I used to feel ashamed of who I am– a Lao American, first-generation, low-income student. I was in an echo chamber of privilege with opportunities that seemed to never echo back to me. I masked the truth of who I am, convinced that I could belong in the same reality as those around me. My sense of normalcy was something I was also ashamed of–worrying about bills or not having a father, living in a one-income household with my mother. My siblings and I separated our mother from my abusive father, who left a bank debt under my name as a parting gift. I knew it wasn’t normal for your unemployed father to have gambled the family’s money—every spin on the slot machine was another hour of overtime my mother had to work. I was a naive, frustrated, and lost child struggling to understand why we grew up the way we did. At this time, I stepped up and started working part-time in high school to ease the stress on my mother. Being a first-generation student, means breaking the cycle and pursuing the unknown. There’s a lot of pressure in being the “first”, but I think there is a lot of honor that you can carry with it. The honor of being the product of my family’s resilience as they fled the war, found their way to the United States, and started from nothing to get to where they are now. They taught me how to be resourceful, to advocate for myself, and especially the value of an education. When it was my time to leave for university, I was scared. I didn’t want to leave her and my brother behind to fend for themselves, but she understood that this was an opportunity that doesn’t always come to first-gen students. She never completed trade school and only had a high school diploma under her belt. She made sure to ingrain it in my head that the most precious thing you can have in life is an education. Entering college, I only had a couple hundred dollars in my savings account and a dream to be an engineer. I’ve always had a scientific mind and love chemistry, as my naivety gave way to responsibility, climate change became something I deeply cared about. I want to “pay it forward” to not only my family, but for the next generation of Lao Americans. I want to show that we can do anything we set our minds to. From the academic trials and tribulations, the weedout classes, and taking care of myself, I was barely surviving. I currently have a part-time job and do research at my school’s nuclear physics lab to make ends meet. Everyday forces a choice: work a few hours and lose study time for finals and midterms, or ask my mother who is financially struggling for money. I couldn’t bear to burden my mother when she was already struggling on her own, providing for herself and my little brother. Amidst the struggle of balancing work, my studies, and my social life, I developed a stronger bond and appreciation for chemistry and physics (no pun intended). For the first time, I watched our local tandem Van de Graaff accelerator run for the first time. Engineers and physicists huddled in the control room, oh so carefully twisting knobs, flipping switches—creating magical isotopes you couldn’t think of for their experiments. They were so fascinated with the things that we couldn’t see with our eyes and soon I was too. We all heard the “boom” coming from a collision of the ion source and a target of some chemical compound, releasing enough energy to initiate a chain reaction. I knew that this could be big for the fight against climate change. So here I am, studying Chemical Engineering with a minor in Physics, hoping to close the gap between the unknown and the potential for nuclear energy. I want to create something that will outlast me, to create a world that will survive so that our nieces, nephews, siblings, children have a chance to see how beautiful the world is. Without a doubt, I know my mother would pursue her education if we weren’t born. Sometimes, I wish I wasn’t, just for her to have that chance. I want to finish my education to make her and our family proud. The greatest lesson I’ve learned from my mother is sacrifice. No matter how exhausted she was from work, or the little money we had, she would make sure we were taken care of. She is sacrificing her certainty and education just to believe in me. For that, I will always rise against the odds being against first-generation, low-income students. I want to make my mothers sacrifice worth it by finishing my degree. But ultimately, I want to represent and show the Lao community that we can do it. I want to invest in the education of other Lao youth around the country, who may be in the same situation as me. If I have a dream and am still chasing it, no matter how much I’ve been dragged down, so can they. I want to give them the small push and support that they need to keep going. Our dreams aren’t impossible nor fantasy– the sky is our limit and we can reach it too.

I used to feel ashamed of who I am– a Lao American, first-generation, low-income student. I was in an echo chamber of privilege with opportunities that seemed to never echo back to me. I masked the truth of who I am, convinced that I could belong in the same reality as those around me. My sense of normalcy was something I was also ashamed of–worrying about bills or not having a father, living in a one-income household with my mother. Through the nights I savored hot pockets for dinner and the shifts I took in high-school to help my mother and brother, my character was shaped into who I would soon become. Being a first-generation student to me, means breaking the cycle and pursuing the unknown. There’s a lot of pressure in being the “first”, but I think there is a lot of honor that you can carry with it. The honor of being the product of my family’s resilience as they fled the war, found their way to the United States, and started from nothing to get to where they are now. They taught me how to be resourceful, to advocate for myself, and especially the value of an education. Entering college, I only had a couple hundred dollars in my savings account and a dream to be an engineer. I’ve always had a scientific mind and love chemistry, as my naivety gave way to responsibility, climate change became something I deeply cared about. I want to “pay it forward” to not only my family, but for the next generation of Lao Americans. I want to show that we can do anything we set our minds to. Here I am, studying Chemical Engineering with a minor in Physics, hoping to close the gap between the unknown and the potential for nuclear energy. Throughout academic trials and tribulations, the weedout classes, I was barely surviving. I currently have a part-time job and do research at my school’s nuclear physics lab to make ends meet. Everyday forces a choice: work a few hours and lose study time for finals and midterms or ask my mother who is financially struggling for money. I couldn’t bear to burden my mother when she was already struggling on her own, providing for herself and my little brother. Without a doubt, I know my mother would pursue her education if we weren’t born. Sometimes, I wish I wasn’t, just for her to have that chance. I want to finish my education to make her and our family proud. The greatest lesson I’ve learned from my mother is sacrifice. No matter how exhausted she was from work, or the little money we had, she would make sure we were taken care of. I want to make hers worth it by finishing my degree. But ultimately, I want to represent and show the Lao community that we can do it. Our dreams aren’t impossible nor fantasy– the sky is our limit and we can reach it too.

If I had a quarter for the amount of times I navigated the unknown, I would have two. One for my 18-year-old self, applying for college, and one for my current 20-year-old self. My perceived normal differed from others, but the devil’s in the details. My fondest memories came from having hot pockets for dinner, while others enjoyed theirs from a sit-down-meal at the table with their parents. I assisted my siblings in separating an abusive father from my mother, leaving behind a one-income household. I picked up a part-time customer service job in high school to support my mother, while others did not have to worry about that responsibility. When college applications rolled around, I was intimidated by the cost of my education– not only financially but at the expense of leaving my mother and brother behind. I was able to waive all my application fees and applied to many schools, relieving the burden of draining whatever savings I had. The real hurdle was starting my undergraduate education–I arrived on campus without a college savings account set up by my parents. With a couple hundred dollars in my savings account and my dream to be the first Lao American engineer in my family, I aspire to be a role-model to others like me–especially my little brother–to show that we can achieve anything we set our minds to. I was scared of falling behind and relying on my mother for money to support me while I was away. So, I am currently working a part-time job and doing research at my school's nuclear physics laboratory, assisting in maintenance and radioactive disposal. My love for physics and chemistry deepened as I watched engineers and physicists creating isotopes for their studies. Combining this with my natural intuition for chemistry, I decided to pursue a degree in Chemical Engineering with a minor in Physics. Seeing the dire state of our world and engaging with the scientific community, climate change became an issue that I must advocate for. With my degree concentration, I intend to work in the renewable energy field–particularly in nuclear energy. I find myself at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory contributing to the advancement of their nuclear reactor, applying my expertise to create self-sufficient fusion reactions. This scholarship would alleviate the burden of choosing between studying for midterms or taking extra hours at the lab. My mother values my siblings’ and my pursuit of higher education deeply and I want to make her proud. I don’t want to risk wasting the opportunity I was given. Completing my education without the risk of losing my spot at college due to falling short from financial aid would mean the world to the both of us. I’ve witnessed my mother stressing over our bills and whether or not we’d have dinner. She is my role model– no matter how exhausted she is from work, she will always find a way to take care of us. I want to do the same for her and my brother. More importantly, I want to pay homage to the Lao community who are also struggling. I want to invest in the education of our Lao youth and continue giving the gift of education through philanthropy. Other Lao Americans, like my little brother, just need support and one final push to achieve their dreams. If I get this chance to keep going with my dreams, so should they.

The world I grew up in felt as new as when my mother and her family immigrated from Laos to the United States for the first time. I took after my mother, both of our six year old selves trying so hard to understand where we grew up. I watched as my parents struggled to make ends meet, let alone assure we had a warm meal waiting for us every night. Gradually, I understood that the way we grew up was unconventional–not every student took on a part-time job to assist their parents and take care of their younger brother. Not every student lost their father to abuse and forced separation, leaving large shoes to fill, and living on a single income household. Attaining an education beyond high school was a goal that my mother engrained in me and my four other siblings. She believed it was quintessential to escaping the financial insecurity we lived in. For me, college was always part of the plan. There was more to understand about this world beyond my high school education and soon, I found myself at the University of Washington studying engineering. I fell in love with the puzzle-like career that engineering is, but I didn’t know what I wanted to specialize in until my Sophomore year. While navigating my decision, our financial troubles followed me into college, leading me to take on a part-time job at my school’s nuclear physics laboratory. I worked there as a lab assistant, diligently tasked with ensuring we had supplies to run our tandem Van de Graff accelerator and creating a safe work environment by properly disposing of radioactive waste. I came into work often, at least 19 hours a week if I managed on top of school work. On one of my longer shifts, I received an email that read, “Accelerator Operations for Today”. Drawn like a magnet into the accelerator control room, I sat next to three engineers. Observant as they pushed buttons, adjusted dials, and precisely fine tuned the direction of the ion beam that was ready to run. The loud wooshing of the neutron radiation detector echoed throughout the hallway, as experimental physicists and engineers anticipated a highly-radioactive isotope for a decay experiment. I have a profound love for chemistry– combinations of atoms to create infinite possibilities and the theory behind bonding. When I sat down with the engineers that day, everything I’ve learned came together. The ion beam, consisting of positively charged hydrogen, would collide with a foil target that was coated with some element, creating a specific isotope that these physicists and engineers were looking for. That moment felt magical, chemistry and physics together reminds me of alchemy where you can create something amazing out of the elements. As cliche as the legos analogy is when it comes to pursuing engineering, it applies to me too. My legos are the Periodic Table of Elements and subatomic particles that I want to combine together to create sustainable energy. Climate change is a pressing issue and is something important to me. I want to protect our environment to pay back Mother Earth for taking care of the human race. I want to leave an impact on the world that will benefit every living being, I want to serve our society and empower the scientific community as a low-income, first-generation, Lao-American. More importantly, I believe in nuclear energy and using that power for good, to create instead of destroy. Here I stand on my two feet, in my Junior year of college, pursuing Chemical Engineering with a minor in Physics.

Chemistry and Physics are magic. You combine mundane atoms: carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur to create the recipe for life and alternatively, you can split them– contradicting its Greek meaning, indivisible. No matter how you combine or split, there is one fundamental truth– that energy is never created or destroyed, but transformed. When I think of magic, I think about the millions of combinations these atoms have arranged themselves– the particle-wave duality of light, radiation, and the fundamental laws of our world that upon discovery, never fails to surprise us every single time. Our universe is unpredictable and that is exactly why I find it so charming. The pivotal moment for me was my first introductory course in university Chemistry. I remember sitting anxiously, shy, anticipating all the information that was going to overload my brain. “Electrons are not actually in circular formation around the nucleus, they are actually in an electron cloud. Within these clouds are atomic orbitals that are home to the electrons.” Orbitals. My understanding of atoms, everything I’ve ever known… What are atomic orbitals? As I progressed through my Chemistry classes, beyond Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and Molecular Orbital Theory, I immersed myself into all matter that holds everything we know together. I no longer see atoms, but the direct consequence of their existence: the bonds that hold them together, the laws that govern energy, and the infinite potential to create something entirely new– something bigger than myself. With this in mind, I chose to pursue Chemical Engineering as my specialized field. I fell in love with the theories of atoms, particles, matter– the puzzle that our world is. Our world is wounded. Our climate is eroding before our very eyes– I, and many other Chemical Engineers, can tend to them. Using the natural abundance of matter available, harnessing their energies, I want to pursue nuclear energy to take action toward a sustainable environment. I envision myself committing the rest of my life to revive its reputation and potential, doing what our predecessors from Fukushima and Chernobyl couldn’t do. I am no stranger to being one of the few–if any–women of color that is also a first-generation, low-income (FGLI) student in labs or in the workplace. Currently, I am preparing myself for the industry by pursuing experiences both on and off-campus. I do research and work part-time at my university’s nuclear physics laboratory, trying to understand both the fundamental laws of our world and applying my knowledge with our particle accelerator. It is empowering to be an FGLI in this lab, where it is primarily male dominated. When I am underestimated, challenged, I rise up knowing that much like atoms that create life, every diverse atom like me has the power to create something powerful and transformative too. Beyond my emotional challenges, I also face significant financial ones. These opportunities often come with sacrifice– whether that be choosing to work a shift over studying for my midterm, pursuing research, or my wellness overall. Being financially independent means facing my educational and living expenses head on. Receiving this scholarship would ease a significant financial burden and would allow me to hone my focus on my educational and career goals. As I continue down my Chemical Engineering path, I realize that I’ve become an Alchemist. Not in the transformation of Lead to Gold, but in my transformation of my passion and curiosity of Chemistry, Physics, and reviving our climate into my purpose. This is my way of paying it forward to the next generation. Thank you for considering students like me and choosing to invest in our futures.

I grew up a motivated and inspired child as my mom told me that the world is my oyster. Evolving into the individual I am today, I have found my passion to be in physics but I wanted a more practical application– thus I landed in the field of Engineering. The discovery of the Higgs-Boson particle hooked me as the uncertainty of the unknown was captivating. This itch in the brain planted a seed in my mind, sprouting into a desire to someday be one of the Engineers at CERN unraveling the mysteries of our universe on a particle level. Engineering will serve as the outlet of my curiosity– solving puzzles and mysteries with the little clues that the natural world has left us. This applies not only in the grand scheme of the makeup of the universe, but it also applies on the micro level– our communities. Often people find themselves gravitating to the Pre-Med path as that is a direct way to impact people's lives, however, I feel like people forget about the finer ways you can change a life. Engineers impact lives every single day through the very appliances we have– the computer I am typing this application on, our fridges, stoves, and many more. I, too, want to have that impact on people's lives. I want to take on the Iron Ring and promise to ethically serve the public by making our quality of life much easier, especially when it comes to environmental sustainability. I want to impact the world by working alongside other Engineers to create an eco-friendly world so that the generations after us will have a chance at life. Throughout my educational journey, I can proudly say that my heart belongs in Engineering. No matter how much I struggled in my classes, I made it out on top and my curiosity failed to dwindle with each level of classes I ascended. I write this as I am short to begin my Sophomore year with specialized upper-division Engineering classes. My experiences thus far were briefly with my school's Aeronautics and Astronautics CubeSat (Cube Satellite) team, where we successfully launched a CubeSat this summer through the NASA CubeSat Launch Initiative. Working with other inspired Aerospace Engineering students made me realize how passionate I am for what they do because of observing the laws of physics in action, the math I’ve been learning in real-time application, and the work ethic to launch their dreams as high as the CubeSat. Engineering is a tough major to study, especially as a lower-income Lao American, where we never had the financial means to chase our dreams. However, I believe I will finish my degree despite all odds and add a familiar face for children to look up to– it is an honor to be part of the change.

I want to bike 17 miles. These 17 miles are crucial to my work and my contribution to humanity. I’ll bike 17 miles in a circle, a mysterious catacomb-like structure that holds four enigmatic faces. As I bike, I wonder the next time they murmur words that will reveal the bits and pieces of our story. But out of all the faces, ATLAS is one whose eyes are a window to the dark, yet important parts of our existence. Coming from an immigrant family that held outdated beliefs about women, the prophetical fantasies I envisioned about myself revolved around falling into the shadow of men. My career, autonomy, and my life fell into the hands of men around me. My father would repeat that my existence amounted to nothing over and over. It was a requiem of a dream– finding my own identity and creating a change in the world I already viewed skeptically. Despite being met with a collision that threw me into the void, I flew around endlessly with no sense of identity or passion until something pulled me into its orbit. I found myself fascinated with the inner workings of our world as I knew it, delving deep into theoretical concepts through all the books that I would throw whatever money I had at. Coming from a low-income background meant that I had to ration and use my money wisely, but the pursuit of knowledge is worth every penny: The Feynman Lectures on Physics and The Principa. Although I failed to understand the process of classical mechanics or even begin to interpret the abstract wonders that are quantum mechanics in modern physics, I never shied away from trying to comprehend Hamiltonian and Lagrangian mechanics. What came forward from this new infatuation with various laws of our existence, was the desire to live the life that these physicists and engineers have– a life of constant absorption of knowledge and gaining the opportunity to discover knowledge worth sharing. Not only was this a chance to enrich myself in what the world has to offer, but a chance to prove to my father that women can pave the way in the world. Ultimately, this dissatisfaction with not being able to understand how Richard Feynman attempted to integrate the laws of classical mechanics and apply them to quantum mechanics will erode my being. Despite the cliche blatantly writing itself, this insatiable curiosity for knowledge on the foundational structures of our universe brings me to the CERN research institute. In my lifetime, there will be someone who surpasses some of the greats: Feynman, Oppenheimer, Bohr, or Heisenberg. A visionary such as myself dreams to be one of the greats and follow the footsteps of the brilliant women physicists and engineers who came before me. Maybe no longer will the names that were listed be the only ones that most of the world knows, maybe we can call back and remember women such as Marie Curie alongside my name. I envision myself contributing to a greater cloud of knowledge that we all share, working with the largest particle accelerator in the world. Niels Bohr, inventor of the Bohr model of the atom, said “Prediction is very difficult, especially about our future.” These 17 miles to bike will not be an easy feat for me, the path to ATLAS is bumpy starting from the ground, but this is a test of my passion and ambition. One day, I would hope to see ATLAS’ face and to see exactly what it is capable of.