Growing up, I saw how hard my parents worked to build a foundation in a new country, even if it meant relying on free meals from the local public school while others lived the “American Dream.” I come from an Asian-American background, being the first person in my family to speak English fluently. My grandparents, parents, and I all lived together in a single one-bedroom apartment—my grandparents in the bedroom while my parents and I slept in the living room flexed into a half-bedroom. Thus, a significant challenge I have faced has always been my family's financial situation. With our tight budget, my love for engineering actually stemmed from having little, as it allowed me to get creative with what I had. Instead of buying a dollhouse, my mom and I built a one out of cardboard, tape, and leftover wrapping paper. To make the most use of the LEGOs I was gifted, I would construct the original design according to the instructions, then take it apart and reconstruct a different creation, often incorporating LEGO pieces from other sets. Playing with LEGOs turned into a passion for VEX robotics. Eventually, I began exploring microcontrollers in high school and now engineering racecars in college. To lessen the burden on my parents, I began working part-time jobs in high school, marking my availability for every hour not spent in school. Since then, I have worked in four different stores, including two Japanese markets, a Taiwanese bubble tea store, and an Italian bakery. From spam musubi and onigiri to brown sugar milk tea and Italian pastries, I learned about different foods, cultures, and languages. I reconnected with my roots—practicing Mandarin with Taiwanese coworkers, picking up snippets of Italian from the bakery, and finding belonging in diverse communities. Even now, I balance a full-time engineering internship with a part-time job on the weekends. At first, I believed these jobs had little connection to my passion for engineering beyond providing financial support. But looking back, the most valuable thing I gained was not the money, but the perspective I developed by being immersed in such diverse communities. Each culture I passed through showed me that it wasn’t just my family trying to fit into this new world, but many others as well. This helped me realize that engineering is not just about numbers, but about understanding and including people’s identities and needs. Through overcoming my family's financial challenge with my part-time jobs, my career goals have changed from simply being an engineer to engineering for people. I created a robotics project with translation features and gestures based on users’ backgrounds, such as bowing for Korean users. After placing 2nd among 10 teams, I was encouraged to pursue accessibility further. I later led the design of an automatic lotion dispenser to help people like my mom, whose arthritis makes squeezing bottles difficult, motivating me to design solutions that ease daily life for those with disabilities as well. As a rising sophomore in Mechanical Engineering, I carry my family’s ambitions forward, driven by values of inclusion and empathy, with a goal of ensuring that every community is represented in this field. Engineers often prioritize technical aspects, measuring progress by gigabytes or horsepower, but I believe real progress comes from reaching more people. From my experiences working alongside coworkers from Japan to Verona to Taiwan, I have seen how diversity shapes lives in ways no textbook can capture. I am still overcoming my family’s financial challenge, and this scholarship would help me greatly in pursuing my goals. More importantly, it would allow me to continue engineering not just for the sake of inventing, but for people—for those who are disabled, underrepresented, or overlooked. I am determined to create a sense of belonging for everyone with engineering, no matter where they are.

Within that first line, I have already thought of 3 ways your information could have been compromised. We are having a cup of coffee—which means we must be at a coffee shop—so through spoofed WiFi portals, intercepted traffic, or bad USB scripts via Bluetooth, someone may already be watching as we speak. But instead of using this knowledge for harm, I use it to educate others, especially those in my community who have never heard of a WiFi Pineapple or Evil Twin attacks. I’ve hosted classroom demonstrations, broken things down for my parents, and shown my friends just how vulnerable their daily habits can be. The more I learn, the more curious I become about more things, and the more I am driven to share. By making cybersecurity known, I aim to empower others to stay safe—and maybe even spark their interest in the field, too.

"Irasshaimase!" my coworkers and I greeted as another customer walked in. From working at a Japanese market to a Chinese bubble tea stop to an Italian bakery, my part time jobs consumed 30 hours a week of my senior year in high school in order to pay for college. Growing up in a low-income household meant doing homework on the train going home at 10pm or missing out on friend hangouts to pick up an extra shift on a Friday night. I used to brush my part-time jobs off as just a way to make ends meet, but over time I realized how working in such diverse places began shaping me. From the Japanese Market, I learned a bit of Japanese from being required to greet customers. I used my broken Mandarin skills at the bubble tea shop to communicate to my coworkers who spoke little English. I learned their song preferences and tastes from the music they played for the store, becoming familiar with Chinese songs that were trending. Now working at the Italian bakery, I picked up some Italian phrases from listening to my manager express his almost too passionate opinions. Surrounded by Spanish-speaking coworkers, I restarted Duolingo to brush up on the Spanish I hadn't practiced since high school classes. My part time jobs were an incentive to learn new languages, reconnect with my Chinese culture, and learn new ones along the way. Realizing the importance of diversity in my major specifically, I am realizing that my insignificant side jobs allowed me to gain an advantage in navigating and being open minded to new cultures and people. Although I couldn't see it back then, those long nights and extra shifts earned me more than just a paycheck.

Although the once completely male-dominated field has seen a new transformation, the journey to bridging the gender gap still has a far way to go. As a woman in STEM, my goal is to empower young women to take on careers in this field by teaching them how to troubleshoot projects. The money from this scholarship would enable me to introduce engineering to more young girls, as well as further my education in this field. As a coding coach at STEAM Champs where the majority of students were female, I was not only able to help guide kids in their paths in coding, robotics, and engineering. During one of my robotics projects at NYU, I was head of programming on my team. We faced numerous struggles and obstacles but we were eventually able to overcome these difficulties and make the robot work. This experience along with many others where I faced troubles inspired me to help guide the students at my internship through their own robotics and coding projects. At times when the project wasn’t going how they imagined, I understood their frustrations as I experienced similar things with many of my own projects. However, it was very rewarding to be able to see their confidence grow while helping and guiding them in tackling the challenges step by step to find the source of the problem. One moment that stood out to me was when one of the students, after completing the original lesson on hitting a ball into a goal, had the creative idea to detect if the ball went into the goal. Despite her initial doubts about being able to make it work, I guided her through the process step by step, solving each challenge together, from integrating different sensors to programming the right code. After the project was finished, she seemed very proud of herself for being able to complete what seemed like such a daunting task at first. In moments like these, I am reminded of how valuable mentorship can be in someone’s learning journey. In addition to teaching at my internship, I am a proud alumnus of the program Girls Who Code. I love helping the girls who are new to coding troubleshoot their projects and seeing the creativity and unique aspects of each project. Girls Who Code opened my eyes to the world of diversity and originality that each coding project holds. The distinctiveness showcases the boundless potential that each girl holds, so assisting others has become a two-way exchange of inspiration for me. This reminds me of the versatility coding offers and inspires me to explore and encourages me to constantly push the boundaries for my own projects. In this program, I am part of a community and sisterhood that allows me to connect with other girls who are on the same path as me. Troubleshooting can be a tiring and complex process that requires intricate attention to small details that can affect the outcome of a project. From extensively testing code, tracing issues to their source, and identifying which parts are affecting the outcome with countless hours of experimentation and debugging, I can help girls all around the world troubleshoot their projects. Helping young women that are just starting in STEM is one of the most rewarding things about being part of this field, so I hope to inspire more young girls and future generations using this scholarship money in my career.