I signed my third major a week before the pandemic began, much to the disdain of my physics advisor. Many individuals were against me adding another major to my college experience, saying that it would constrain my ability to conduct research and have a social life. Nevertheless, after a semester of struggling to engage with physics problems and lagging behind my peers because of my developmental disability, I realized that I needed time to learn how to problem-solve. This is when I decided to take the introduction to proofs course. When I began my course, I was awful at constructing my arguments. I had a hard time understanding why my arguments, which seemed valid, were not strong answers. I would get frustrated when it took me hours to complete a problem, while my classmates seemed to fly through homework. However, after learning what it took to construct and evaluate rigorous arguments, I gained a deeper understanding of proofs and logical thinking. Not only did I take more proof-heavy courses, strengthening my reasoning skills, but I also began doing better in my physics courses. I found myself to be able to solve physics problems that I had not before. Moreover, these skills helped me outside of the classroom. As the Diversity Committee Chair for my Student Government Association, I found myself able to make more connections when discussing legislation and during debates. I could defend my advocacy work better, which allowed me the opportunity to present important discussions to administrators (such as my current work with the Associate Dean of the College of Science and Engineering and the Vice President of the Office of Diversity Equity and Inclusion to reduce the impact of barrier courses in STEM among underrepresented groups on campus). I also found myself able to understand other people’s perspectives when in a heated personal argument, saving me time that would have otherwise been spent being angry. Before learning proofs, I had little confidence in myself or my ability to overcome barriers on my own. As a disabled student, I was often forced to rely on what accommodations others were willing to provide me with while also struggling with teachers, assuming that my conceptual understanding was lower than what it was because of my inability to communicate where I stood with the material. After learning proofs, I became more confident. I can identify systematic problems that prevented me from succeeding, and my ability to communicate these barriers was more disciplined and efficient. I could even create plausible solutions to issues I was facing and, with help, could implement them on a wider scale to prevent others from encountering the same situation. Because of mathematics, I was able to feel not only academically accomplished but personally accomplished. Although the pandemic prevented mathematics from allowing me to find lifelong friends, strengthen my values, or shape my beliefs and identity, it gave me the ability to learn skills that will stay with me for the rest of my life.

I was born deaf. This, in and of itself, is not unique. Roughly three out of 1,000 children will be born deaf every single day. Many of them will not have the experiences I had, where surgery and specialized therapy gave them a large portion of their hearing back, but this is still not unique. Hardly any of them will end up diagnosed with my disability, superior semi-circular canal dehiscence, which is a rare disorder affecting less than 1% of the global population. This condition is caused by a thinned or opened bony barrier, which distorts sound waves in the inner ear to cause a heightened sensitivity to sound and hearing loss at low frequencies, but this is still not unique. If less than 1% of the global population has my disorder, then roughly 79 million people have my disorder. I wouldn't consider that unique. The thing that is unique about me comes from irony. Many people who have a heightened sensitivity to noise have to make accommodations to attend concerts, avoid loud bars, and often isolate themselves in situations where their disability can be triggered. Instead, I learned how to play the flute, and have been playing professionally since I was 6 years old. Deaf musicians are far and few between, but they are people who took a look at a system that was evolved without them in mind and decided they liked a challenge. My interest in music and sound has remained throughout my life. I have always been interested in the way sound works, the power that comes from sound, and what we can accomplish by using its unique properties. To complement my interest, I have also been an avid physicist. I went into school dual majoring in these fields, often to great criticism as the unenlightened thought them to be unrelated. That is nothing further from the truth, there is music in all things from the vibration of particles to the oscillation of stars; there is physics in all things, from the harmonics in a single note played by an instrument to the construction of concert halls. I am unique because I have taken my disadvantage and made it my biggest strength. I currently work as an observational astronomer doing sound wave analysis on pulsating stars. The only other human beings who are as unique as me are blind artists, deaf musicians, mute comedians, and many others whose talents and curiosity lie in the irony of their experiences. Every day I hold these people in my heart. My sister, who suffers from a heart condition, is a thrill seeker. My brother, who is hyperactive, finds his stillness in meditation. I have spent a good portion of my college years fighting for the ironic and unique. I have also found a passion for political policy, including policy for disability education. I give back to my community by working to make sure that their irony is always appreciated and accommodated. Recently, I have been successful in working to get my university to recognize and address barrier courses, by analyzing DWFI rates in STEM classes and surveying the identities of those who received a D, W, F, or I. At higher rates, my unrepresented minorities were being pushed out of these classes. By the end of the semester, I am hoping to implement a cohort program so they are no longer alone in these experiences. So, yes. I am unique. I am unique in the irony of my passion and my field. However, it never feels unique to me. There is irony everywhere, it's just how we explore it.

Due to the recent economic crisis, living costs have become almost unaffordable to me. Currently, I am making ends meet by working multiple jobs and pinching pennies where I can by turning off the heat during the day and using the on-campus food pantry to fill out my groceries. I have been trying to be productive in order to change this situation by applying for off-campus jobs that pay more, as well as trying to work more hours. However, many off campus jobs that pay higher wages will not accommodate my schedule. Not to mention, no on campus job pays more than minimum wage and federal law states we are not allowed to work more than 20 hours a week. I am lucky to live at a university where there are supports when students are in crisis, but living below my means starts with drastic sacrifice students shouldn't have to take. Get as much help as I might, winter is coming. With limited heat, I worry that my roommate and I risk getting sick throughout the semester as research shows lack of heating increases risk of respiratory infections. I worry that, by pinching the budget for groceries, we'll have a lack of vitamins in our diet to help our immune system fight off these infections. I'm also incredibly worried that costs are going to increase more, meaning more sacrifices that affect our health and ability to do well in school. Throughout my four years on campus, most of my costs have been covered. I have been able to get scholarships for my tuition, to help pay for housing, and even some to allow me to go to research conferences and pay for my publications. However, this crisis is new to my time on campus. It seems like, no matter how hard I budget, there is no room for error. This scholarship would help me with some of the intense rise of living costs that we have been seeing. It would allow me to turn on my heat without worrying that I won't be able to afford groceries. It will allow me to buy groceries without worrying what the total cost is going to be. It will allow me to rest from the time spent scrimping coupons and finding low-cost food items, giving me more time to focus on my studies again. This scholarship would also allow me to focus on increasing my GPA for graduate school applications. I am planning on getting my Ph D in astrophysics, and increasing my GPA (and it is not poor by any means) would help me stand out to the application committee. This would allow me to really pursue the path I have wanted to since I was very little, allowing me to become a research physicists at an observatory.

I am pursuing my graduate degree in astrophysics, particularly I am studying white dwarf variables stars and using observed oscillations of the stellar interior to identify what material the stellar interior is made of. As you may know, the speed of sound changes as compression waves move from one medium to another. In space, sound waves can't travel due to the lack of medium. However, we can observe waves traveling in stellar, galactic, and sometimes even planetary material. It's like how we can observe an earthquake here on Earth, and use it to determine where the seismic activity is coming from and what activity we're seeing in the mantle. Many would argue that my science isn't important to the bottom line. Many would feel in the right; I'm not saving endangered species, I'm not doing environmental conservation, and I'm definitely not eradicating any disease. However, I don't feel like you have to be doing something drastic to be important. I know I am not changing the world through the discovery of a celestial object's interior, but I am changing the world. There are a lot of reasons why my work is important to society. In the 1960's-1970's, space exploration brought an nations together through times of political and social turmoil. Throughout the 1990's and early 2000's, projects like the Hubble Telescope, Messenger, and New Horizons have given our entire civilization ways to connect to our earliest beginnings. They have given us images that allow humanity to explore the cosmos as far as we ever have, giving us hope, wonder, and astonishment. Allowing us to ask questions like are we all alone? Obviously, this is all great and important work. Forcing the entirety of humanity to comes to terms with the fact that we are all here on this blue marble of Earth by chance, and that we are not separated as we seem to like to be is definitely a feat in and of itself. I still do not feel like it is the most important part, though. I do political advocacy and lobbying for scientific endeavors both on and off campus. One of the biggest problems I focus on is accessibility to STEM and STEM research for all groups, although I take a particular interest in disabilities. The most important issue I have put time towards is accessibility of the night sky. Today, our night sky is often obscured by light pollution, space junk, and even night time advertising through drones. I am working to clear up our night skies, as some 60% of individuals have now never seen the Milky Way galaxy. My main talking point when individuals ask why they should care, or why I should care, is the following: Galileo, Einstein, Newton, Kepler, Aristotle, Brahe, and many more all stared up at the same sky. They were ultimately inspired to their work by the secrets the night sky gave to them. Humanity owns the night sky as a whole, and every deserves the right to be able to look upon the same night sky that Kepler or Herschel did. No one entity should be able to take that away from them. Science is important to society because it speaks to all of us. We are here on this planet, in this life, together. I think science is important because we all contribute to it, no matter how insignificantly, every single day. It's one of the only collective actions we have as a society. Expand from there: science is the only collectively empathetic action we can achieve together. We get to prove that we matter.

Loving you is like a car crash Four lane traffic Twelve car pileup And I’m stuck in the middle With all the doors caved in They’re gonna have to use The Jaws of Life to save me I have the typical wounds Head trauma Broken Wrists Heart Palpitations I’m groggy when I finally come to And I’m trying To keep myself from crying My legs hurt My mind is numb And everyone around me is telling me I’m going to be okay Meanwhile, I’m stuck in the deafening silence Of waiting for help As I hear sirens in the distance And suddenly they’re here Prying open my window While trying to shield me from the wreckage Asking me questions Like, “What’s your name?” “What number do we need to call?” “Is there anyone who can be here for you?” Meanwhile I cannot get over the fact That callousness of my hands Has been rubbed so raw It hurts to pray The door comes off And they lift me up high Strapping me onto a stretcher Taking me to a safe place To heal And loving you is like that car crash But it is also like the rescue And hospital staff And all the things that come after Because loving you is beauty after the wreckage Where car doors have never looked so soft And neither has a hospital bed

In my junior year of my physics program, we had a speaker come give a presentation titled, "Real Techies Don't Worry About Eugenics." Everyone was required to come to the presentation, including those who upheld the little diversity the program liked to show off. The only problem was that when real techies don't worry about eugenics, it means that they don't worry about you. You see, real techies don't worry about eugenics. When they come up with a problem, maybe discussing inherited diseases, they'll calculate without regard for what they're calculating for. They come up with solutions: education campaigns, fines for those who keep offspring with the disease, sterilization, forced miscarriages until they finally reach the ultimate conclusion. We won't have the disease if we no longer have any carriers left alive. It wasn't long before we knew that those "real techies" meant us. It wasn't long before we got out of the presentation, which highlighted steps we needed to take to prevent "real techies" from disregarding human life in their calculations, that we had to hear arguments of, "well, it's an idea. No one would ever really implement measures like that. We know human life is valuable." We know that, even for the Nazi's, it always just starts out as an "idea." We know that, in their eyes, we will never be a "real techy." The problem will go around and around again, traumatizing us each time. This is shown best in online gaming forums. You don't have to go long before players are yelling as you, telling you that you will never be a real gamer. They fight companies for introducing "forced diversity," as if people don't just look like that. As if people aren't black, or gay, or a woman with body hair. Players will degrade you until you break. No matter what you do, you will never be a "real gamer." You will always be something to remove, a carrier they don't want left alive. No one talks about the effects that this phenomenon has on its victims, it's mostly a highlight of the disregard for social norms. However, it is important to recognize that we are just committing another form of eugenics. A social one. There are always those who fight, but they face increasing hostile resistance. Some have to hide, some have to move. Eventually, some quit. These victims will be traumatized, and often won't pick up games again. They will live with the damages of not being a "real gamer." I am very tired of the idea of a "real" something. No matter what you do, or how you do it, you're "real." The more we cave into this idea that it takes some intricate trait of a profession to be considered real, the more we isolate our communities. Gaming is just the most obvious incident we can point to. Am I a real physicist? Or will my disability prevent others from seeing me that way? Am I destined to live with the trauma of not being a "real physicist?" Who knows. I, for sure, would like to see that change. There is value in experience and diversity and human life as we know it, and it is never just a thought experiment. I am real just as the sky and trees and Earth are.