I live in an area where our economy is built around the refineries that pepper the region. With so many high-paying positions available, one might expect us to have better economic resilience than we do. Our poverty rate, however, is nearly twice the national rate. A problem I want to help change in my community is the lack of empathy and care toward our unhoused, impoverished, and other residents in need. I have been working as a delivery driver for almost a year now. While doing this, I have seen more of my town at all times of day than I ever have. My hope for the degree I am working on is to use it to help advocate for those in need, and I have often thought working towards this was the best I could do at this given time. My mind was changed after a particularly hard night of work. I was in a rush to pay my phone bill. It was severely past due, and I was on hour eleven of my delivery shift. I wasn't sure it could make another day without payment. Throughout the evening, to night, to morning, I drove past a man sleeping at a bus stop. I noticed something I hadn't before: it had anti-homeless benches. Each time I passed it, he was in a different position. The only thing I could do for him was bring him breakfast and a cold drink. It was extremely hot for being four in the morning, and the only place open was Starbucks, so that is where I went. I had the worker help me choose something for him: a ham & Swiss sandwich and a large iced water. When I brought it to him, his response caught me off guard. He tried to reject it. "Oh, I just had something, and I have a Gatorade somewhere in my bag," he said. I told him a white lie. I said I couldn't have this because it has meat in it, and I wasn't supposed to have meat. I insisted the water was needed because the heat was horrible, and I told him it was free anyway. He accepted it and set it down. Before I left, he told me his friend was coming to get him a phone soon, and a car. I told him that sounded great. He told me it would be a black Camaro, and that he had always wanted one. All he did after this was lie back down on the bench, squeezing his legs between the bars. When I passed him the next time, he was halfway through the sandwich. Of course I needed that money. That order alone was around ten dollars, and with how slow it had been, that was over an hour of work for me. It was an impulse and a need to not have that guilt directly on myself as I continued towards the morning. I let that experience marinate in my head up to getting home, a grand sixteen hours after I had first left the house. It stuck with me. Change doesn't have to start all at once, with everyone taking part. Sometimes the best way to get started is to make one kind gesture to one person who needs it. This is one of many events that have pushed me to work specifically with the topic of poverty in Southern America as a result. I hope to one day make a big change in my community, but until then, I'll do one small thing every time I can.

I was once told that grief is like a ball in a box with a button. When the ball is first in the box, it is huge, hitting the button constantly and wreaking havoc. Over time, it shrinks, but when it does hit the button, it feels the same as the first time. I was in high school when I first lost a loved one. It was a friend of mine, whom I had last talked to the morning he decided to end his life. For the funeral, my stepfather dropped me off and told me my mother would pick me up when it was over. I was scared, as this was the worst kind of new experience to have alone. When I went to give condolences to my friend's parents, I lost it when I saw him. One of my teachers found me sobbing in the back of the funeral home and comforted me. My mother never picked me up, so I walked home from the funeral barefoot, holding my too-small dress shoes, sobbing in the rain. I was never asked how it went or told how to deal with what I felt, so I tried my absolute best to pretend it never happened. The third year of my bachelor's program is when I lost my paternal grandparents. Two funerals within a year of each other, though so far away that it felt like a dream on the drive there. I cried, but I was so numb during this that I didn't fully process what was going on. When I walked in for my grandfather's funeral, my grandmother saw me and came running to throw her arms around me. That's all I could think of during her funeral, in the same funeral home I had been in months before for my grandfather. I did the same thing I had done for my friend to process this. On the way back, I compartmentalised what had happened the best I could. I couldn't do the same with my next experience with death. My husband's grandmother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer on a Monday, and exactly a week later, I found myself giving CPR for the first time in my life while my father-in-law did breaths. We didn't have the money to bury her like she wanted. I had trouble looking at myself in the mirror for a long time after that. It was barely two weeks later when my maternal grandfather was put into hospice. I had never hated anything in my life more than I did myself when I found myself holding back vomit when I heard his death rattles. I struggled with the swiftness and mere existence of death from then on. How was I supposed to go along each day knowing that it could always be my last? I sought answers about the point of life everywhere. I found myself in the deepest depression I had experienced in my life. It crept into my schoolwork, too. I would spend hours staring at a pile of papers I needed to review for my research, unable to touch them. In reference to the "ball in a box" metaphor, it felt like the ball wasn't just hitting the button; it was stuck on there, never giving me a break. By the end of the first semester, since my first-hand experience with death, I had barely scraped my way through with an A, something that usually felt gratifying, but this time felt suffocating. A wave of pessimism hit me like a tsunami, and I felt utterly lost with myself. On a whim, one day, a few months later, when running errands, I found myself drawn to a church I had never been to before. I hadn't gone to any church in over ten years, let alone by myself on my own volition. I still am not sure what pushed me to bring myself there out of the blue. In this church, for the first time in my entire life, I felt at peace with more than just my own existence. I felt at peace with the idea that I may not always exist. I have been working on putting myself back together since then. The most challenging thing I have faced during school has been the havoc I caused for myself when processing grief. I dropped so many classes during this time that I was disqualified from taking out student loans for my next semester, and as someone who was barely scraping by with student loans, this has been devastating. I will never give up on myself, my loved ones, or my potential. I will never give up on the hope that I will overcome this, like I overcame my fear of death. I know that no matter what happens, I will be able to handle the feelings that stem from it and move forward, even if it feels like the very first time it happened.

What I find most beautiful about math is that it isn't something that makes the world go 'round; it's how we track that it actually does. It was there long before us, and it will be there long after we are gone, even if we aren't there to do so. It is used in every avenue of every aspect of our lives—it is inescapable. We can't pretend it doesn't exist, lest we forget to divvy up our paycheck among our bills, needs, and wants every payday. While sometimes it feels like it can be out to get us, math is innately neutral, although many school children may disagree with you there. Math is everything and nothing at the same time, and arguably, there is nothing else like it. What other subject bleeds so well into every other one? One could argue language, but there are over seven-thousand known living languages in our world, and only one math. Science is worldwide, but it is inductive and can be revised when something new is discovered. History is said to be written by the victors, but math could be completely forgotten by the world, and upon rediscovery, it would follow the same rules. To put it simply, I love math because there is nothing else like it. For students who don't speak the same language as their teachers, math is often easier to transfer than other core subjects due to the concepts being consistent worldwide. It is universal, and it can track the universe.

I want to build a better life for myself and my loved ones. My ambitions stem from my abundance of need that I experienced as a youth. I grew up without a lot and without a lot of help. I had a common occurrence growing up of mispronouncing words and being made fun of for it by adults when I had only learned the word from reading books. I did not always have someone to teach me the things I needed, and I often had to rely on my intuition and what I could find in books or online. In order to build a better future for myself and my loved ones, I need to be successful. This is something that everyone measures differently, but to me, success is measured by financial stability and kindness. If I keep a kind heart and can support myself and my family, I will view myself as a success. I know this may not hold for everyone, as others may have different standards for their success, but this is mine. In order to achieve my goal of becoming successful, I am working hard at school and doing everything I can to make the connections that I may need in the future. This could be simple things like joining clubs and engaging students in classes I am in, to things like participating in research events and applying for research positions. No matter what I do, I want to always be partaking in something that will move me forward in my goal of being successful. I hope that the diligence I have and the effort I put into this are fruitful. Measuring success in my ability to help others is near and dear to my heart, because that is exactly what I needed when I was younger. I want to be able to do that for my family, friends, and loved ones.