my family environment, my love for research remains undaunted. Because of my hope to help people like me, I am pursuing a degree in biochemical sciences and forensic biology. I do not take for granted what a privilege my brain is to have and use or how precious it is to be able to love freely and openly. Since I’ve had those things restricted or taken away completely I take very few things in life for granted. People who waste such things as their time, their love, and their ability to use their minds haven’t learned the true value of life. Life is so precious I wouldn’t dare to waste an hour of it. My greatest hope in life is to help others with my career and my personal life. To do this finances are a necessity and I could not be doing it if it were not for people who have already had so much faith in me, so it is for this reason that I ask you to support me on my mission.

I grew up with severe epilepsy in a very large family. I was the oldest girl of seven children! Plus, I was pretty weird, I would spend all day in my imagination pretending Narnia was real or that I had to take the ring to Mordor. My parents were very practical people, my dad was an engineer and my mom was a lobbyist for local politics so they never understood this imaginative side to me. It was honestly just my coping mechanism, we found out after I had been diagnosed that without my medications I was having thousands of small seizures every day! I couldn’t remember anything, I continually felt disoriented and confused and there was nothing I could do to prevent my seizures. I forget sometimes just how traumatic it was for me but I guess that’s why telling stories and having a huge imagination was a good coping skill to have. My life didn’t feel real, it felt like a dream that I was just drifting through, only a vague memory of things that had just happened so I was able to convince myself that an imaginary world was real since it felt almost the same to me as real life. Once my mom saw me have a seizure in my sleep, it was bigger than the ones I have while I was awake, I was gently shaking and foaming at the mouth, just another night for me, but thankfully my mom noticed that this wasn’t normal and so she took me to the doctor and they diagnosed me with absences epilepsy and put me on really strong meds. The meds helped a lot at fist, but after a few years I started to get mental health problems because I constantly felt plugged up, like a drain that had too much hair in, I felt like I couldn’t really process my emotions and that all my emotions had been sucked out of me. I talked with my good friends about this but since they had only known me on my meds they thought that being unemotional was just my personality but I was tired of this, I felt like I was completely missing out on normal human emotions. I started dating another girl in college and I fell in love with her very quickly. I can’t say why exactly but other females just seemed easier to be in love with. It felt natural to me and a real emotional experience was what I wanted more than anything. I had plenty of problems after this, for one thing my parents were extremely religious, but it was my emotional awakening and I started to learn how to be a whole human and didn’t feel plugged up anymore. I wasn’t very good at managing my feelings at first but now that I’ve had a little bit of time to practice and go to my doctor to find other things that worked for me I started to feel more whole. I’m a very complex person but I believe that anyone who doesn’t have the opportunity or the ability to express all sides of them become depressed and stretched out an unable to have a positive outlook on life. There’s an old poem called the Epic of Gilgamesh that says that the hero Gilgamesh felt all feelings and knew all emotions, from the height of love to the depths of despair, a man who had lost all and gained all and that is what I hope that people will say about me.

The thing I find most fascinating about food is using wine to cook with and finding good parings with wine and food.

Perhaps this is a little cliché but the person who has supported me the most has been myself. A lot of first generation, poor, foreign, or underprivileged children like myself, we don't have a ton of support from our families, maybe we have a nice teacher or two that comes and goes but being an adult in western culture means depending on yourself and not getting much help from anyone. I come from Czech culture were things are typically a lot more community oriented, I had a clan that was over a hundred people, it was very nice to have pretty much a huge family that was there for me for everything and I was there for them, but communities like that tend to fall apart very easily in America where there is so much pressure to be modern and there is also COVID where over one hundred people is not a safe number for a household. I haven't seen my clan in over three years and the transition from being smothered at all points of the day to being on my own all the time with no one to talk to for days and days was so bad for my internal happiness. Czech culture is probably the most affectionate in the world, people think I'm being funny when I say that the traditional greeting for close friends and family is to kiss them anywhere on the face until they beg you three times to stop. I'm not really like other people who are so proud of their strength and independence. There are some days when I feel that way, few and far between, but on those days I feel less like a successful western person and more like Atlas trying to hold up the world. On those days my reality of having to be alone and strong feel very close and my clan, my tribe, and my culture feels further away like a distant dream. I used to have night terrors all the time, aimlessly wandering around my apartment as if I were looking for a familiar face. Like I said, I'm not like other western people, personally I believe being alone and having to be husband, wife, parents, siblings, and cousins to yourself is not a strength but a weakness. Every person is destined to be bad at at least one of those roles. I had to learn that the hard way, Czech families can be a bit much and it is easy if you have grown up in it to become unglued and hate your family or at least want to be away from it for a while. One gets tired of feeling like an outcast, having to deal with overbearing and superstitious parents, or the entitlement that Czech people have to their family members bodies, it is very easy to get tired of and want to be normal. I've done a lot of things on my own that I should have depended on my comrades for. I didn't have enough food a couple of semesters ago but I hated asking for help especially from my white friends who always seem to be judging me for asking for the smallest things. If I'm being honest with myself most of my older scholarship essays were a little too proud and possibly gave off the air of entitlement or deserving. I think I am deserving, I'm an excellent student, but I've grown up a bit since then and started to realizing the things that are really important.

There's an old poem called the Garden of Proserpine and the last several lines read, "From too much love of living, our hopes and fears set free, we think with great thanksgiving whatever gods may be, that no life lives forever, that dead men rise up never, and even the weariest river winds somewhere safe at sea." I'm probably the most stubborn person I know but after being raised in a cult, living with undiagnosed epilepsy and suffering from hundreds of seizures every day, and then recovering a little bit only to discover I was gay and had to endure my parents abandoning me to handle my school, erupted PTSD, memories of being molested as a child all alone, I do at times get tired of life. I would say I was suicidal although I don't believe anyone really wants to die, they only want to stop suffering. To be quite honest I hate the people who have only ever had a stubbed toe to overcome, I can't help myself, just like I hate the people who's minds are perfectly healthy and yet they hate using them. It is like a poor, starving person seeing a millionaire throw away luxurious food. I made an oath to myself when I was suffering from hundreds of small seizures every day, I was quite an idiot at the time because seizures can cause moments of amnesia and memory lapses so I couldn't retain anything, but I swore that if I could ever find a way to get better I would never take my mind for granted. And I haven't.

"There is no supernatural, there is only nature. Nature alone exists and contains all." - Victor Hugo

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science." - Albert Einstein

My best skill is story telling, I used to work as a nurse's aid at an old folk's home, there was an old man there they told me to to take care of, so I go up to his apartment and knock on the door and the door slowly creeks open and to my surprise the old man is a honey badger. Now, I'm not sure if you know too much about honey badgers but they're not friendly, and it's sitting in a rocking chair smoking a pipe all Sherlock Holmes looking and it yells at me "who is it!" I push the door open a bit more and I say "It's just me." I sit down next to the honey badger and read him the story and then give him his meds. As he is taking his meds he tells me that the previous nurse's aid stole his very valuable painting, I ask him which painting and he points to a painting that is sitting on the floor and I said, "I found your painting, it's right over there." and he says "no, he stole the nail that hung up the painting." I'm hoping to help this guy out so after I get done with my shift I try to find his nail that hung up his painting. Eventually, I find it in the bowls of the other nurse aid's pet pickled rattlesnake and brought it back to the honey badger and he hammers it into the wall and looks at me, and says "thank you, I love this painting." I was very glad I did it for him so that's why I believe community service is so important because otherwise how else was this honey badger supposed to hang up his painting?

Before I can remember, my ideas and words were interrupted by terrifying electrical shocks. I would briefly become unconscious, waking up several moments later in utter confusion, scarcely knowing where I was, and having lost track of my thoughts. These episodes made it hard for me to focus in school, and my resulting failure was painfully embarrassing. It became obvious that I had some mysterious learning disability. Eventually, I was diagnosed with Absence Epilepsy. I had to make several adjustments to my daily life. Once I was put on medications and changed a few things about my daily routine, enough seizures were controlled to begin improving my mind. I had to exert a massive amount of intense labor to bring my social and common-sense intelligence to where it needed to be, and I was in a hurry to make progress. I attacked my studies, doing whole grades over the summers and quickly losing my good eyesight straining my eyes over books late at night. I was very inquisitive and asked as many questions of my homeschool co-op science teacher as she would let me before becoming irritated. I engulfed myself in books, I was particularly interested in science and liked to research topics I had learned in school after class. Diversity is a double-edged blade that gives identity and originality as much as it does searing pain and trauma. Though I am still challenged by epilepsy and some of its inconveniences, like not being able to drive, as well as the challenges of being queer in my family environment, my love for research remains undaunted. Because of my hope to help people like me, I am pursuing a degree in biochemical sciences and forensic biology. I do not take for granted what a privilege my brain is to have and use or how precious it is to be able to love freely and openly. Since I’ve had those things restricted or taken away completely I take very few things in life for granted. People who waste such things as their time, their love, and their ability to use their minds haven’t learned the true value of life. Life is so precious I wouldn’t dare to waste an hour of it. My greatest hope in life is to help others with my career and my personal life. To do this finances are a necessity and I could not be doing it if it were not for people who have already had so much faith in me, so it is for this reason that I ask you to support me on my mission.

A person who does not see the benefit of the community must be an intolerably stupid creature with no imagination. I used to work as a nurse's aid at an old folk's home, there was an old man there they told me to to take care of, so I go up to his apartment and knock on the door and the door creeks open and on the doormat to my surprise is a honey badger. Now, I'm not sure if you know too much about honey badgers but they're not friendly, and it's sitting in a rocking chair smoking a pipe and it yells at me "who is it!" I push the door open and I say "It's just me, I usually read to my residents who need around-the-clock care, I've brought Joules Vern Around the World in Eighty Days." I sit down next to the honey badger and read him the story and then give him his meds. As he is taking his meds he tells me that the previous nurse's aid stole his very valuable painting, I ask him which painting and he points to a painting that is sitting on the floor and I said, "I found your painting, it's right over there." and he says "no, he stole the nail that hung up the painting, do you think you can find the thief for me?" I'm hoping to help this guy out, being a nurse aid and all so after I get done with my shift I try to find his nail that hung up his painting. Eventually, I find it in the bowls of a pickled rattlesnake and brought it back to the honey badger and he hammers it into the wall and looks at me, and says "thank you, I love this painting." I was very glad I did it for him and it made my heart happy so that's why I believe community service is so important because otherwise how else was this honey badger supposed to hang up his painting? In my future career, I'm not interested in helping more honey badgers, I think that phase is over but I am hoping to be the husband of a vineyard and make my wine and sell it someday, it's either that or go to med school. The algorithm in the matrix only gave me two options before I came here, med school or making my wine brand. I'm not very good at standardized tests, they just provide so little scope for the imagination, I had to cross my eyes and imagine a long-necked lama with a mouth a foot long with brown spots to do well on the ACT but then I realized I had just reverse-engineered a giraffe. I do like IQ tests though, trying to think up thirty or so missing pieces is excellent practice for the mind's eye but unfortunately, I got most of them right so it wasn't much of a challenge. I asked Mensa if there were any more and they said they'd think about letting me join their little club if I can behave myself. I'm still not sure exactly what that means or if the matrix algorithm wants me to do that though. Some people only have one option for what they can do as a career but as you can see I have the freedom of choice that the matrix algorithm gave me and I guess it's my illusion so I can do what I want with it. I think it's unfortunate that some people only get the luck of one person to be their soul mate and one career path to chose, I guess they don't have as much luck as I do, I'm very fortunate.

1. Since brevity is the soul of wit, and duty is duty and time is time, to avoid wasting wit, duty, and time, I will be brief. All creatures deserve something out of life, the fish water, the birds air, the worms to eat the dead bodies of kings, and scholars their scholarships. Since I am in the latter category of creatures, I deserve thus. 2. I want to be a wine chemist and possibly get a doctorate in something if I'm in the mood. 3. I was at the mall, there was this guy on the escalator going down but he was facing up. I walk down and try to get past him and but his heels wedge in the gap at the end of the escalator and I had to watch as his body gets eaten by the Sheels floor! Rolled up like a fruit rollup. I step over the guy as to not suffer the same fate but then out of his bag comes a hand, it's feeling around and undoes the zipper, and out jumps a new man, identical to the one I just saw get eaten! It was the hardest thing I ever had to process.

Before I can remember, my ideas and words were interrupted by terrifying electrical shocks. I would briefly become unconscious, waking up several moments later in utter confusion, scarcely knowing where I was, and having lost track of my thoughts. These episodes made it hard for me to focus in school, and my resulting failure was painfully embarrassing. It became obvious that I had some mysterious learning disability. Eventually, I was diagnosed with Absence Epilepsy. I had to make several adjustments to my daily life. Once I was put on medications and changed a few things about my daily routine, enough seizures were controlled to begin improving my mind. I had to exert a massive amount of intense labor to bring my social and common-sense intelligence to where it needed to be, and I was in a hurry to make progress. I attacked my studies, doing whole grades over the summers and quickly losing my good eyesight straining my eyes over books late at night. I was very inquisitive and asked as many questions of my homeschool co-op science teacher as she would let me before becoming irritated. I engulfed myself in books, I was particularly interested in science and liked to research topics I had learned in school after class. Diversity is a double-edged blade that gives identity and originality as much as it does searing pain and trauma. Though I am still challenged by epilepsy and some of its inconveniences, like not being able to drive, as well as the challenges of being queer in my family environment, my love for research remains undaunted. Because of my hope to help people like me, I am pursuing a degree in biochemical sciences and forensic biology. I do not take for granted what a privilege my brain is to have and use or how precious it is to be able to love freely and openly. Since I’ve had those things restricted or taken away completely I take very few things in life for granted. People who waste such things as their time, their love, and their ability to use their minds haven’t learned the true value of life. Life is so precious I wouldn’t dare to waste an hour of it. My greatest hope in life is to help others with my career and my personal life. To do this finances are a necessity and I could not be doing it if it were not for people who have already had so much faith in me, so it is for this reason that I ask you to support me on my mission.

I'm a bit of a history geek and I really love the things about the human soul that can be found in ancient writing as well as modern. Sometimes I even connect better to the old writing and stories than the new because it can give a deeper perspective about life by virtue of being old. Sapho was an ancient Greek woman who was a scholar, a poet, a play writer and a ruler of her island, Lesbos, in a culture that was very male centered and very patriarchal. Many of her books and poems were later destroyed later by Christian scholars because first of all they were written by a woman and the male Christian leaders at the time wanted to keep women in subjugation and believing they couldn't accomplish anything scholarly, so it fit with the propaganda they had. Another very important reason why her legacy was being erased was because Sapho wrote about her love for another woman in sexual context and may the Almighty forbid that anyone look at that in the future and realizes that people who are same sex attracted are in fact human, normal humans in fact, and that same sex behaviors and attraction have been happening for forever. In honor of her many women with same sex attraction are called Sapphics and are often named after the Island of which she was queen, Lesbos, Lesbians. I am very fond of Sapho because her story has such weight not only to the western philosophy that women are inferiors but also to the Christian myth that same sex attraction is an entirely new phenomenon, a modern anti Christian idea that also seeped its way into the queer community resulting in many queer people believing that they are revolutionaries or a people who for the first time sought liberation when none of human history did. It also challenges this very ridged idea that is prevalent in the queer community that Lesbians are only attracted to other women because Sapho herself had a husband who she loved very much. The identity aspect doesn't have to be ridged at all, in fact it probably doesn't even have to exist as a social construct because I doubt if Sapho really thought of her love as being part of her identity, only a person she was passionate about. I don't hope to talk about my sexuality or about my particular philosophy of feminism in my career very much, rather I hope to do it privately or with a separate organization to that of my work. Some of my mentors have suggested to me different careers especially for women in science and I do find those very interesting but as of right now that isn't a plan of mine. I hope to inspire the women around me, especially my god daughter who is to be born soon and especially teach her the value of knowledge and education. I painted a little alphabet book for her, maybe I'll publish it some day, and I'm very excited for her to be born.

Sometimes, when I've straightened my back from hours of studying molecules and medicine, I like to take out my Bohemian bead embroidery and listen to an audio book while I stich patterns of snowflakes and nutcrackers onto a white button up shirt with beads that are as tiny as a grain of sand. I like to indulge in my unhinged Bohemianness especially in private. I don't like talking about it very much and I get culture shock quite regularly, so I like the calm and the quiet where Bohemians can be unhinged, and can call themselves gypsies if they like the sound of the word. My eyes will roll back in a gentile seizure, I'm an epileptic but just like my Bohemianness, I am only afraid of myself around other people for that reason, alone, my seizures are seldom painful and the only thing I've ever known that could switch between different states of the mind so readily. Seizures are the soul stepping through the looking glass for a moment to the other side. On the other side for a moment is death, the universe, all of human understanding at once, the All. Then I'm thrown back to reality in an instant while I was just in friendly chat with bird and beast and half believed it true. It is all nonsense, it is like asking yourself what the internet looks like when the device is turned off. Epilepsy is very Bohemian, in the sense that epilepsy could have started that whole culture. Our beloved complicated patterns are just perfect for the epileptic mind to digest life. Tarot, witchcraft, orthodoxy, and physical closeness to each other might have all been created to be therapeutic for epileptic souls.

I've fallen in a lot of different places along this discussion over the years. I was born into a cult that was very socially isolated so until about high school I didn't really have any interesting thoughts on the relationship between spirituality and science, faith and family were the most important things in my life at the time and I didn't know enough about either science or math to have a critique of what this cult was teaching me and my family. I got a lot more analytical as a teenager and for a while I rejected my faith and all spirituality and really fell in love with science and math. I don't think that there are many people who leave their faith because they want to be sinners or evil, that's propaganda, most of them leave for integrity, because they disagree about doctrine or how things are run. Sometimes, the people who leave have more integrity than the people who stay but other times they're just hurt by the people there and they need a new group. Western Christianity, in general, which is the faith that the cult I was in had, depends very heavily on a list of affirmations and if you don't meet all or most of those affirmations then they don't consider you to be a Christian. That's western spirituality which is hardly a spirituality at all. But I picked up a book by an old Russian author, it was a novel called the Idiot, and it was about a very Eastern idea of imitating Christ, of loving people unconditionally, the nature of the human soul, etc. and that was what Christianity meant to that Russian author, not some kind of grocery list of affirmations that tend to not hold up scientifically, it was about something else entirely. That was, I think, my first real glimpse of what spirituality was without being chained to the floor by the politics of western Christianity. Personally, I believe the purpose of western Christianity is far more political than it is spiritual, that is what it has been historically anyway. I would have been happy to call myself a Christian in that sense but there was no one around me who would agree that the spirituality I had was Christian so it simply became a nameless auxiliary philosophy to me. I think I see God most in things like math and science, that is to say the world is governed by natural laws and forces that make all of life possible some people chose to call that God and others don't. Arguing about God's existence is really just an issue about semantics. For me being able to understand fundamental questions about matter, math, and life are like looking God directly in the face.

My family is and enormous Bohemian one, a tribe almost with several hundred members that all came from my great grandfather's family of nine children. He was the patriarch of the community, a huge slice of western Nebraska and Kansas most of which he owned. His "children" that is to say practically everyone were the community I grew up with. Bohemian families are very close and tribe oriented in a way I haven't seen from any other community. Family needs were felt so strongly that there was really no concept of property, if someone needed something from anyone else they would simply take it, they would go into their neighbor's house, at home or otherwise and eat there food if they were hungry or warm themselves if they were cold. Hospitaluty is the most important value to us, even more important than religious beliefs. Despite the emphasize on family and hospitality, I would often flush in embarrassment if I didn't know the person smothering my face with Bohemian kisses. In a family that big it is impossible to know everyone and during high holidays the traditional way to great a family member was to grab them by the ears and kiss their face anywhere between six and twelve times except for special sercomstances where they would kiss the hand. That is more or less how I feel about community but I get culture shock from society quite often when for example, I had my own lonely room and bed for the first time and developed insomnia because I wasn't used to sleeping by myself. I was also pegged by some people as a thief or worse, a communist, since I didn't understand the concept of personal property very well at first. I want to give back to the community I was raised in but also to everyone else. I typically do this by taking care of new children, since for medical reasons I can't have children myself, I like to provide my services to new moms who need help with their infants. Personally, I think that is one of the best ways to give back to the community but I'm also studying biochemistry, I'm the medical expert in my family and other people will come to me for advice expecially on the COVID vaccine. More than anything, I feel very clostrophobic and anxious around people when I never was before. I feel a bit cheated on my college experience with COVID and I want to see the world, learn a new language, and see a lot of different people and their land. I'm considering getting a master's once I come home or possibly go on to medical school. Eventually, I want to develop medications for disabled children, possible epileptics like myself who struggle with ordinary life due to disability.

My brother had the most vanity of anyone I had ever met, when I got lower grades than him in school he said it was because girls weren't smart, when I got a higher grade than him, he laughed in my face and said he'd never accept a girl as a legitimate competitor and that I had probably just cheated off of some boy. I started crying with anger and he rubbed salt in the wound by saying that girls were too emotional to be smart. I told my parents about what happened, I was shocked when they agreed with him, girls shouldn't be legitimate opponents because it would damage the boy's vanity if he lost to a girl. It was infuriating! I wanted him to be a good sport and concede that I had done better than him that time, but our parents didn't teach him what being a good sport meant and our unhealthy competition didn't end there, it went on for our entire childhoods. When we were in high school I was so thrilled that I got a big scholarship, and an A in calculus 2 but for my graduation my mom insisted that I couldn't invite any of my friends and to my disgust all my brother's friends showed up. I was so upset! It was my day, I had graduated with a 4.0 and a scholarship but my mom and my brother were making my accomplishment about themselves. I had been so patient with my family to finally give me some respect as a person but even though it never came, I probably wouldn't have the gumption to get a science degree if I wasn't so patient and diligent with my school even when my entire family just wanted me to be a talentless girl.

I was having dinner with a friend recently, an elderly man who used to be a professor of religion and literature at Wesleyan, and I brought up that many people who were historically considered wise like Socrates or Solomon or Dostoyevsky so often seemed depressed. I said that I thought it more likely that wise people would be more depressed than others as this was so often the case in my own life where the smartest people I knew seemed the most lonely and fatalistic. He told me that he thought intelligence might make people more likely to be depressed but wisdom makes people happy and that is the difference between an intelligent person and a wise person. I've thought about his conjecture a lot since then and I think he is right, depression is not an illness that is nature's curse to the wise but wisdom itself is happiness and contentment. Even though I do become depressed a lot and like Solomon I often wonder how long simple people will love their simplicity, scoffers delight in their scoffing and fools hate knowledge, I have to remember to take care of my mental health and the more my mind is healthy the more pleasure I take in learning.

Hello, my name is Anna Hilton. I've had a lot of different skills over the years. One that I'm pretty sure I was born with I still do till this day: I love storytelling. I grew up in a really restrictive household that was involved in a Messianic cult, I wasn't allowed to express myself at all, but after dark when my four sisters and I retreated to our room, they would cuddle in my arms, look up at me with their big brown eyes and beg me for a story. I was like one of those old Russian novelists, I found a way of critiquing my life and the world I lived in via stories. Obviously, as a small child with minimal analytical skills most of the stories were nonsense, Alice in Wonderland vibe stories, and didn't provide the structured critique that adult story tellers do but nevertheless my siblings often understood what I was trying to tell them, that I was in pain, that I was being abused, and that I couldn't say any of it directly. For better or worse, I’m not quite the air headed feverish child that I used to be and after filling an entire tub of my writing I finally got a little good at storytelling with purpose.

Before I can remember, my ideas and words were interrupted by terrifying electrical shocks. I would briefly become unconscious, waking up several moments later in utter confusion, scarcely knowing where I was, and having lost track of my thoughts. These episodes made it hard for me to focus in school, and my resulting failure was painfully embarrassing. It became obvious that I had some mysterious learning disability. Eventually, I was diagnosed with Absence Epilepsy. I had to make several adjustments to my daily life. Once I was put on medications I attacked my studies, doing whole grades over the summers and quickly losing my good eyesight straining over books late at night. I engulfed myself in books, I was particularly interested in science and liked to research topics I learned in school after class. Because of my hope to help people like me, I am pursuing a degree in biochemical sciences and forensic biology. I do not take for granted what a privilege my brain is to have and use or how precious it is to be able to love freely and openly. Since I’ve had those things restricted or taken away completely I take very few things in life for granted. People who waste such things as their time, their love, and their ability to use their minds haven’t learned the true value of life. Life is so precious I wouldn’t dare to waste an hour of it. My greatest hope in life is to help others with my career and my personal life. To do this finances are a necessity and I could not be doing it if it were not for people who have already had so much faith in me, so it is for this reason that I ask you to support me on my mission.

It is a very difficult thing to determine how upbringing influences our character and personality, it's been a debate since antiquity with very few people being truly analytical about it. Most authors of literature stick to a black or white fame of nature vs nurture suggesting that we are either "chosen ones," ubermesches forged in the destiny of our nature and genetic heritage, while other literary thinkers put all emphasis on human free will, grit, and an antique idea of American hard work. It is all cartoonish and many of its influenced works are literally cartoons of superheroes. Even more since I've heard the news that I can't have children, my idea of legacy depends more on my academics, career, and interaction with my community. I've been told on several occasions that my intelligence is "unwomanly". I protect little insults like that, I keep them in a box flavored with sweet smelling spices and take them out to smell and look at every once in a while when I need inspiration. That is what all wise people who have any originality do, some pretend to be offended at snide remarks but secretly put them in jars of vodka seasoned with salt and red pepper to preserve that insult in all its glory forever. There is nothing that insults people so much these days as being told that they are unoriginal, an archetype fossil or having a personality made by machine. I've clearly identified in my own soul the things I wish to keep and the things I want to leave behind. There seems to be a particular form of spiritual cleaning when people hit their twenties or college, and recognize what's impossible to change, what has to change, and things that will stay the same.

I was having dinner with a friend recently, an elderly man who used to be a professor of religion and literature at Wesleyan, and I brought up that many people who were historically considered wise like Socrates or Solomon or Dostoyevsky so often seemed depressed. I said that I thought it more likely that wise people would be more depressed than others as this was so often the case in my own life where the smartest people I knew seemed the most lonely and fatalistic. He told me that he thought intelligence might make people more likely to be depressed but wisdom makes people happy and that is the difference between an intelligent person and a wise person. I've thought about his conjecture a lot since then and I think he is right, depression is not an illness that is nature's curse to the wise but wisdom itself is happiness and contentment. Even though I do become depressed a lot and like Solomon I often wonder how long simple people will love their simplicity, scoffers delight in their scoffing and fools hate knowledge, I have to remember to take care of my mental health and the more my mind is healthy the more pleasure I take in learning.

Being raised very differently from most Americans, I naturally have a very unusual taste in music that my friends sometimes tease me for. I come from a Roma Bohemian family that had a very sheltered lifestyle, I mostly listed to Russian and Bohemian music and like most girls who came from Eastern European families, I learned to dance ballet to songs like the Second Waltz, Tchaikovsky, etc. I got to know the other dancers really well and it was formative to for my music appreciation. Music has a very social connotation for me, one that followed me into high school choir till the day I graduated. Most of my friends from the same community were in the choir and we sang a lot of very advanced, very difficult music. Every choir has to learn choral at some point and some of the most difficult music that we sang was choral. For this particular piece, Domine, we had to practice so many times together, cry over, and depend on each other to sing the correct thing so many times that by the time we were done we were so proud of it that none of us could hear words of disrespect to choral music again. That song was our baby. One song that we never got to sing at an actual concert but my friends from choir got together and sang anyway, was Bohemian Rhapsody, the queen of Bohemian American music, pun intended. It was a difficult song to sing as a choir and it was also the last song we ever sang together as a friend group. We sang it right after our community's graduation ceremony where over half the choir was graduating that year and we all cried and hugged each other in the building's stair well.

I'm very interested in art, particularly religious art, but religious art doesn't inspire my own hands to create as much as it does me to ask questions. In terms of faith myself, I do not subscribe to one religion or another but I do believe in a god in the philosophical sense: there are natural forces that make life and the world possible and some people chose to call that god and others don't. I think more often than not religious art is the reason people lose their faith. God, for example is not a man nor a woman, God can relate to us in either of those ways but God's essence is undefinable and transcends our ideas of sex and gender. So much most people who are educated in religion know but there is nothing so hard to destroy as an idea once it is in people's minds. Androgynous people remind me of God’s confusing essence the most so I think one of my favorite paintings that illustrates this is the Young Bohemian Serb, a painting by Charles Landelle of an andogenous person. As an American Bohemian myself I also find this picture intriguing for that reason as few people know about my ethnic group or how Bohemians were perceived historically by the west. There are even some Kabbalist who believe that the original human creature, Adam, had both sexes and the two sexes were separated by God to create Eve. Not a very popular mystical interpretation of Genesis and I don’t believe in it literally but I think it can teach us something about how we see ourselves which is the whole point of Kabbalah as well as origin stories.

Before I can remember, my ideas and words were interrupted by terrifying electrical shocks. I would briefly become unconscious, waking up several moments later in utter confusion, scarcely knowing where I was, and having lost track of my thoughts. These episodes made it hard for me to focus in school, and my resulting failure was painfully embarrassing. It became obvious that I had some mysterious learning disability. Eventually, I was diagnosed with Absence Epilepsy. I had to make several adjustments to my daily life. Once I was put on medications and changed a few things about my daily routine, enough seizures were controlled to begin improving my mind. I had to exert a massive amount of intense labor to bring my social and common-sense intelligence to where it needed to be, and I was in a hurry to make progress. I attacked my studies, doing whole grades over the summers and quickly losing my good eyesight straining my eyes over books late at night. I was very inquisitive and asked as many questions of my homeschool co-op science teacher as she would let me before becoming irritated. I engulfed myself in books, I was particularly interested in science and liked to research topics I had learned in school after class. Diversity is a double-edged blade that gives identity and originality as much as it does searing pain and trauma. Though I am still challenged by epilepsy and some of its inconveniences, like not being able to drive, as well as the challenges of being queer in my family environment, my love for research remains undaunted. Because of my hope to help people like me, I am pursuing a degree in biochemical sciences and forensic biology. I do not take for granted what a privilege my brain is to have and use or how precious it is to be able to love freely and openly. Since I’ve had those things restricted or taken away completely I take very few things in life for granted. People who waste such things as their time, their love, and their ability to use their minds haven’t learned the true value of life. Life is so precious I wouldn’t dare to waste an hour of it. My greatest hope in life is to help others with my career and my personal life. To do this finances are a necessity and I could not be doing it if it were not for people who have already had so much faith in me, so it is for this reason that I ask you to support me on my mission.

Before I can remember, my ideas and words were interrupted by terrifying electrical shocks. I would briefly become unconscious, waking up several moments later in utter confusion, scarcely knowing where I was, and having lost track of my thoughts. These episodes made it hard for me to focus in school, and my resulting failure was painfully embarrassing. It became obvious that I had some mysterious learning disability. Eventually, I was diagnosed with Absence Epilepsy. I had to make several adjustments to my daily life. Once I was put on medications and changed a few things about my daily routine, enough seizures were controlled to begin improving my mind. I had to exert a massive amount of intense labor to bring my social and common-sense intelligence to where it needed to be, and I was in a hurry to make progress. I attacked my studies, doing whole grades over the summers and quickly losing my good eyesight straining my eyes over books late at night. I was very inquisitive and asked as many questions of my homeschool co-op science teacher as she would let me before becoming irritated. I engulfed myself in books, I was particularly interested in science and liked to research topics I had learned in school after class. Diversity is a double-edged blade that gives identity and originality as much as it does searing pain and trauma. Though I am still challenged by epilepsy and some of its inconveniences, like not being able to drive, as well as the challenges of being queer in my family environment, my love for research remains undaunted. Because of my hope to help people like me, I am pursuing a degree in biochemical sciences and forensic biology. I do not take for granted what a privilege my brain is to have and use or how precious it is to be able to love freely and openly. Since I’ve had those things restricted or taken away completely I take very few things in life for granted. People who waste such things as their time, their love, and their ability to use their minds haven’t learned the true value of life. Life is so precious I wouldn’t dare to waste an hour of it. My greatest hope in life is to help others with my career and my personal life. To do this finances are a necessity and I could not be doing it if it were not for people who have already had so much faith in me, so it is for this reason that I ask you to support me on my mission.

I want to start off by saying that although I feel great lose from my family, neither of my parents are dead. As far as I can tell there is nothing in the rules that specify death as the cause of loss so I assume separation or the ending of a relationship to be valid as well. I was sitting in my dorm room in careful consideration of what I was about to do. I had just confided in my friend, a catholic girl who had given me an icon neckless, that I couldn't have children due to the strong epileptic medications I was on and admitted I had no idea what that would mean for my future relationships. She told me it would be fine, that I'd just have to be careful and I'd be able to live an ordinary life. I, however, wasn't interested in cheating good men out of fatherhood, neither was I content in living a half life and dying a virgin. A girl had asked me out to an ice skating party that night, although I never thought of myself as gay I am a very adventurous person and simply thought of it as something I might as well try. I am a very intelligent person and I can reasonably predict things that will happen in the future. Although, I wanted to be free to experiment and find connection with humanity in whatever way worked for me, I knew that my religious family would never approve if my little experiment was successful. I guess, unfortunately for me it was successful. I enjoyed the company of other women very well and I felt the full force of that madness that is love. I was never a very emotional person after I got put on my medications, I was normally very level headed but intimacy's can bring out strange things in people. Perhaps it was that that set my epilepsy off majorly, maybe it was the anxiety of keeping it secret from my family, ether way, my epilepsy medications that had long kept many of my emotions trapped quickly ineffective. My emotions and fits of epilepsy were uncontrollable, painful, and never stopped. I longed to tell my family my secret, had to, in fact the anxiety was becoming too much for me. I came out to them and they rejected me, told me they wished they had never raised me, told me never too see my siblings again and it was over. I had predicted it of course, but still wasn't ready. I wept for them for months and truly felt like I had lost my entire family to death all in an instant. My epilepsy got a lot worse and quickly descended into PTSD symptoms. I was chocked with emotions and seizures I couldn't control, in utter agony almost all the time with no relief and no one to comfort or take care of me while I was in the middle of my fits. It's now been almost two years since I first came out and my recuperation has been rocky to say the least. I've gotten better at controlling my feelings and seizures without the help of any medication and my brain has matured enough to be able to absorb seizures better. I recently read a book written by a holocaust survivor and he said that people are able to suffer through anything as long as they have hope and meaning to their suffering. Suffering, in general, is meaningless, we have to be intentional to ascribe meaning to it.

I was locked in the basement bathroom of the pastor of the messianic Jewish cult that my family was a part of, wondering when someone would let me out. I had just had an epileptic fit and had hit my head pretty hard on the bathroom sink. The door had accidentally been installed backwards so that the lock was on the outside and many cruel children took advantage of this epic home repair fail to frighten their little companions minds out before eventually setting them free. My situation was a little bit different, though. I had just had an epileptic melt down and a few of the older girls had put me in this bathroom until I had calmed down. I noticed that my dress was torn and the itching head scarf I wore during prayer had been shredded to pieces. This story illiterates just how unusual my life was even as a small child. I suppose most people, I hope, have never been locked in a cult leader’s bathroom on account of epilepsy but it is not extremely pleasant. Overcoming my epilepsy and childhood trauma of being raised in a cult was a big part of why I wanted to go into biochemistry. School was a sanctuary for me and I wanted to help other kids like me who struggle with chronic illnesses.

I was locked in the bathroom of a Messianic Jewish cult leader’s basement, hoping someone would let me out soon. I had just finished an epileptic fit and someone had apparently locked me in the bathroom for safe keeping but now it didn’t sound like there was anyone on the other side of the door. Hello, my name is Anna Hilton and I’m a third year undergraduate student in biochemistry and forensics. You might be wondering how I ended up in that situation but that’s a pretty long story and only one snapshot of my very exciting life.

It is a very difficult thing to determine how upbringing influences our character and personality, it's been a debate since antiquity with very few people being truly analytical about it. Most authors of literature stick to a black or white fame of nature vs nurture suggesting that we are either "chosen ones," ubermesches forged in the destiny of our nature and genetic heritage, while other literary thinkers put all emphasis on human free will, grit, and an antique idea of an American hard work. It is all cartoonish and many of its influenced works are literally cartoons. I believe my entire influenced upbringing would easily fill a Russian novel, it's something I've thought about a lot and sometimes I cry out to G-d in prayer that I would be able to chose more things for myself as having a whole sexuality influenced by upbringing is neither a normal sentiment nor a comfortable one. Perhaps I was already born with an affinity to same sex attraction but never the less I think I would have ended up straight if it had not been for the fact that I had early childhood trauma and that I am physically incapable of bearing a child, which was far more serious news to me than most people would expect. I was faced with impossible choices, I could either cheat a man I cared about out of fatherhood, be ciliate for the rest of my life, or find out what same sex love was like. Even though there are many people who go for having a straight relationship with no children or complete celibacy, those were not possible in my mind and to me defeated the purpose of happy life. Regardless, even if I was born with a fixed sexuality, it would be who I was but it wouldn't be anymore of a choice than how I was raised or impossible and unfortunate circumstances, either way sexuality is never much of a choice. It is an even deeper philosophical question than classic nature vs nurture because we often do not get to chose our nurture either and then it seems as though human kind doesn't have free will in that scenario either. Even more since I've heard the news that I can't have children, my idea of legacy depends more on my academics, career, and interaction with my community. I've been told on several occasions that my intelligence is "unwomanly". I protect little insults like that, I keep them in a box flavored with sweat smelling spices and take them out to smell and look at every once in a while when I need inspiration. That is what all wise people do who have accepted themselves, some pretend to be offended at snide remarks as is their right to do but secretly put them in jars of vinegar and vodka seasoned with salt and red pepper to preserve them in all their glory forever. They are meant to be insults to my womanliness but never the less a prized treasure for me as being a woman with originality and uniqueness. There is nothing that insults people so much these days as being told that they are unoriginal, an archetype fossil or having a personality uniform enough to be made by machine. I've clearly identified in my own soul the things I wish to keep and the things I want to leave behind. There seems to be a particular form of spiritual cleaning when people hit their twenties or college, and recognize what's impossible to change, what has to change, and things that will stay the same.

Hello, my name is Anna Hilton. I've had a lot of different hobbies over the years. One that I'm pretty sure I was born with I still do till this day: I love story telling. I grew up in a really restrictive house hold that was involved in a Messianic cult, I wasn't allowed to express myself at all, but after dark when my four sisters and I retreated to our room, they would cuddle in my arms, look up at me with their big brown eyes and beg me for a story. I was like one of those old Russian novelists, I found a way of critiquing my life and the world I lived in via stories. Obviously, as a small child with minimal analytical skills most of the stories were nonsense, Alice in Wonderland vibe stories, and didn't provide the structured critique that adult story tellers do but never the less my siblings often understood what I was trying to tell them, that I was in pain, that I was being abused, and that I couldn't say any of it directly. Jewish culture in general takes stories pretty seriously. We are all taught from a young age to read between the lines and search for meaning in the convoluted stories we read. I find that many of my readers who don't come from that background need things explained to them much more plainly and I found it difficult and a little heart breaking to see my important allegorical stories fly over people's heads. Sometimes I just increase my length to drive my point home and other times I'm not interested in trying to ease people into Jewish culture as I am getting my point across. That's my favorite hobby, other hobbies I enjoy are reading and bead embroidery.

A friend of mine once told me she loved hanging out with me because she said I was so diverse. Her face flushed and her eyes looked very shinny and big and were staring right into mine. I was suspired and a little scared because although I think of myself as a diverse person in my own unique way, I am made a little uncomfortable by people's admiration and I'm not quite sure what to do with it. Whenever I think of someone who supports diversity and equality, I always thing of those exhaustingly woke social media activists not someone like me who simply exists and has ambitions and rarely talks about my own diversity. I'm an epileptic queer Roma (think Gypsy) who was raised in Messianic Jewish culture and a woman in science. I get tired just from writing all that. I don't have the wordcount for a more in depth story of how all of those affect my life, that would easily fill up a Russian novel, but to summarize, life is difficult. I have no idea why a lot of people, especially girls, flock to me for inspiration but I have a mentor who says I would be an excellent leader for women in science. I am confused by this too, I barely notice I'm the only woman in a lot of my science classes and I make friends easily and speak my mind freely and I don't think many of my male classmates notice too much that I'm a woman either and yet some have come up to me and said they respected my ideas without encouragement. I think the best thing for me too do to support diversity is to be a source of inspiration to other diverse people.

Before I can remember, my ideas and words were interrupted by terrifying electrical shocks. I would briefly become unconscious, waking up several moments later in utter confusion, scarcely knowing where I was, and having lost track of my thoughts. These episodes made it hard for me to focus in school, and my resulting failure was painfully embarrassing. It became obvious that I had some mysterious learning disability. Eventually, I was diagnosed with Absence Epilepsy. I had to make several adjustments to my daily life. Once I was put on medications and changed a few things about my daily routine, enough seizures were controlled to begin improving my mind. I had to exert a massive amount of intense labor to bring my social and common-sense intelligence to where it needed to be, and I was in a hurry to make progress. I attacked my studies, doing whole grades over the summers and quickly losing my good eyesight straining my eyes over books late at night. I was very inquisitive and asked as many questions of my homeschool co-op science teacher as she would let me before becoming irritated. I engulfed myself in books, I was particularly interested in science and liked to research topics I had learned in school after class. Diversity is a double-edged blade that gives identity and originality as much as it does searing pain and trauma. Though I am still challenged by epilepsy and some of its inconveniences, like not being able to drive, as well as the challenges of being queer in my family environment, my love for research remains undaunted. Because of my hope to help people like me, I am pursuing a degree in biochemical sciences and forensic biology. I do not take for granted what a privilege my brain is to have and use or how precious it is to be able to love freely and openly. Since I’ve had those things restricted or taken away completely I take very few things in life for granted. People who waste such things as their time, their love, and their ability to use their minds haven’t learned the true value of life. Life is so precious I wouldn’t dare to waste an hour of it. My greatest hope in life is to help others with my career and my personal life. To do this finances are a necessity and I could not be doing it if it were not for people who have already had so much faith in me, so it is for this reason that I ask you to support me on my mission.

There are a lot of things that concern me about humanity, mostly tik tok and this thing my Rabbi calls "COVID brain." Apparently COVID brain is when you get really absent minded, depressed, maybe careless because COVID is changing the way our brains work. It's like when you shower and forget to take off your underwear or impulsively shaving all your hair off but I think the worst part of COVID brain is the fact that people will forget how to be happy about small things. My best friend recently told me that she was pregnant, I was very excited for her so I told everyone: I told my boss, I told my coworker, I told my fellow students in all my classes. You are probably realizing what I did not know at the time, normally people don't tell everyone they know when their friend is pregnant, but I didn't know this because I grew up in Messianic Jewish culture and in that community you tell everyone because it stands to reason that if one person is happy about something then the rest of the group deserves to be happy about it too. It is very rude to keep happiness to yourself in that community especially when happiness is in short supply...which is always. The people I told though were mostly confused, they didn't realize I was trying to share happiness with them. My coworker asked me if my friend getting pregnant was a good thing and then asked me why I was happy about it. I was startled by those questions so I was like "um...I'm happy because it's a baby and because it's my friend." she looked at me in confusion and gave the most bland "oh...good" I've ever heard in my life. It makes me worry about the future of humanity when we take ourselves so seriously that we can't be happy about something small like a friend's pregnancy. How absurd is that to get so caught up in wokenes that you can't be happy about small things? I'll be bending over to pick a flower when my friend reminds me that the planet is dying. There is a place to talk about the planet and other issues that are more serious but it isn't when we are trying to make ourselves happy especially with COVID, happiness is in short supply.

Before I can remember, my ideas and words were interrupted by terrifying electrical shocks. I would briefly become unconscious, waking up several moments later in utter confusion, scarcely knowing where I was, and having lost track of my thoughts. These episodes made it hard for me to focus in school, and my resulting failure was painfully embarrassing. It became obvious that I had some mysterious learning disability. Eventually, I was diagnosed with Absence Epilepsy. I had to make several adjustments to my daily life. Once I was put on medications and changed a few things about my daily routine, enough seizures were controlled to begin improving my mind. I had to exert a massive amount of intense labor to bring my social and common-sense intelligence to where it needed to be, and I was in a hurry to make progress. I attacked my studies, doing whole grades over the summers and quickly losing my good eyesight straining my eyes over books late at night. I was very inquisitive and asked as many questions of my homeschool co-op science teacher as she would let me before becoming irritated. I engulfed myself in books, I was particularly interested in science and liked to research topics I had learned in school after class. Diversity is a double-edged blade that gives identity and originality as much as it does searing pain and trauma. Though I am still challenged by epilepsy and some of its inconveniences, like not being able to drive, as well as the challenges of being queer in my family environment, my love for research remains undaunted. Because of my hope to help people like me, I am pursuing a degree in biochemical sciences and forensic biology. I do not take for granted what a privilege my brain is to have and use or how precious it is to be able to love freely and openly. Since I’ve had those things restricted or taken away completely I take very few things in life for granted. People who waste such things as their time, their love, and their ability to use their minds haven’t learned the true value of life. Life is so precious I wouldn’t dare to waste an hour of it. My greatest hope in life is to help others with my career and my personal life. To do this finances are a necessity and I could not be doing it if it were not for people who have already had so much faith in me, so it is for this reason that I ask you to support me on my mission.

Before I can remember, my ideas and words were interrupted by terrifying electrical shocks. I would briefly become unconscious, waking up several moments later in utter confusion, scarcely knowing where I was, and having lost track of my thoughts. These episodes made it hard for me to focus in school, and my resulting failure was painfully embarrassing. It became obvious that I had some mysterious learning disability. Eventually, I was diagnosed with Absence Epilepsy. I had to make several adjustments to my daily life. Once I was put on medications and changed a few things about my daily routine, enough seizures were controlled to begin improving my mind. I had to exert a massive amount of intense labor to bring my social and common-sense intelligence to where it needed to be, and I was in a hurry to make progress. I attacked my studies, doing whole grades over the summers and quickly losing my good eyesight straining my eyes over books late at night. I was very inquisitive and asked as many questions of my homeschool co-op science teacher as she would let me before becoming irritated. I engulfed myself in books, I was particularly interested in science and liked to research topics I had learned in school after class. Diversity is a double-edged blade that gives identity and originality as much as it does searing pain and trauma. Though I am still challenged by epilepsy and some of its inconveniences, like not being able to drive, as well as the challenges of being queer in my family environment, my love for research remains undaunted. Because of my hope to help people like me, I am pursuing a degree in biochemical sciences and forensic biology. I do not take for granted what a privilege my brain is to have and use or how precious it is to be able to love freely and openly. Since I’ve had those things restricted or taken away completely I take very few things in life for granted. People who waste such things as their time, their love, and their ability to use their minds haven’t learned the true value of life. Life is so precious I wouldn’t dare to waste an hour of it. My greatest hope in life is to help others with my career and my personal life. To do this finances are a necessity and I could not be doing it if it were not for people who have already had so much faith in me, so it is for this reason that I ask you to support me on my mission.

Before I can remember, my ideas and words were interrupted by terrifying electrical shocks. I would briefly become unconscious, waking up several moments later in utter confusion, scarcely knowing where I was, and having lost track of my thoughts. It became obvious that I had some learning disability. Eventually, I was diagnosed with Absence Epilepsy. Once I was put on medications and changed a few things about my daily routine, enough seizures were controlled to begin improving my mind. I had to exert a massive amount of intense labor to bring my social and common-sense intelligence to where it needed to be, and I was in a hurry to make progress. I attacked my studies, doing whole grades over the summers and quickly losing my good eyesight straining my eyes over books late at night. I was very inquisitive and asked as many questions of my homeschool co-op science teacher as she would let me before becoming irritated. I engulfed myself in books, I was particularly interested in science and liked to research topics I had learned in school after class. Because of my hope to help people like me, I am pursuing a degree in biochemical sciences and forensic biology. I do not take for granted what a privilege my brain is to have and use or how precious it is to be able to love freely and openly. My greatest hope in life is to help others with my career and my personal life. To do this finances are a necessity and I could not be doing it if it were not for people who have already had so much faith in me, so it is for this reason that I ask you to support me on my mission.

Empathy is a natural feeling that we don't always have time for. It takes a lot of energy to be epithetic but for most of us it isn't very difficult. It's like walking ten miles without a break, most of us can do it with relative ease but it's still exhausting. Sometimes it is hard for me to hear others complaining about their problems because I have been through so many myself other people's often sound very small in comparison. For me it is unfathomable that there are people out there who have never attempted suicide or abused themselves in some way. How easy their lives must be and I slightly resent them for it. Humans like to play this silly little game of who has more hurt. If a person has family issues that they are struggling with, then at least they have a family. If a person has miscreed then people will tell them, "well at least you know you can get pregnant." If a person has only one leg, people will tell them it's still better than none. Humans like this game a lot but it undermines what people have been through. What's actually therapeutic is crying with people and feeling their pain. I would say the stereotypical things people say about empathy aren't really enough, what people find healing is real tears. Maybe we can't carry their burden but we can help carry their sorrow and sorrow is better when many people carry it.

Hello, my name is Anna. A thing I did to improve the lives of the elderly was working as a nurse's aid for a few years.

Before I can remember, my ideas and words were interrupted by terrifying electrical shocks. I would briefly become unconscious, waking up several moments later in utter confusion, scarcely knowing where I was, and having lost track of my thoughts. These episodes made it hard for me to focus in school, and my resulting failure was painfully embarrassing. Eventually, I was diagnosed with Absence Epilepsy. Once I was put on medications and changed a few things about my daily routine, enough seizures were controlled to begin improving my mind. I had to exert a massive amount of intense labor to bring my social and common-sense intelligence to where it needed to be, and I was in a hurry to make progress. I attacked my studies, doing whole grades over the summers and quickly losing my good eyesight straining my eyes over books late at night. I was very inquisitive and asked as many questions of my homeschool co-op science teacher as she would let me before becoming irritated. I engulfed myself in books, I was particularly interested in science and liked to research topics I had learned in school after class. I do not take for granted what a privilege my brain is to have and use or how precious it is to be able to love freely and openly. Since I’ve had those things restricted or taken away completely I take very few things in life for granted. My greatest hope in life is to help others with my career and my personal life. To do this finances are a necessity and I could not be doing it if it were not for people who have already had so much faith in me, so it is for this reason that I ask you to support me on my mission.

CRISPR, it's a system of genetic editing and very new and exciting in the biology world.

Before I can remember, my ideas and words were interrupted by terrifying electrical shocks. I would briefly become unconscious, waking up several moments later in utter confusion, scarcely knowing where I was, and having lost track of my thoughts. These episodes made it hard for me to focus in school, and my resulting failure was painfully embarrassing. It became obvious that I had some mysterious learning disability. Eventually, I was diagnosed with Absence Epilepsy. I had to make several adjustments to my daily life. Once I was put on medications and changed a few things about my daily routine, enough seizures were controlled to begin improving my mind. I had to exert a massive amount of intense labor to bring my social and common-sense intelligence to where it needed to be, and I was in a hurry to make progress. I attacked my studies, doing whole grades over the summers and quickly losing my good eyesight straining my eyes over books late at night. I was very inquisitive and asked as many questions of my homeschool co-op science teacher as she would let me before becoming irritated. I engulfed myself in books, I was particularly interested in science and liked to research topics I had learned in school after class. The thing I find most exciting about STEM is discovering new things and solving puzzles. In a poetic way, it's discovering the secrets of the world and realizing just how small we are and how little we know. Diversity is a double-edged blade that gives identity and originality as much as it does searing pain and trauma. Though I am still challenged by epilepsy and some of its inconveniences, like not being able to drive, as well as the challenges of being queer in my family environment, my love for research remains undaunted. Because of my hope to help people like me, I am pursuing a degree in biochemical sciences and forensic biology. I do not take for granted what a privilege my brain is to have and use or how precious it is to be able to love freely and openly. Since I’ve had those things restricted or taken away completely I take very few things in life for granted. People who waste such things as their time, their love, and their ability to use their minds haven’t learned the true value of life. Life is so precious I wouldn’t dare to waste an hour of it. My greatest hope in life is to help others with my career and my personal life. To do this finances are a necessity and I could not be doing it if it were not for people who have already had so much faith in me, so it is for this reason that I ask you to support me on my mission.

Before I can remember, my ideas and words were interrupted by terrifying electrical shocks. I would briefly become unconscious, waking up several moments later in utter confusion, scarcely knowing where I was, and having lost track of my thoughts. These episodes made it hard for me to focus in school, and my resulting failure was painfully embarrassing. It became obvious that I had some mysterious learning disability. Eventually, I was diagnosed with Absence Epilepsy. I had to make several adjustments to my daily life. Once I was put on medications and changed a few things about my daily routine, enough seizures were controlled to begin improving my mind. I had to exert a massive amount of intense labor to bring my social and common-sense intelligence to where it needed to be, and I was in a hurry to make progress. I attacked my studies, doing whole grades over the summers and quickly losing my good eyesight straining my eyes over books late at night. I was very inquisitive and asked as many questions of my homeschool co-op science teacher as she would let me before becoming irritated. I engulfed myself in books, I was particularly interested in science and liked to research topics I had learned in school after class. Diversity is a double-edged blade that gives identity and originality as much as it does searing pain and trauma. Though I am still challenged by epilepsy and some of its inconveniences, like not being able to drive, as well as the challenges of being queer in my family environment, my love for research remains undaunted. Because of my hope to help people like me, I am pursuing a degree in biochemical sciences and forensic biology. I do not take for granted what a privilege my brain is to have and use or how precious it is to be able to love freely and openly. Since I’ve had those things restricted or taken away completely I take very few things in life for granted. People who waste such things as their time, their love, and their ability to use their minds haven’t learned the true value of life. Life is so precious I wouldn’t dare to waste an hour of it. My greatest hope in life is to help others with my career and my personal life. To do this finances are a necessity and I could not be doing it if it were not for people who have already had so much faith in me, so it is for this reason that I ask you to support me on my mission.

Hello, I'm Anna Hilton. I struggle with mental health a lot, I have PTSD and anxiety. I got help from a therapist but it's also important to look for advice from other people. I saw it prudent to get advice from the best source imaginable, holocaust survivors. Many of them wrote books to help other people who were struggling with mental health by explaining how they got through everything they did. My favorite advice comes from Victor Frankel who explained that there is no greater courage than the courage to suffer. Life can take away everything from us except our ability to chose how to respond. Rather than aiming for success, I try my best to do every day whatever it is Life demands of me. My demands I have for Life are meaningless, Life never promised me happiness, and even though there are people who it seems G-d has blessed with immeasurable luck, Life didn't promise them happiness either. Success happens when we refuse to let the traumas in our life take more of our life away from us.

Hello, I'm Anna Hilton. Being someone who struggles with metal health a lot, I saw it prudent to get advice from the best source imaginable, holocaust survivors. Many of them wrote books to help other people who were struggling with mental health by explaining how they got through everything they did. My favorite advice comes from Victor Frankel who explained that there is no greater courage than the courage to suffer. Life can take away everything from us except our ability to chose how to respond.

Before I can remember, my ideas and words were interrupted by terrifying electrical shocks. I would briefly become unconscious, waking up several moments later in utter confusion, scarcely knowing where I was, and having lost track of my thoughts. These episodes made it hard for me to focus in school, and my resulting failure was painfully embarrassing. It became obvious that I had some mysterious learning disability. Eventually, I was diagnosed with Absence Epilepsy. I had to make several adjustments to my daily life. Once I was put on medications and changed a few things about my daily routine, enough seizures were controlled to begin improving my mind. I had to exert a massive amount of intense labor to bring my social and common-sense intelligence to where it needed to be, and I was in a hurry to make progress. I attacked my studies, doing whole grades over the summers and quickly losing my good eyesight straining my eyes over books late at night. I was very inquisitive and asked as many questions of my homeschool co-op science teacher as she would let me before becoming irritated. I engulfed myself in books, I was particularly interested in science and liked to research topics I had learned in school after class. Diversity is a double-edged blade that gives identity and originality as much as it does searing pain and trauma. Though I am still challenged by epilepsy and some of its inconveniences, like not being able to drive, as well as the challenges of being queer in my family environment, my love for research remains undaunted. Because of my hope to help people like me, I am pursuing a degree in biochemical sciences and forensic biology. I do not take for granted what a privilege my brain is to have and use or how precious it is to be able to love freely and openly. Since I’ve had those things restricted or taken away completely I take very few things in life for granted. People who waste such things as their time, their love, and their ability to use their minds haven’t learned the true value of life. Life is so precious I wouldn’t dare to waste an hour of it. My greatest hope in life is to help others with my career and my personal life. To do this finances are a necessity and I could not be doing it if it were not for people who have already had so much faith in me, so it is for this reason that I ask you to support me on my mission.

Before I can remember, my ideas and words were interrupted by terrifying electrical shocks. I would briefly become unconscious, waking up several moments later in utter confusion, scarcely knowing where I was, and having lost track of my thoughts. These episodes made it hard for me to focus in school, and my resulting failure was painfully embarrassing. It became obvious that I had some mysterious learning disability. Eventually, I was diagnosed with Absence Epilepsy. I had to make several adjustments to my daily life. Once I was put on medications and changed a few things about my daily routine, enough seizures were controlled to begin improving my mind. I had to exert a massive amount of intense labor to bring my social and common-sense intelligence to where it needed to be, and I was in a hurry to make progress. I attacked my studies, doing whole grades over the summers and quickly losing my good eyesight straining my eyes over books late at night. I was very inquisitive and asked as many questions of my homeschool co-op science teacher as she would let me before becoming irritated. I engulfed myself in books, I was particularly interested in science and liked to research topics I had learned in school after class. Diversity is a double-edged blade that gives identity and originality as much as it does searing pain and trauma. Though I am still challenged by epilepsy and some of its inconveniences, like not being able to drive, as well as the challenges of being queer in my family environment, my love for research remains undaunted. Because of my hope to help people like me, I am pursuing a degree in biochemical sciences and forensic biology. I do not take for granted what a privilege my brain is to have and use or how precious it is to be able to love freely and openly. I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do so I took several online assessments and answering those questions really made me think a lot more about what I actually liked and what I was good at. I think people don't often think about those things until they are asked. The assessment told me I should probably go into science or medicine. I already really liked science and I had completed a course for a nurse aid so I thought biochemistry would be a really good choice. Since I’ve had those things restricted or taken away completely I take very few things in life for granted. People who waste such things as their time, their love, and their ability to use their minds haven’t learned the true value of life. Life is so precious I wouldn’t dare to waste an hour of it. My greatest hope in life is to help others with my career and my personal life. To do this finances are a necessity and I could not be doing it if it were not for people who have already had so much faith in me, so it is for this reason that I ask you to support me on my mission.

Before I can remember, my ideas and words were interrupted by terrifying electrical shocks. I would briefly become unconscious, waking up several moments later in utter confusion, scarcely knowing where I was, and having lost track of my thoughts. These episodes made it hard for me to focus in school, and my resulting failure was painfully embarrassing. It became obvious that I had some mysterious learning disability. Eventually, I was diagnosed with Absence Epilepsy. I had to make several adjustments to my daily life. Once I was put on medications and changed a few things about my daily routine, enough seizures were controlled to begin improving my mind. I had to exert a massive amount of intense labor to bring my social and common-sense intelligence to where it needed to be, and I was in a hurry to make progress. I attacked my studies, doing whole grades over the summers and quickly losing my good eyesight straining my eyes over books late at night. I was very inquisitive and asked as many questions of my homeschool co-op science teacher as she would let me before becoming irritated. I engulfed myself in books, I was particularly interested in science and liked to research topics I had learned in school after class. Diversity is a double-edged blade that gives identity and originality as much as it does searing pain and trauma. Though I am still challenged by epilepsy and some of its inconveniences, like not being able to drive, as well as the challenges of being queer in my family environment, my love for research remains undaunted. Because of my hope to help people like me, I am pursuing a degree in biochemical sciences and forensic biology. I do not take for granted what a privilege my brain is to have and use or how precious it is to be able to love freely and openly. Since I’ve had those things restricted or taken away completely I take very few things in life for granted. People who waste such things as their time, their love, and their ability to use their minds haven’t learned the true value of life. Life is so precious I wouldn’t dare to waste an hour of it. My greatest hope in life is to help others with my career and my personal life. To do this finances are a necessity and I could not be doing it if it were not for people who have already had so much faith in me, so it is for this reason that I ask you to support me on my mission.

Hello, I'm Anna Hilton, a biochemistry student at UNL. I've been reading a lot of books recently, it's my favorite pass time, and my most recent book has been "Man's Search for Meaning" by Victor Frankel, a Holocaust survivor. In the book he explains that what people in the camps feared the most was not leaving anything behind or having done anything they liked to remember. Victor explains that humans can suffer through just about anything as long as their suffering has meaning, once the suffering has no meaning then people are far more likely to give in to despair. However, making life about finding positive impact or leaving something behind is a fragile way to structure one's life and to find meaning in life. Pandemics come, disability comes, depression and despair come and all hopes of success and leaving behind something positive are shattered, and those things always come. Life is pain and difficulty, anyone who says differently is selling something. A life created around positive impact is likely to shatter and despair set in after the first signs of failure. Far more powerful, I think, is to acknowledge despite how sad it is that every life is meaningful, every moment of our lives is meaningful, for the simple fact that we were all born. despite unfortunate circumstances great or small as Frankel says, we must suffer courageously whatever life demands of us. Living with courage is the first and most crucial step if positive impact on the world if it is to be attained at all. Just being the point where negativity stops is a very positive impact during Corona times. The next step is my mind children: my school, the natural compaction I have for others that I hope to use in a medical setting one day. On a more personal level, I was born with very severe epilepsy and it has always been on my heart to help kids who are like I was, that's why I'm getting a biochemistry degree, I hope I would be able to either be a doctor or work in the pharmaceutical industry as a biochemist. Those are all how I plan on leaving something positive but they aren't my life's necessity. I think a lot of people in my generation make their whole lives about positive impact, about changing the world, climate change, social issues etc. but are a little too scared of suffering through things with courage. Making life about positive impact is a fragile way to shape one's life. I would challenge everyone to suffer through everything, especially the pandemic, with bravery and courage and positive impact will follow.

Hello, My name is Anna Hilton, When I was born with epilepsy and correlating low muscle tone, I felt very early on that I was somehow a disappointment to my parents. Surely, having a baby that could not walk until she was three was nothing to rejoice over, it's a serious concern, but many disabled people feel personally that they had done something to insult their parents. It was no small deal for me as I got disproportionately less amounts of love from my family as the rest of my siblings and I was beaten every day for small offences. It was not so much the beatings that hurt but rather the pure injustice of hitting me for eating my soup too quickly or too slow, saying something that was too smart or too stupid, occasionally running into people because of my short seizures. Everything I did was interpreted as disrespectful to my parents and I grew to believe my entire existence was an insult to them. I had trouble sleeping and I prayed every night that my parents might love me because every day was filled with beatings, and shouting and stealing food and getting caught stealing food because I would try to avoid shoutings and beatings at the dinner table. There was this person at the cult like messianic church that my family went to who took great pleasure in seeing "the fear of G-d" in my eyes as they groped me inappropriately. I was maybe six or seven and I have little doubt that regular experience informed much of my adult sexuality but then it was completely unbearable and would induce more seizures and moments of hysteria at home. All this happened to a little girl who was still sucking her fingers and carrying around stuffed animals. I think of myself in the third person sometimes and feel sorry for her. I got on medications when I was about ten and things got better for me for a while, I was able to think and do my school work exceptionally well. My rather cold hearted family understood that I would most likely develop PTSD and got me a special device to help me control my seizures and emotions better. To their credit, it was a very thoughtful and expensive gift but I developed PTSD anyway after I came out to my parents as queer and they finally told me to my face that they wished I had never been born. I had been waiting to hear those words my whole life, hoping they weren't true, doing my best to be a good, obedient, and smart child but none of it was good enough and I got PTSD. It was like reliving every bad thing I had ever been through every moment of the day. I'm still recovering and I'm in therapy now and I am very good at school, school and books were a bit of a safe place for me. I'm a life long learner, I really love learning and as you can see, I'm tough as nails. I think I've been hugely impacted by my learning disability and that's why I don't take learning for granted.

To roughly quote Viktor Frankl, a famous Holocaust survivor, there is no greater courage than the courage to suffer. I do not have this courage a lot of the time, I am very unwilling to suffer despite my persisting problems that induce my suffering but it's not like I ever had a choice: I didn't chose to be born an epileptic who couldn't walk, or into an environment that abused me for small offenses, I didn't chose to be molested as a child, have my genuine faith manipulated and used against me, or PTSD, or the fact that I will never be able to have a child, those were never things that I could decide for myself and yet I've been obliged to accept them. Life always has things that shape who we are when we don't want them to. I've prayed to Life many times "no more, I can't take anymore," and those kinds of prayers are never answered the way we want them to be. Life always demands that we be courageous because life is pain and whoever says differently is selling something. If you, my reader, have never been traumatized (unlikely because you are probably older than I) then you will be, pain is as constant and reliable as death and taxes. I've accepted this like accepting a challenge to a wrestling match, or accepting a marriage proposal that Life gives me like I'm taking a wedding vow. I solemnly swear that I will never stop fighting despair by means of giving Life radicle acceptance and having the courage, the audacity, to suffer.

Hello, my name is Anna Hilton and I am very ambitious but I think ambition isn't good enough to get through the current pandemic mentally healthy. The hardest part about it is not knowing when it will end and losing hope or suffering from the delusion that all life will be like this in the future. Never the less we all demand particular things out of life: food, water, happiness, hope, and if we are very lucky, ambition. Life has made no such promise to us to provide those things how ever much we demand them, instead life has countless demands for us. I want to travel with my career and see new places, hopefully learn a second language. I've thought about working as a wine chemist or husband, I think I would like that job very much, I've thought about being a bench scientist and working my way up to a new discovery. I am very happy with the list but I think about far more regularly about necessities. Sometimes I'm not sure when I'm going to eat next so I to spend my day resting, to conserve energy praying for my own hungry soul and constantly dreaming about recipes and the good food I'm going to make once I have enough money for food. But it is better to make a list of things life needs me to do: go to school, finish my paper, keep my habitation clean, etc. No matter how hungry I am, I can still do those things, they aren't too hard for me and give me more hope and curiosity for the future. I have no doubt I will do some of the things I've listed because I'm always focused on just the next step, putting one foot in front of the other.

Hello! My name is Anna Grace which is a little redundant if you know Hebrew because Anna means "gracious, merciful or forgiving." I have twice the grace other people with the name Anna do. Parents name their kids things like that because that's what they hope they will become and I am that to a fault. I have a very big heart and I get really burnt out sometimes. I like to talk to people and for whatever reason they just open up to me and I always comfort them. Sometimes I have no idea how big my impact is because it's just natural for me. There was this one girl in my dorm a few years ago who I would just talk to, I didn't think it was anything special, but I learned a couple of months after moving out from a mutual friend that she actually credited me for saving her life because she was going to commit suicide. Going through hard things myself I've learned that the most healing thing you can do for someone who is hurting is cry with them. People like to play comparison games of who has it harder to put things in perspective, people in pain don't need that, they need tears. I've had a number of odd jobs over the years but I spent several years at a nursing home as a nurse's assistant. It was very educational to talk to old people, my generation really dislikes old people but that's far from how I was taught to see them and was this able to learn things that my peers weren't. I don't think that love and kindness is a spoon theory thing. We're all running low on spoons due to COVID but giving might be the best way to heal.

I have a mentor who told me once that I was an inspiration to women in science, I was very confused. I’m not an activist in the modern sense of the word and I’m not much of a feminist either. I am slow of speech and don’t give like to give a spiel that makes people angry. So why did she say that? I’m not entirely sure but I’m more of a writer and a doer than other feminists, if I even deserve that name. I don’t know how to empower women, truth be told I just like science and the idea of a promising career, I didn’t do it to prove anything. Nothing needed to be proven! I know I’m capable of passing hard classes so why shouldn’t I? People got inspiration from my spirit and it really freaked me out. I’m not sure what I did but now my sisters are wanting to go into science or medicine and several of the people I knew in high school told me I helped them pull their grades up and feel inspired to start college. What did I even do? Nothing, just be my typical nerdy, stubborn self. I don’t think women need empowerment, I think they need inspiration. They’re already powerful and can do whatever’s in the realm of human possibility, that’s not a belief, it’s a fact. Women also have power men don’t. In Judaism we believe that women have a closer connection with the Devine, it’s not a superstition it’s an analogy to how women hold the keys to life and birth. They already have all the power life has. They don’t need to be empowered, they are powerful. They just need someone to remind them every so often because the Gentile world is patriarchal and likes to ignore women’s connection to the Devine but it is there and always has been there and always will be there. I don’t make any demands of men except that they not get in my way. I would request that women to have a symbol, an inspirational voice, something femininely strong that embodies our values and ambition.

Hello, I’m Anna Hilton and my life has been a Russian novel. A year ago I went to the funeral of a woman who was pretty much like a grandma to me and my siblings. She passed away from COVID and although we all knew it was going to happen, no one who loves someone is ever ready for death. My family and our friends helped ourselves to the funeral food and started to relax a bit and share stories about what we remembered. I remember tea parties she had for me and my sisters, the Sabbath dinners, and the history lessons because she was also our history teacher for a while. I remembered how incredibly stubborn she thought I was, diligent was the word she used and I have no doubt it is true. I can be impressively even unreasonably resolved and stiff necked but such is the nature of temperament, I suppose, our best characteristics are so often also our worst. I’m not sure if I was born that way of if the number of traumas I had to face as a young child made me that way but I was born with severe epilepsy. It isn’t very uncommon among my people who are Messianic Jews but that’s very…complicated situation. Seizures are painful things and even worse when they take bits of your memory and spirit. I had difficulty retaining any information and was in so much pain all the time. Predictably, I lived through childhood and now I’m an adult and I’m writing this but only by shear willpower and indulging in my unique and quirky interests. I think I’ve learned that getting through any trauma, because I’ve had several since then, I need to hold on to myself, indulge in my personality and sense of identity.

As the eldest sister in a family of seven children, I think I can say from the bottom of my heart that leadership isn't always something that you want. I don't mind babies, I love babies, they cry, they poop, they vomit all over you, I'm so used to that I don't even mind, what bothers me and what I find hardest about being a leader is when I see this look of disappointment and betrayal in their face. Sometimes they don't have the analytical skills to understand that I can't control everything: when they stub their toes or get a really bad scratch they don't always understand that I can't fix it, sometimes they think I know everything and I don't, sometimes they don't understand that I have other commitments in my life that aren't them. That's all fine, of course, they're small children, their brains aren't all the way developed yet but it's the hardest thing for me because I don't know what to do in those moments. Do I try to explain to them? What if they're too young to understand? I came out to my family as gay a couple of years ago and my parents didn't take it well at first and they didn't let me see my siblings for over a year. I was heartbroken but I was even more upset when I was finally allowed to see my little siblings because they treated me like I had abandoned them. They're too little to understand that it was not my fault, my parents had cut me off, and to me, that's the hardest thing I've ever had to deal with as a leader in my family. I think being a good leader is doing what's best for the people you lead and being able to be a good communicator. What's best for my siblings is that I'm there for them and that they can understand eventually that it wasn't my fault and I always wanted to be with them and I would have if I could. Maybe I can't communicate that with them right now because they wouldn't understand so I will wait, I'll listen to their frustration and even possible hatred for me, not take it too seriously or personally and wait for their brains to develop. Being a leader is important to me because that's the relationship I have with my family. I have to take care of the kids, I have to be the adult and deal with my parents calling me elementary school insults about my sexuality and not get upset or start a fight, I can't just be another sibling in the family or even a child when I was one, that's just not the way the world I was born into wanted me to be.

Most of my friends and family would probably describe me as stubborn or determined. I don’t really mind those kinds of adjectives because I’m tough as nails. I grew up in a messianic Jewish community and I’m fairly confident that whenever God gets too bored He plans some mischief that I have to suffer through. I was born with extreme epilepsy and it had to be the kind of epilepsy that both affects my personality rather like autism while being extremely tricky to diagnose, so I waited. I listened to people shout at me for things I couldn’t control and I said nothing and I waited. I had seizures in my sleep and while I was talking to people and while I was thinking and I just waited. After ten years of waiting I was put on medication and diagnosed but to this day I wonder why it couldn’t have just been autism. People know what autism is and can enter their world and understand how they feel and how their mind works. I wouldn’t say I struggle relating to my peers, I’m pretty socially intelligent, my peers struggle to relate to me and have very lot patients or grace for me. Being able to wait even in an uncomfortable situation is invaluable and my specially. I’m willing to be uncomfortable to get what I want and most people aren’t, and that’s why I’ve been able to stay in college during quarantine, turn in assignments when I had no idea where my next meal was coming from, and when my heart was breaking for not being able to see my siblings. I’m very, very tough only because patients is so important to getting what I want and living through difficult situations.

My roommate and I were out well past midnight studying for an exam. I actually like school and seeing my roommate be so smart, it was the only thing I could admire about her while the very walls were scanning us for abnormalities. We were being watched all the time were we lived so we went to the gardens were there weren't many cameras or people and finally breathed in each other's arms, just breathed with our noses touching. A tear rolled down my face. Somehow this needed to last forever.

Hello! Personally, I wish everyone everywhere was happy and they all had friends, food, and water. I don't think I have the heart to change much about my home town, I'd like it to be exactly as I remember it before COVID with no one's grandma buried, none of it's unique shops closed, all of it's music, lights, and general buzz. I love my home town's small businesses and I shop at them regularly, whenever I think about my town, I think of the small business because you can't find places like them anywhere else. They are my friends, I know how they are doing, I know how their cousins are doing, their sails, etc. and I would like them to not have to worry about money or closing so much. Watching so many of my town's small business close for COVID was like watching my city die. Walking in the Hay Market with non of my friends there was one of the creepiest things I had ever seen in my life. They could have all died for all I knew and since no one was around I couldn't get any news on how they all were or their families. Now that some of them are open again I shop there whenever I can and buy their stuff and try to encourage all my college friends to do the same because they need all the business they can get and having them compete with large stores or online stores isn't very fair. I don't want to live in a city where you can just copy and past all the shops and business from every other city into mine. I want to be able to interact with people, people who know me and I know them and their families and their unique products you can't get anywhere else. If I were to change something about the country and my local community it would be that everyone and the government would value small companies more. I think we would all be happier if we all knew our neighbors and supported our neighbors, and the neighbors would be more happy to get our money and be able to live comfortably doing what their heart wants.

Hello, I've been waiting a long time for someone to ask me about my passion project! I'm a biochemistry and forensics student, I'm also a huge bookworm and I love writing and illustrating children's science books. They are all handmade watercolor paintings originally made for my younger siblings who were homeschooled and I had to teach them a lot about science and I wanted something beautiful that they could learn from so I wrote and illustrated a book for them. I am the eldest daughter in my huge family with seven children and constantly had to take care of my little siblings and teach them. It was a lot of responsibility but I wanted to do the best for them that I could. I love them so much so I'm always applying to scholarships like these because my family doesn't have the money to send all of us kids to school and I want to give my family the best opportunity that I can at higher education.

Hello, My name is Anna Hilton and I have been waiting for years for someone to ask me what I have learned from the books I've read! You see, I'm not just an award-winning STEM scholar, I'm also a huge bookworm: I've read everything from Shakespeare to Dostoyevsky to the Art of War and obviously good reads like Tolkien and Harry Potter. It's tricky to stay focused and not just go off on a tangent about my favorite books but I think the most valuable moral and social lessons come form the Russian authors that I've read. Literature, especially novels, has a very different purpose in Russia than they do in the west. Here, novels are mostly for entertainment or escapism, but in Russia where people are limited in what they can say about the government and society, they serve a more socially critical purpose. Tolstoy had a very interesting social philosophy, especially from his novel Anna Karenina, you can see that he thinks that is in all of our capabilities to be empathetic to anyone, even social outcasts or stiff and prudish characters like Anna's husband. His point is that we typically dislike people like that but that is only because we don't see things from their perspective and if we did, then no matter how bad they were, we could empathize with them. I think this influences how I see medicine as well as forensics which are my two fields. In medicine we have a philosophy to always help and care for the patients' needs above everything else, it's the Hippocratic oath that we've all taken and live by. We believe that all life is important and valuable and if we can't empathize with them that simply means there is something we don't understand.

Hello! For a little bit of context, I've been diagnosed with PTSD, my life has been really hard and that makes my self-care look really different from other people's. I have a disorder that causes seizures and chronic muscle fatigue so I depend on my good friends more than my pride would like to admit. Disabled people, in general, are very proud but I have to let people help me and that is very difficult because I'm a smart girl and afraid of judgment. Being around other people brings me a lot more joy than it did before COVID. I like to go on walks and a lot of my friends know I have chronic muscle fatigue so they don't walk too quickly for me and they drive me places because I can't drive due to my epilepsy. Being able to hug people too is very therapeutic at this point too. My friends worry about me because I live all by myself so they like to pull me into really long hugs as if reassuring themselves that I'm still here. I was at high risk so they lose their minds if I so much as choke while I'm around them. I'm not sure when something so simple as touching another human being became so important to my mental health but it is and putting myself in situations is probably the best thing I do for my mental health now, more so than reading a book or having quiet time to myself or meditating.

Hello! For a little bit of context, I've been diagnosed with PTSD, my life has been really hard and that makes my self-care look really different from other people's. I have a disorder that causes seizures and chronic muscle fatigue so I depend on my good friends more than my pride would like to admit. Disabled people, in general, are very proud but I have to let people help me and that is very difficult because I'm a smart girl and afraid of judgment. Being around other people brings me a lot more joy than it did before COVID. I like to go on walks and a lot of my friends know I have chronic muscle fatigue so they don't walk too quickly for me and they drive me places because I can't drive due to my epilepsy. Being able to hug people too is very therapeutic at this point too. My friends worry about me because I live all by myself so they like to pull me into really long hugs as if reassuring themselves that I'm still here. I was at high risk so they lose their minds if I so much as choke while I'm around them. I'm not sure when something so simple as touching another human being became so important to my mental health but it is and putting myself in situations is probably the best thing I do for my mental health now, more so than reading a book or having quiet time to myself or meditating.

Hello, My name is Anna Hilton and I have been waiting for years for someone to ask me what I have learned from the books I've read! You see, I'm not just an award-winning STEM scholar, I'm also a huge bookworm: I've read everything from Shakespeare to Dostoyevsky to the Art of War and obviously good reads like Tolkien and Harry Potter. It's tricky to stay focused and not just go off on a tangent about my favorite books but I think the most valuable moral and social lessons come form the Russian authors that I've read. Literature, especially novels, has a very different purpose in Russia than they do in the west. Here, novels are mostly for entertainment or escapism, but in Russia where people are limited in what they can say about the government and society, they serve a more socially critical purpose. Tolstoy had a very interesting social philosophy, especially from his novel Anna Karenina, you can see that he thinks that is in all of our capabilities to be empathetic to anyone, even social outcasts or stiff and prudish characters like Anna's husband. His point is that we typically dislike people like that but that is only because we don't see things from their perspective and if we did, then no matter how bad they were, we could empathize with them. I think this influences how I see medicine as well as forensics which are my two fields. In medicine we have a philosophy to always help and care for the patients' needs above everything else, it's the Hippocratic oath that we've all taken and live by. We believe that all life is important and valuable and if we can't empathize with them that simply means there is something we don't understand. It's important to know how people think when you're in medicine but especially in forensics where the people to work with are even more difficult, the stakes are typically just as high, and the perpetrators aren't always people we want to show a lot of empathy to or put a lot of effort into understanding their thoughts and feelings, yet we have to not just to figure out their identity (if unknown) but so that justice is carried out in the most humane way we can. Not everyone involved in the criminal justice system has dedicated their hearts to humanity, they know who they are, but that needs to change.

Hello, I'm Anna Hilton and I'm the eldest daughter of Lieutenant Commander Jon Hilton of the US Navy. Having my dad away for much of my life on drill or in Iraq and Afghanistan shaped my character: I got used to traveling all the time and making new friends wherever I went, I also had to be responsible for my five younger siblings and be almost another parent to them. Although I would say most of my career ambitions come from within (the things my heart wants) I never ignore the responsibility I have to my younger siblings. Because we're such a huge family, my parents can't pay for college for all of us, that's why I spend so much time applying for scholarships like this so that my younger siblings can have the best chance at higher education. Another way that it shaped my career ideals is that I really enjoy a nomadic lifestyle: I like traveling, trying new things, and making spontaneous friends; some of my best memories as a child are traveling to different bases with my dad and meeting other families and making friends with their kids. Sometimes the impermanence of our life really got to me and I would cry over friends I would never see again or places that I had to leave that I had fallen in love with, but getting older I realize that even having things for a short time can make them the most beautiful and I feel most myself when I'm in a new situation and I think not feeling pinned down to one thing, in particular, has made me more successful than many of my peers who prefer more to stay in the same situation than taking a risk. I go for more and more ambitious opportunities just about every summer since most students worker positions are made to be temporary. Right now I work for the USDA as a student worker and it's by far the best job I've had and one that a lot of my peers envy, so I'm very glad I took the opportunity and was quick to go to the interview even though I already liked the job I had. Having a nomadic lifestyle as a kid has made me much more of a risk-taker, I believe. I plan on traveling a lot in the future but I also like to keep some degree of permanence in my personal life. I had a domestic partner for a few years and that experience changed me and taught me how good it is to have people around me who are there for me for a long time.

All the other "artsy" kids in my middle school class seemed to have the same set of issues in common, we were all wired differently and we all hated math. There was something inflexible, cold, lizard-like about the subject with very little scope for the imagination that seemed to repel all of us. There was no doubt that any of us were intelligent and yet we struggled to do basic algebra and long division as if it were an entity from Under Land sent to stomp out the creative juices of wonder that sprang from our minds. We were all melodramatic about it and treated math as if the idea itself were made by machine in a cold, heartless 19th-century factory by starving children with short hair and no shoes. For me, I am not sure when I hated it less, maybe it was when I started doing algebra and the ideas became a little more abstract and complicated, maybe it was because I started using abacus beads so that I could conceptually manipulate numbers in my head, but something clicked. It was like Hellen Keller when she first touched water. Math was a language, it had grammatical structures such as PEMDAS, and symbols that represented real objects, relationships, orientations, and questions. Sometimes the objects or nouns of each question aren't a real object, more of an idea, like how the square root of minus one is an idea not a representation of a physical object. The analogy I had in my mind is how non-concrete nouns like love or anger are feelings and ideas, not physical objects, similarly imaginary numbers are ideas that exist but don't have anything physical in real life that it represents. As math gets progressively more difficult and abstract with our age and level of education, the people who are "good" or "bad" at math slowly swap places. Difficult math takes a great deal of creative skill and pliable imagination whereas easy math only requires the ability to follow instructions. A lot of naturally creative people are somewhere on a spectrum of finding all instruction and guidance intolerable to finding only the instructions that don't have logical explanation irritating. What drew me to math and what I find so interesting about it now is the room my imagination has to move around in. One of the most astonishing things I find about math particularly calculus is that anything in our world can be expressed in 2D arithmetic. Does it mean that life is a simulation? An anime written by whatever gods or forces control the codes of our lives? It's possible and I am here for it.

Hello, I grew up in a small army of a family. There were so many of us that we rarely socialized with each other when we could enjoy quiet and rare moments of loneliness, but there was one time when my mom decided all the girls needed to hang out. She took my sisters and me downtown and the lights, the artwork, the Bohemian bead embroidery, made me fall in love with my city. My sisters didn't say anything to each other at first, then some bright-colored pottery caught my sister's eye. It was inspired by African sculpture but also abstract and modern looking. My sister looked at it for a very long time and asked me what I thought about its elements and colors. I had no idea she had any interest or taste for art and it was good to see her in a new environment. She had the reputation in our family of being the bossy older sibling who was always correcting the little ones, a bit self-righteously in my opinion, but I hadn't seen her in any other environment so I mistakingly thought that being the bossy older sister was her whole personality. I like how art will bring out a fresh side to people you've known for years and let you know them more. 2. Sometimes I like to remember the last day of my English class that I took while I was dual-enrolled, my English teacher told me she admired my potential and asked me what I wanted to do with my life. I was embarrassed that a teacher thought so highly of me and I didn't even know what I wanted to do so I told her I was still deciding. I tend to struggle with self-esteem so hearing someone tell me I could do whatever I wanted reminds me to have faith in myself whenever I remember that. 3. I was very sheltered as a kid so I think I owe the galleries that I frequented in my city for exposing me to how different ethnic minorities in my state saw themselves and their experiences. My family is Roma Bohemian (gypsy) so it made my heart happy to see a lot of Roma art, artists, and witches in my area as well as Native and Black art that spoke volumes about how they saw themselves and their culture. I think art and the celebration of culture is a very positive thing for a community to invest in, it brings awareness to different events, ideas, and people as well as a better sense of community. Personally, I really like the idea of an art and literature cafe, where local artists and writers can sell their work at a local coffee shop where people can come and socialize. 4. I was devastated when I had to drop a class last year because I wasn't doing well in it. COVID had shut everything down, I was overwhelmed with having to find a new place to live outside of the dorms, and I eventually got and recovering from COVID myself. I felt really upset because it seemed like I couldn't trust myself academically anymore and that the carefree college life I had dreamed of for years was a wishful dream again. Academically, I think I needed to fail really hard and retake the class just to learn that having to retake a class after dropping out mid-semester isn't the end of the world and not something I needed to stress over as much as I did.

I have a lot of courage, I do the things a lot of other people shy away from or put off, but often they don't seem like choices to me. I had to experience culture shock multiple times at very young ages because my dad was in the military and we were constantly moving and I had to come out of the closest even though my family was very homophobic. There is no doubt who I am in my mind when push comes to shove, I'm adaptable, resilient, brave, and independent and those are things I have to be on a daily basis. But they weren't really choices. I didn't choose to be gay or have a family that constantly moved around, I just adapted to those circumstances without compromise or quarter. I know who I am when life gets tough and it too often is but I also want to get to know myself when I'm not so stressed. I'm always trying to figure out what kind of person I am in terms of taste and habits, they're softer questions than my core character which I know very well, but to me sensibility is important. I have no idea what kind of music I should be listening to, or what style of clothes to wear, what kind of charisma and manners work best for me, etc. Most of my daily fun comes from looking into these things and trying to self-express and show my quality.

When I was a tween my entire family had come down with scarlet fever. We were a huge family and I was the pseudo mother to several younger siblings. I started having fever dreams of my baby sister's hot face in my hand when I remembered that my mom had just checked on me about an hour ago so if she was up then she had probably checked on the others as well. My mom had smothered my lethargic face with kisses when she came to check on me. She was very Bohemian and it's important to incorporate kisses in any interaction with very close friends or relatives. She left me alone with a glass of water and one of her old quilts in case I got very cold. I must have drifted off to sleep at some point because when I woke up I found my body to be shivering violently with cold. My lips were cracked from dehydration but I was completely paralyzed. It was similar to what some people call sleep paralysis. I felt that maybe I could reach up and grab my quilt or the water but then I would surely pass out. I was terrified, freezing, thirsty, and it took too much energy to shiver and breath. I knew I was getting too close to the doors of death. I decided to go for the quilt and then I remember nothing more until I woke up two days later with my fever finally broken. I'll never forget how terrified and close to death I was. I attribute that moment to why I'm so motivated and ambitious because I don't want to waste any time while I'm alive.

Hello! My name is Anna Hilton, I currently attend the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and I'm getting two degrees, biochemistry, and forensic biology. I've been interested in STEAM for a long time especially in the philosophical way since it helped me develop critical thinking skills when I was a kid. Let me explain, I grew up with absence epilepsy, a very unique disability that our culture isn't as aware of as things like autism so I often compare it to autism because there are a few overlapping symptoms. My problem was that I got very overwhelmed with my own imagination and particularly had trouble grounding myself in things that were true. I was very intelligent but that was part of the problem, I'd lose myself in complete fantasy. It is like that one line from the poem "Wonderland," - "in a friendly chat with bird and beast and half believed it true." I was a bit of an air head which was good until I started having seizures simply from hating the idea of not knowing something. In a lot of ways learning the philosophy of science and math, how we verify that things are true, helped my hyperactive imagination calm down a bit and I started to develop good critical thinking skills that I would use for the rest of my life. My mentor, Gina Matkin, a professor at UNL often tells me that I have a unique perspective and that I'll be a good role model for other women in science someday. I'm not sure what I did to deserve that specific kind of praise, but I trust my mentor. Personally, I feel a little divorced from my gender. When I had very extreme epilepsy, my consciousness or the soul or the awareness, etc. knew that the brain was malfunctioning. Whatever the consciousness is it is different from the body. It is the way it is regardless of what the body is going through or what shape or hormones it has, so I don't really see my body as part of my definition at least not on a personal level, biologically and medically I am a woman. However, I am diverse in a lot of ways and that can inspire people to better themselves and reach their full potential and that is something I would like to do, I would like to be a leader and inspire people in my field or to join my field. A while ago I wrote and illustrated a children's book about photosynthesis for my high school senior project and I enjoyed the process a lot. I like writing and children and illustrating so it is something I'd like to do at least in part during my career. Unfortunately, I wasn't experienced enough as an author to publish my book, the publication process is incredibly complicated, and since I was going into college I didn't have time for it. That's who I am, a little bit. I'm a very ambitious person and I like learning. Sometimes I wonder if I am in over my head because two degrees is a lot especially for someone like me who is sick with epilepsy often but I don't think I am, I keep passing classes and moving forward and now I'm in my junior year so I think that very few things indeed are really impossible for me to do because of my disability. I love all people I wish I could give all people hope.

Before I can remember, my ideas and words were interrupted by terrifying electrical shocks. I would briefly become unconscious, waking up several moments later in utter confusion, scarcely knowing where I was, and having lost track of my thoughts. These episodes made it hard for me to focus in school, and my resulting failure was painfully embarrassing. It became obvious that I had some mysterious learning disability. Eventually, I was diagnosed with Absence Epilepsy. I had to make several adjustments to my daily life. Once I was put on medications and changed a few things about my daily routine, enough seizures were controlled to begin improving my mind. I had to exert a massive amount of intense labor to bring my social and common-sense intelligence to where it needed to be, and I was in a hurry to make progress. I attacked my studies, doing whole grades over the summers and quickly losing my good eyesight straining my eyes over books late at night. I was very inquisitive and asked as many questions of my homeschool co-op science teacher as she would let me before becoming irritated. I engulfed myself in books, I was particularly interested in science and liked to research topics I had learned in school after class. Even though I had already accepted and overcame my epilepsy, there was yet another layer of diversity still to be uncovered and explored. By the time I got to high school, I had suspected for a while that my feelings for the opposite sex were not exactly typical. I paid very little special notice of them other than friendship, and never even thought about dating boys either. I told myself I was too busy to be interested, and I did work very hard all the time, but the truth was that the idea of dating a guy almost never crossed my mind. I became a little embarrassed of this as I got older and people started asking me about my dating life. I had turned down quite a few dates out of disinterest but upon the realization that I had never gone on an official date or kissed a guy, I thought I should not refuse at least once or twice. I went out with some guys I thought I might like, friends of mine I got along well with and had a lot in common, but I felt absolutely nothing other than a little disgusted and audacious. I am a shy person and dislike a lot of attention from people I don’t know, but I decided to try it with people of the same sex. The endearments didn’t seem forced or choreographed anymore, as intrepid and shy as I was they were genuine and precious. I had a hard time admitting it to myself but I couldn’t deny it anymore, I was a queer person. Diversity is a double-edged blade that gives identity and originality as much as it does searing pain and trauma. Though I am still challenged by epilepsy and some of its inconveniences, like not being able to drive, as well as the challenges of being queer in my family environment, my love for research remains undaunted. Because of my hope to help people like me, I am pursuing a degree in biochemical sciences and forensic biology with the hope of getting a master's in behavioral analysis. I do not take for granted what a privilege my brain is to have and use or how precious it is to be able to love freely and openly. Since I’ve had those things restricted or taken away completely I take very few things in life for granted. People who waste such things as their time, their love, and their ability to use their minds haven’t learned the true value of life. Life is so precious I wouldn’t dare to waste an hour of it. My greatest hope in life is to help others with my career and my personal life. To do this finances are a necessity and I could not be doing it if it were not for people who have already had so much faith in me, so it is for this reason that I ask you to support me on my mission

I definitely believe that we should all stand for educational equity. There are a lot of processes in society that work to sift out different people which makes the educated classes less diverse and more problematic for people who are disadvantaged. In many ways, I fit into a lot of categories that don't get as many opportunities as I am a queer, disabled, woman in science. I've faced a lot of discrimination in my life and like to discuss academically how people get sorted through this social filter where you mostly end up with straight, white men getting most of the power and money and education is a huge part of that filtration system. First, education is expensive, you can get scholarships but those are never going to be a guarantee, and people who come from rich families will have a better chance at seeing their education through to the end. I technically come from this demographic but I do not have any support from my family because I am a queer person, so educations favors rich kids who are supported by their parents and that very often cuts out queer people. Education also favors men. Women's education isn't seen as important as men's, generally speaking, it's seen as a feminist thing whereas men's education is seen as more of a social necessity. Sexual orientation, race, gender, and disability status are not good reasons why a person wouldn't have an education.

I'm a complicated person but my close friends would probably say that I have a strong moral compass that is at times too sensitive, I am greatly disturbed by the pain of other people, I am prone to being too ambitious and overwhelming myself, that I'm too smart for my own good, and that I've been through a lot in life making many of behaviors masochistic and at times self-deprecating. That is what my character is like and naturally, my goals are correspondingly overly ambitious, borderline masochistic, and bent on reliving the pain of the people around me. No one goes into something as hard as biochemistry and forensics unless, to some degree, they loved their own suffering. I've thought a lot about going to Med School or getting a master's in something but, as I said, I am very disturbed by the pain of other people. I have epilepsy and as a child seeing something violent on TV would set me off into fits of seizures and hysteria. If I do choose to go into something medical for my own sake it shouldn't be interacting with patients. Recently, I've thought about taking a break from my quite frankly exhausting ambition after I'm done with my two degrees and be a chemist for a hard cider brewery, save up money, travel the world, possibly study abroad and get a quick degree in literature, fall in love with a majestic woman, and then plan out the rest of my life from there. I'm in love with that idea and I think it would be much better for me than my other dreams of going to Med School or getting a master's although that might happen after my respite. The thing I hope to achieve most in life is excitement in the world. I like traveling, reading, consuming new cultures via food, wine, fashion, etc. I like meeting interesting people and especially after the pandemic, I am in love with all of humanity. I would french kiss everyone if it were socially acceptable. I hope to give back to my community and friends but since I've come from a period in my life where helping others was my priority and it drained me, I hope to do that in better proportion to my natural capacity, in a way that is more mindful of my limitations and triggers. Apparently, to my peers, I am an icon, a madonna of diverse women in science. I wasn't trying to be, in fact, my gender was never incredibly important to my identity and I spent most of my childhood ignoring it, but I am very glad I'm able to be someone that other women looked up to. I've struggled with my gender identity a little bit mostly as an adult because when I was a child I thought gender, sex, human relations, etc. were things that were only important to the adult world, not mine, so I completely dismissed any idea of gender as irrelevant. I can't really do that anymore. It's cute when children don't follow gender expectations because they don't understand adult things but it's not as cute now that I'm an adult and still living like my gender and biological sex don't have any social significance. Now, I have to be a woman and an inspiration to other women. It's defiantly a paradigm shift and a huge project for me because I constantly forget that I'm a woman as strange as it sounds, but it's something I have to remind myself of. I'm not transgender or anything, I'm biologically female, I've just ignored my gender for most of my life and I'm not used to it. But it's a way I hope to give back to my world by inspiring other women and it's one I'm excited for and I'm always looking for ways to get involved and be a leader in that aspect.

It has been very difficult for me to write a narrative of what I've been through, that's part of my reason for applying for scholarships like these is to write and practice processing. Perhaps the hardest thing that I'm still learning how to do is finding meaning in my suffering without justifying the things that happened to me. I didn't deserve the things that gave me PTSD. I'd rather not be stronger than go through everything I did again if I'm being honest with myself. I wish I had gone through much less painful ways of achieving strength than what I had, but there would definitely be things that I wouldn't have known if my life had been more simple. I've learned a lot about death in my journey- I've seen people I loved die, I tried to commit suicide several times, I've knocked on Death's door more than once with physical illnesses- and I think about it very differently than other people, though my original opinions of death and suffering weren't exactly normal. I was a very sensitive child and hated to see people suffer, I got a lot of sympathy pain from things like movies and the TV, though that is perhaps an understatement. I had epilepsy and seeing someone get hurt would send me into a wild fit of seizures, tears, and hysteria where I was often shouted at or beaten for causing so much noise and trouble. You see, my medical condition affected my personality rather like people who have autism or ADHD have unique personalities, and it made it difficult for me to function in an environment where I wasn't understood. My family got scarlet fever once and I became very ill. I was neglected as a kid and even though I had a high fever, my parents didn't take me to the doctor or refill my water when it was empty and I was too weak to move. I must have gone about a day and a half without water, so in desperation, I stumbled out of bed but I fainted on my way to the bathroom where the nearest faucet was. Luckily, my sister found me a couple of hours later and she was able to read my lips mouthing the word "water" and gave me a drink. I was having massive hallucinations at this point, and though I knew my life was in danger I felt happy like I was high off of some drug. I don't know how to explain it, but I was in a state of bliss and I don't remember seeing my sister at all, I remember seeing an angelic being that gave me the best tasting water I had ever had in my life, not being able to talk or move, and then passing out. Events like that gave me a very different impression of death. I was able to see death as a beautiful thing, a gift that life gives us one last time. I wasn't so triggered by seeing suffering anymore but longing for stress relief and knowing that next-to-death events can give stress relief was probably what made me attempt suicide several times. I'm in the middle of dealing with PTSD myself, so I don't have all the answers for other people, but hopefully, I can tell people who are struggling that there are safe and effective ways of dealing with extreme stress. I like roller coasters, they seem to give me a similar kind of stress relief that I was looking for with suicide but they are relatively safe.

Death Note was my introduction to the anime world, it's an older anime but its themes are evergreen. The anime deals with themes such as justice, morality, etc. I found it to be equally thought-provoking as the classic novel Crime and Punishment to which is has many similarities. In Russia, literature has a very different utility than it does in the west, it is a political commentary in a trench coat. The famous character Rhodia and Light almost resemble each other perfectly and intentionally do things that they had no idea would disturb them. They think that they're cold sociopaths but in fact, they're both tenderhearted. The characters don't know themselves very well and it made the point that none of us really know our own characters that well. It made me ask some questions about myself, which I think good art is supposed to do.

The faith I was born into was a very corrupt one, one I was glad to leave behind as I got older. It is better to believe in nothing than in something that hurts you. But sometimes I feel very adrift spiritually, it is like when I am asleep and my mind can't realize that it is attached to a body, the body is frozen and can't move. That is how I am spiritually at the moment, the mind is fine, it can crunch numbers and understand complex ideas all day long but it doesn't realize that those numbers and concepts are connected to a much bigger picture all the time. Every once in a blue moon I get a realization, it used to be more frequent than that, but now it happens every once in a while. Sometimes I will look at the stars and realize that I'm not important, the things that I struggle with that give me stress are not that important. The universe doesn't really care about me and for that, I feel a strange relief. I can pilot my own ship and do as I please. That is probably the realization I have most often and it comes from other places in nature too not just from astronomy, I get the same message from biology and chemistry just in different flavors. In biology, there are many species, more than anyone can memorize, some of them very similar to humans in intelligence and social behavior, some are more complicated than humans and can do things we can't. It doesn't take away our humanity, it's just a comforting lesson that we aren't gods, we are creatures just like any other creature, we live, we die, life keeps going, we don't have to put the pressure on ourselves to be like gods, it's not true and it's not helpful. The same thing with chemistry, we aren't made of very special things: carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, calcium, iron, etc. they're nice, they all have their own interesting properties, but not very special. Some people think these things take away our humanity, our perceived significance, it doesn't take away our humanity, in my opinion. A lot of the problems in the world are people thinking they are closer to god than others and proximity with a god defines their humanity. God doesn't mean any particular deity in this context, just an idea of perfection and significance. The closer we are to these ideas the more human we become is what religion says or my previous religion, anyway. Men are closer to god than women because the ideals of god are that he is masculine, dominant, a person to be feared. Adults are closer to god than children because the ideal is to be in control, to be mindful, to be wise and experienced. The pure person is closer to god than the sinful because god is the ideal of purity and does not sin. An ideal person is a person who does not have sex because we do not attribute sexual behavior to god. They all reflect the culture's ideals of perfection and are all ways of saying one human is more human than another. That is the purpose of a god. One of the things that science and math can teach us about spirituality is that none of us are closer or further away from "god" (the projection of our significance) as we are all insignificant and on equal levels of imperfect as perfection is in the eyes of the beholder, a subjective idea. I find it comforting.

Personally, I think education would be a lot better if children of all ages were given time to read more, do projects, and be encouraged to learn about the things they were interested in, alone time. Initially, I was homeschooled and had a lot of time to myself that I didn't know what to do with so I would just read, I would learn new skills and hobbies, I had a lot of projects I would work on. I was so shocked when I eventually went to public school because most of the people there had no interest in learning whatsoever, they were the walking dead of education, if a thought crossed their mind I doubt they didn't like it. I think there was such a huge difference between my love of learning and theirs partly because they were always around other children and never given any time to themselves to be alone and think about who they were and what they liked to do, rather since they were always around other people it quickly became toxic levels of everything being about socializing. Quarantine zoom school is very different but I'm talking about a regular school where kids can't so much as adjust their shirts or their hair without having at least three people looking at them do it. Even bathrooms, places where people do embarrassing things that everyone would prefer no one knew or cared about are hot spots for socializing. It's like having cameras on you all the time judging your every move, it's just too much social pressure to always be around your peers. I got a little paranoid because everything I did was being watched and judged by my peers. I think most students are tired from being with their peers all day and need to be in a learning environment at least for several hours where they are alone and no one is judging their every step. To some degree, I understand teachers who are worried about them misbehaving, but they're alone, they aren't going to hurt anyone. Maybe have a library time a few hours a day where students can fan out and don't need to be crammed like cattle in a classroom. We definitely learned this year that not socializing enough can be really bad for our mental health but do we ever think about how students are constantly put in stressful situations where they are being scrutinized by their peers? It creates such unhealthy levels of social paranoia and conformity that no one in the group wants to be outstanding or inspirational, they just want to blend in and be a forgettable brick in the wall.

As I am a college student applying for a scholarship with this essay so that I can have money to go to school and pay for my daily Ramen and moisture for my tongue that isn't laced with lead, I can't help but see the irony in the question. I feel sorry for homeless people but it would do the world no good for me to cut my only winter coat in half and give one part of it to a homeless person out of generosity when we all know that we would both still freeze and die when winter comes. Although everyone being equal and having no poor people in the world are ideals that are the height of generosity, no one needs their coat in tatters until they only have a scrap of sheepskin that the government is willing to call a coat. My family is Bohemian, an ethnicity from Eastern Europe and Eastern Europeans are very community-centered and have strong ideas of generosity and hospitality. Although I'm not as idealistic as some of them, to me, that's still what generosity is, sharing your home and table with people. I also get my ideas of generosity from the queer community as I am a queer person. The queer community sees generosity as emotional labor and physical friendliness, making someone feel calm and their physical bodies at home with things like hugs complex body language that utilizes things like posture imitation, physical proximity, and a lot more friendly touching than what normal people do. It's a different culture, with normal people you have to have several dozen dull conversations to be considered a friend, but with queer folks, friendship is almost always assumed whether they know your name or not. To me, they are both is what generosity means.

I'm a masochist, it's a psychological condition where people interpret pain and fear as love and excitement. Normally the term refers to someone's sexuality and enjoying pain in a physically intimate context but there are many people like me who enjoy pain in all aspects of life and are also masochists. I feel happy when people say things that hurt my feelings and shout at me or give me hard things to do for no reason. I love it when people make me feel like the worst writer they have ever heard of, the point is they have heard of me and thought about my writing long enough to have an extreme opinion. My favorite thing is when I get those polite rejection letters, not the ones that just say "I'm sorry, you didn't win" I like the ones that are drawn out, complicated, well thought through. Whoever wrote them probably put more effort into writing me a rejection letter than they did in giving the winner the prize which means I did better than the winner. They thought about me more, they paid attention to my words more, they wrote back to me. That's my mentality and it makes me apply to so many more writing competitions and scholarships so I win more often, which I need. I didn't fully realize this tendency that I had until I heard Sun Tzu say that if you know yourself and your enemy, you don't have to be afraid of peril. Sun Tzu was wise but he was a very practical man and that quote made me do a lot of introspection and realize how to motivate myself using my masochistic tendencies so I believe it to be the wisest thing I've ever heard.

My family raised me in a cult when I was a kid. It was very sexist, females were to be seen and not heard, but I was a very smart girl so I was beaten quite regularly by the cult leaders and by my parents. I also had very severe epilepsy but it was a very rare form of epilepsy, one that isn't visible right away, so I didn't have the words to communicate what was going on in my brain to the adults who were ready to beat me at any moment for looking at them the wrong way. I was also sexually abused by one of the people at the cult quite regularly, which should be no surprise to anyone, it's a cult. I think it was some kind of ultimate punishment for acting out and having a smart mouth but I was too young to really understand what was going on and I was very confused. It was a very abnormal childhood, one that I didn't like at all, I was in that much pain and didn't know the words for what was going on. I couldn't get help and I just wanted it to be over. Eventually, we left the cult eventually and I got really good at school. I was very happy with myself after high school was over and I got free ride scholarships to UNL, so I went there and started living my best life. I had never had a relationship before, I didn't like relationships, I thought they were gross and fake and all about popularity because most of them were, but I wanted to try being intimate at least once so I got into a relationship with a woman because that seemed the least intimidating thing to me. My parents found out and told me they wished they had never raised me. I moved out but was suffering every day from panic attacks and this awful pain in my side, so I decided I needed to see a therapist which I did and diagnosed me with PTSD. I used to have fits of anxiety over the smallest things like hearing people mumble the word "priest." I was very sensitive and couldn't help feeling like I was being molested or beaten in those moments when I was triggered. I was reliving the worst days of my life over and over again and couldn't escape for a long time. I'm mostly recovered now and I don't have too much trouble talking about it. I imagine that most people would wonder if being molested as a child made me gay. I wish I could give an answer to that question, but the truth is I have no idea. It feels natural to me like I've had the emotions there for a very long time but I never really took any notice of them until the opportune moment. They are very complicated feelings and I do not completely understand them myself but it is like I'm at home with a bosom friend who knows me as well as she knows her own mind. It was truly awful to relive the worst day of my life on replay for months and months but somehow every time it hurt a little less and I kept working at my therapy and trying my best to slow down my stress. I think it's fair to assume I can handle just about anything at this point now that I have way too much perspective. Getting molested was a problem, failing an organic chemistry exam, not a problem.

It is supposed that although we have all struggled with the pandemic and other issues that have plagued the last year and a half that people who are older, have more money, more security, less need for friends and human company are prone to see this as a drop in the bucket for their lives. On the other hand, people in my generation who have no wealth, are as securely attached to wherever we live or work as my Gypsi ancestors were, and have a great need for human company and friends can not possibly be expected to see the pandemic or other pressing issues as fleeting or temporary in the way that older generations do. This is our life now, and we will likely have to struggle with more pandemics in our lifetime as well as resolve issues that our ancestors have neglected such as racism, climate change, etc. Having the vast majority of the responsibility to fix procrastinated problems biting into our shoulders gives my generation a sense of hopelessness and despair that none of us can escape from. I myself am a queer person and although I am very well esteemed and hold status with my peers I receive constant harassment from middle-aged alcoholics with greasy hair and older evangelical demographics, neither of which are ever going to quit their creepy obsession with my community's suffering in my lifetime or in the lifetime of my sibling's children. We have a lot of problems that have been put on our shoulders and we know we can't fix all of them in our lifetime, so things that give me hope often aren't things like seeing the end of an inordinate pandemic or finally making much needed social or economic progress. The truth is that the future isn't going to be better, not for a very long time. My generation has already learned that we can't put any money on the future for the source of our hope, but during our most desperate moments of loneliness and fear, hope has to be something we give ourselves. I am the thing that gives me hope for the future, and I am more than capable of making my own life happy even if I am only capable of doing small things. I can't stop COVID but I can get vaccinated, I can't clear away the pollution to see the stars but I can donate two dollars to help stop climate change. I haven't been able to see the stars in such a long time. I'm not being comforted every night by my own insignificance like I used to be when my family lived in the country. Ironically, I find my own insignificance hopeful. I don't really matter all that much and that means I can do as I please and be happy; it's only when I think that because I'm brilliant and don't feel the obligation to have a family beyond a partner that I feel like I have to fix everything.

Having grown up in an abusive household I've had to sequentially lose a lot of things in my life. I often envy the childhood stories of other people who didn't have to grow up like that as well as the relationship they had with their families. Although mine wasn't even in the picture in a healthy way, to begin with, I've only recently been able to feel the full hurt of that loss now that I'm suffering from PTSD and chronic depression. I'd rather not go into all the details of how I was horribly abused by my family, why I can't help but love them anyway, and our mutual choice to never interact with each other, but I will say that I was mentally handicap and neglected in that aspect as well as physically abused by regular beatings for more or less arbitrary reasons. My family was also involved in a cult when I was just a small kid and one of their members made a habit of sexually abusing me off and on for several years. I prefer to leave the details out about how I felt about all this but my loss was so enormous and my pain so unbearable, it drove me to attempt suicide several times. As abusive as my family was, I never hated them, they were the people who taught me what hate and love were in the first place so I feel no need for anger or hate like I would with a person I didn't know very well if they abused me, only sadness and loss. I loved my family and always hoped that they would be better people, that somehow I could show them. I dreamed that they would find a way to love me without needing to hurt me, it was the thread of hope that kept me alive for a while, but I grew up and realized I needed to love myself in a healthy way even if other people didn't. How they felt about me isn't something I'm very interested in, not anymore. Some people who I assume had good intentions would tell me that my family did love me and that a relationship would be mutually beneficial. I am not as naive as they are. Obligatory love and relationship with the family for family's sake out of a philosophical or spiritual value can have disastrous results to people, like myself who were born to an abusive family. I grieve my loss every day, not just of my parents but also my siblings. I was a lot older than the youngest three and since my mom was negligent, a lot of the responsibility of taking care of them as infants fell to me. Some kids did sports or music while they were in middle school, I took care of my infant siblings who sometimes called me "mama" and would suck on my shirt where my developing breasts were while I was holding them, actually thinking I was their mom. I felt responsible to them and liked helping them with things like their homework and hobbies as they got older. My brother used to interrupt me while I was doing homework for AP classes and rant about comics or beg me to watch the Flash or Supergirl with him. That all changed when my parents found out that I preferred to date other women. I don't think wanting to love or be loved by someone is about being a man or a woman, the distinction seems irrelevant to me when there is genuine love and affection regardless, but at the moment I'm still very stiff and awkward around men because I was abused as a kid, so it feels more natural to me to date other women. For that "perversion" I was cut off from my siblings and I have to grieve their loss too even if we can restore the fragments of our family in a decade or so when they're grown. Even though I've had to deal with overwhelming loss, there are still so many things in life that I want to achieve. Eventually, I want a wife and a home, start our own family, but for right now I'm married to my education and career. I'm not sure precisely what I want to do with my degrees or if I want to think about grad school but working through classes like organic chemistry or genetics and figuring out how I'm going to pay bills is enough for me to focus on right now. I want to fight for my happiness in life, I believe I deserve it after all the hard work I put in and everything I've lost and been through. I believe people deserve happiness.

When I was nine I was diagnosed with chronic seizures, epilepsy. It was a very hard time in my life because I had to go in for multiple doctor visits and I knew that it was entirely possible that they might have to cut my head open and my life would never be the same. My condition ended up being inoperable but I was put on some very strong medications that blocked a lot of episodes. However, at the time I almost wanted to bleed to death on the table, I was so tired of struggling against my seizures and having them draw unwanted attention to me and not getting any sympathy from my family, I was heartbroken, confused, and desperate for any kind of love. I was wide open for abuse and some older people at my church took advantage of that vulnerability and made a regular habit of sexually abusing me almost every week for years. I've been through a lot and I barely remember a time when I felt like life wasn't too much for me to handle. When I was a teen I shoved all those memories and emotions down, I forgot about them, and it helped me function more normally but it set me up for PTSD later in life. Because of what happened, I had trouble dating men and didn't date anyone until I was about nineteen where I found out that I was much less anxious and more natural around other women, so I started dating a woman. I knew I had to tell my homophobic family at some point but the stress of that catalyzed all my memories and emotions that I had kept bottled up for so long to spill out. I needed some kind of escapism to help me cope and I got a lot of comfort from nature, it was quiet and lonely. I liked to go hiking or read in the woods that were close to my family's house. We lived next to some beautiful forests and I always liked to see foxes and deer there. I grew a hobby of hunting wild plants to eat and enjoyed my time identifying and tasting native plants. Later, I got a job as a technician at the university I was attending that diagnosed diseases in plants. The plants were mostly row crops but occasionally they were native or specialty crops, I may consider a career in that with my degrees since they do accept not just wildlife and agriculture majors but also biochem since it is molecular work. Since I had a hobby of hunting wild plants for food, I knew how scarce some of them were when they used to be abundant and used in the everyday lives of the Native Americans who lived here before my people did. I suppose most people don't think of plants when they think of conservation but also worked for a summer at an animal research facility. The animals were mostly domesticated test animals but occasionally there were a few wild animals we were running treatments on. I have to say, I didn't like it very much. I had to euthanize animals who mostly had very poor lives and were stressed by the lab and research environment. Although I knew the research was going to a noble cause that helped protect both animal and human lives, I had trouble justifying killing them simply because an experiment was over and they took up food and space. I used to thank them for their service before I had to euthanize them and that more than anything made me realize how important a vibrant ecosystem was to an animal's quality of life. Although we could be selfish and think only of ourselves when it comes to environmental health, it's ultimately self-destructive and inhuman to reduce an animal's environment to practically nothing. Although I haven't chosen any particular career in nature restoration those job options will be ones that I strongly consider once I'm out of college. To me, it seems unwise to pin myself down to one thing that I want to do as I am both a person of many interests and live in a world with many viable opportunities for a fulfilling career. Naturally, as a scientist, I understand the importance of conservation but as a person, caring for nature and interacting with it gives me a degree of happiness and fulfillment.

When I was nine I was diagnosed with chronic seizures, epilepsy. It was a very hard time in my life because I had to go in for multiple doctor visits and I knew that it was entirely possible that they might have to cut my head open and my life would never be the same. My condition ended up being inoperable but I was put on some very strong medications that blocked a lot of episodes. However, at the time I almost wanted to bleed to death on the table, I was so tired of struggling against my seizures and having them draw unwanted attention to me and not getting any sympathy from my family, I was heartbroken, confused, and desperate for any kind of love. I was wide open for abuse and some older people at my church took advantage of that vulnerability and made a regular habit of sexually abusing me almost every week for years. I've been through a lot and I barely remember a time when I felt like life wasn't too much for me to handle. When I was a teen I shoved all those memories and emotions down, I forgot about them, and it helped me function more normally but it set me up for PTSD later in life. Because of what happened, I had trouble dating men and didn't date anyone until I was about nineteen where I found out that I was much less anxious and more natural around other women, so I started dating a woman. I knew I had to tell my homophobic family at some point but the stress of that catalyzed all my memories and emotions that I had kept bottled up for so long to spill out. Luckily, I got a therapist who diagnosed me but I want to help people who struggle with mental illness in my personal life and in my career: I hope to work for pharmaceutical companies that produce and research medications and drugs as well as spend some of my spare time volunteering and being a resource for my friends.

When I was nine I was diagnosed with chronic seizures, epilepsy. It was a very hard time in my life because I had to go in for multiple doctor visits and I knew that it was entirely possible that they might have to cut my head open and my life would never be the same. My condition ended up being inoperable but I was put on some very strong medications that blocked a lot of episodes. However, at the time I almost wanted to bleed to death on the table, I was so tired of struggling against my seizures and having them draw unwanted attention to me and not getting any sympathy from my family, I was heartbroken, confused, and desperate for any kind of love. I was wide open for abuse and some older people at my church took advantage of that vulnerability and made a regular habit of sexually abusing me almost every week for years. I've been through a lot and I barely remember a time when I felt like life wasn't too much for me to handle. When I was a teen I shoved all those memories and emotions down, I forgot about them, and it helped me function more normally but it set me up for PTSD later in life. Because of what happened, I had trouble dating men and didn't date anyone until I was about nineteen where I found out that I was much less anxious and more natural around other women, so I started dating a woman. I knew I had to tell my homophobic family at some point but the stress of that catalyzed all my memories and emotions that I had kept bottled up for so long to spill out. Luckily, I got a therapist who diagnosed me but I want to help people who struggle with mental illness in my personal life and in my career: I hope to work for pharmaceutical companies that produce and research medications and drugs as well as spend some of my spare time volunteering and being a resource for my friends.

I was really into arts and crafts as a kid, so one day I brought home an art's and crafts book from the library that was all about making things like wizard's hats and magic wands, and other DIY projects related to magical esthetic. I'm in the middle of making a witch's wand when my mother comes crashing into the room and asks me if I've smuggled witchcraft into her house. I was terrified, didn't know what to say, so like any young sapphic accused of witchcraft, I started crying. My family was not an environment that was very open to new ideas, so when I was sent away to a Christian camp for having questions about my faith I finally got to ask myself who I was. My parents had confiscated my computer where I was debating some folks online about religion so that's how they knew I was questioning my faith. The camp wasn't bad, it was made for Christian teenagers to attend during the summer so it wasn't technically a conversion camp. I was supposed to stay there for two weeks so naturally, I saw what an opportunity this was to act in whatever crazy way I wanted around a bunch of people who would never remember my name. I did so many things there that I wouldn't do normally: I kissed several girls, I openly talked about my disability and other things I felt were embarrassing, I climbed the beams of the barn-like cafeteria and had my lunch there. I was experimenting and trying to discover who I was. I don't think I realized this at the time but during those few weeks I was trying to find myself but what I had actually successfully done was give myself room for self-love. I was so happy exploring and trying new things that finding out who I was wasn't really what I took away from that experience. To me, it is profound that I got the most self-love out of exploring rather than finding anything extremely concrete. This enthusiasm for life and exploration is something I hope I can share with everyone I meet. I think a lot of people are like me and feel their happiest when they are exploring, so I want to teach the people around me that unique types of relationships and ways of behaving, as long as they cause no harm, are things that can be enjoyable, truly beautiful, and enrich everyone's lives no matter their sexuality or gender identity.

Growing up I had really tough and traditional schooling from my parents. Since that isn't really a style anymore at least not in America, I'll explain what that means. Basically, it means that children were beaten if they were being slow or stupid or if they didn't turn in their assignments on time. Talking back or having a smart mouth were not encuragable to say the least. I didn't do very well in this type of learning environment mostly because I was smart and called out when my mom was being cruel or setting unrealistic expectations. I was also very neurodivers and I had dylexia and a poor memory capacity because I was having seizures that were constantly giving me amnesia. It was all very traumatizing and needless to say, I really hated school. It was difficult for me to understand abstract ideas which is basically what numbers are, the number five doesn't really exist in the physical world as anything other than a representation of a repeating unit and that was hard for me to grasp. Out of what I can only assume was random chance, my mom switched cariculums on us and had me do one that explained the idea of numbers with blocks and dried black beans, a very down to earth method. Finally, something clicked. Math was a language for describing and predicting the things that happened in the real world. I was much more of an artsy kid and I used my imagination a lot so once I understood that numbers were an idea representing units of something in the real world I had no more need of blocks or dried beans. I dislike how math and art are pitted against each other when in reality most people have two hemispheres of their brain so using both for an extremely complicated task is probably benifitial. My good imagination was what got me to be really talented at math, my logical thinking grew substantially but it didn't initiate my interest. I used math as a bit of an escapism to get away from my toxic family. They typically didn't bother me when I was studying so I tried to study all the time. I was completely emersed in my academics, they were my safe place where everything made sense and was logical. Some people don't like how cold, ridged, and lifeless math can seem but to me it was comforting to not indulge in my emotions, a way of blocking out all the unnessisary noise with defining calm. Engaging in math is like being in a sensory deprivation chamber that some people use for stress management. Although I don't try to completely block out all my emotions anymore the principles of math is still a muscle I utilize in my everyday life to make dissitions and predict possible outcomes of different situations. I considered having math be my career but I decided that math wasn't really my destination but something I take with me wherever I go.

Growing up, my Bohemian community did a lot of gardening as well as bee and goat keeping that we shared and baught from other families. That culture was probably different several generations ago but during my childhood it was mostly being hospitable to other Bohemian families who were traveling, or just any family in general, by letting them stay the night at our house and impressing them with our natural produce and good hospitality. Natural foods and creating our own produce was something I took for granted as a kid, I thought that every family considered hospitality and sharing your food with stangers an important virtue. Saying that hospitality is important to Bohemian culture is an understatement, hospitality is more important than a person's religious beliefs and not growing your own food was completely undeard of. Now that I'm going to the university and getting my two degrees with the college of agriculture, I don't get to engage with my Bohemian community very often and I got to learn that not everyone has the same values that I did growing up. I got to hear the activism side of natural foods for the first time and thought it a little strange how natural foods were sold mostly as an idea to help the environment rather than a normal thing that people did to be good, hospitable people. I found the science of it very interesting and I was particularly interested in how important bees were. I knew people who kept bees who weren't very aware about how important they were for so many scpiecies of flowers and plants. It was exciting to learn how good my community was at helping the environment even though they mostly didn't do it out of activism. I think it's important to see natural foods as both a thing that is good for the environment and something that is very important culturally. Right now I'm working at two part time jobs with the department of plath pathology this summer studying how disease affact crop plants. Eventually, I want to share the cultural values that I was raised with to other people so that we can see gardening and bee keeping as both things that are good for the environment as well as an important social activity that promotes community and hospitality.

The pandemic was such a catalyst for personal growth for me: I came out to my parents as queer, I moved out of the house and started living on my own, I had my first serious relationship, I got two more semesters of college education under my belt, and two resume buffing jobs. Not to say that those things we're not the hardest things I have ever done in my life but I am glad they happened. I can see the rainbow through the rain. Those things turned me into an adult. I liked how I was as a teenager but I'm ready for that naive and dependent time in my life to be over.

Leonardo da Vinci, was a homosexual, bastard, Italian engineer, painter, architect, mad scientist, maker of the Mona Lisa, inventor of strange contraptions, and father of the Renaissance. He is one of my favorite historical characters. I relate a lot to him because I am a queer STEM scholar, artist, illustrator, writer, and hobby mathematician. He clearly had a lot of interests but was somehow a historical icon for all of them, and the one I most look up to.

In my opinion, the best invention in the last 10 years was mRNA vaccines and the CRISPR cas 9 system. As we all know, Pfizer and Moderna were able to produce cutting-edge technology in the middle of a global pandemic because the production of mRNA doesn't take as long as more traditional vaccines. It has really made history in such a substantial way and maybe later when biotech companies aren't having to deal with a pandemic they can use the same technology to cure other problems. Part of the reason why I decided to go into biochemistry was that it is such a fast-growing field with new medicines and new studies coming out all the time. It is really exciting to look at the news or hear my classmates getting excited over new technology and discoveries. I will definitely be keeping a biotech career in mind once I graduate and although the COVID hipe is dying down a bit, biotech companies will still have more funding and more jobs available than ever before. I almost got a job at a local company that works with Pfizer and I'm not even a grad student yet. Whether or not I go to med school or get my masters is really going to depend on a lot of things but I definitely hope to contribute to the biotechnology world in a meaningful way and now that that specific section of the economy is doing extremely well, I think my hopes and ambitions for helping people will be satisfied. Before I decided on getting two degrees in STEM, I thought I might like being a nurse so I got my CNA and started working at a local retirement home. The problem with that was is that I am an extreme introvert and empath. I don't think I have the emotional stamina to see new people every day and exhaust my empathy trying to fix whatever problem they have, that would be too much for someone like me. I decided that whatever I went into even though I liked medicine, I didn't want to be directly working with the patients and that was a very valuable thing to learn at 16. Right now I'm definitely thinking about being a research technician or going into pathology if I decided to go to medical school.

As a person who fits into multiple minority categories at once, there are very few people I truly see myself in because even celebrities typically only fit into one category or not the same as the ones that I do. I feel a little envious of other candidates who have likely chosen their mother who had the biggest influence on their life, as I was abused by both of my parents and eventually disowned as a young adult for being queer so I can't choose my mother though I wish I could. I would say, Ben Carson an African American man whose political career is controversial but I like him because he wrote a book about being the dumbest kid in school and believing he had no hope for a future but all that changed one day when he remembered something from a book he read and eventually went on to become a famous surgeon despite being a minority raised in poverty. Learning disability and the love for medicine, in particular, was something I found very relatable and it helped inspire me to do great things as well. I wrote a book myself a few years ago, it was a book for children that I had illustrated myself about microbiology since that is my field of study. It was a passion project for me and I really liked how it turned out. Although I still sometimes show the book to kids and sell a few copies to families, I still have a lot to learn about the publishing and illustrating world. It's something I hope to put more time into once I have graduated and have extra money to spend on the book's advertising and buying new art supplies to make more of my own illustrations. It's definitely not the only science education book that I want to write and if it pays well I hope to do a series. Being both a scientist and an artist is what makes my art different and to some people hard to understand since society keeps telling us that they are opposing. They use different parts of the brain but they are not opposing, most humans do have two sides to their brain. To me, it was very frustrating in high school to have people who didn't know me ask me what my hobbies were and when I told them art they would kind of imply that it was a lame thing to be interested in and then I would tell them I wanted to go into science and they would look at me like I was the imposter in among us. I'm mostly trying to have enough money to live off of and contribute to my education because I don't have any help from my family like other people do and I also don't have access to as much financial aid as other people or even other minorities might have.

Though I am very scientifically and mathematically inclined, I wrote a children's book once that I illustrated myself. It was the ultimate passion project for me since I got to show children just how visually stunning the microbial world can be. I was very inspired by popular figures in science education like Bill Nye, etc. people who use science, art, and humor to get younger generations interested in science. To me being an artist means showing the world something it doesn't really notice or putting something it does notice in a new light. I really like exploring this idea that the world doesn't really see microbes as beautiful and has very little idea of what they are outside of a medical or scientific context. What I like to do is isolate the beauty from all the dryness to show people we can appreciate the aesthetics of microbiology. Once the dryness isn't being forced and it's just being appreciated for its own sake, I've learned that people especially children will naturally ask questions, and very insightful questions too. It's a very special thing to see when I'm showing the book to kids, it gives me so much hope that I can be a part of getting children interested in science without treating science like a thing that superior to all other careers or reserved only for extremely intelligent people. I'm not a fan of the elitism that STEM often holds and I don't want younger generations to think that they are lesser than for choosing an art career over a STEM career or think that they can't like what they do if they're a scientist or an engineer because it's too dry. Personally, it gives me a lot of drive for teaching my own children someday and watching their eyes grow wide when they learn that there are creatures we can't even see.