Mental health has changed who I am dramatically over the past four years. I never really thought that mental health was much of a concern when I was in eighth grade but that had all changed when I had encountered my first real hardship in my life. My family and I went to Mexico for my sister's graduation vacation and it was supposed to be some great adventure with no conflict, but I was very wrong with that assumption. When we had gotten to the resort, my family and I were so excited to explore the new place but we still needed to leave the resort to help my mom with her dialysis for her kidney; which she had been fighting for multiple years. Around midway through the trip my dad and mom got in a horrible fight that they always do when we are on a trip but this time it was different, my dad seemed off, very off. He had left soon after the yelling had settled down and me and my 3 other siblings had started to get worried. I was the second oldest of my siblings and I was scared the most. I left about a half hour after my dad had left and I found him drenched, missing a shoe, and broken glasses. I felt so scared because I thought that he had been beaten up by someone but I was too young to understand. Soon after the trip ended, my dad and uncle who were once so inseparable got into a fight that ended in injury on both sides. When he got home we asked him what happened and he told us everything. They had gotten into a fight because my uncle never believed in mental health and depression. My dad asked for some time off of the business they owned together because he was struggling but he said he was fine and to "man up" and choked him against the wall until my aunt stopped them. Soon after my dad told me everything. He sat me down and told me what actually happened in Mexico. He had tried to kill himself in the ocean because he felt that we would have been better off without him and we would be happier; and the fight with my uncle was because he was depressed and couldn't handle work. I had felt so bad about everything and it made me want to vomit from hearing that my own father had tried to take his own life because of what felt like, me. After that my whole family started to fall apart. My uncle and aunt stopped talking to us and that included 3 of my cousins. I was very close too. I felt like they hated me and only me even though it was a lot bigger than me. It had sent me into a deep depression because our families would all see each other weekly but with the sudden stop it hurt me in ways that I cannot explain. About 3 years after that I was just getting out of my junior year of high school and my mental health had sunk to the lowest of the lows, I wouldn't get out of bed or even eat because I felt like my whole graduating class hated me because I couldn't stop running my mouth even though I never thought that I was so annoying. I lost all my confidence and just wanted high school to be over. My grades started dropping and I started to lose friends because they lost interest in talking to me. After summer break started I was at the lowest I had ever been, I started to have suicidal thoughts all the time it was so unbearable that I had almost went on with it. I had left my house in the middle of the night and drove myself to an old bridge in my hometown and stood atop it just looking at the ground balling my eyes out trying to think of any way that would make me want to keep living, it was so hard to live with all these horrible thoughts in my life. What saved me was my best friend texting me that he missed who I used to be and that he wanted to help. That is what truly made me a better person, to myself and others. My mom had sent me to therapy that had helped me fully get out of the deep hole I was in. It took so much for me to go to therapy that my mom basically had to drag me to the place. Once I stepped foot in the building it made me so scared that I could just melt. I started attending weekly checkups until I started to feel better about my life. A few months later, looking back at all that happened had helped me understand how important every living thing on earth is and that life is precious and should not be ended prematurely. I have since become empathetic towards my peers and help my community in every way I can. My goals have changed to helping the world and finding new ways to make energy more efficient by becoming an electrical engineer at Montana Technological University. I want to build better relationships with people and help everyone that I find struggling because the worst thing in the world is to go through depression alone. In my eyes I see a brighter future than ever before. I see people happy that electricity is cheaper and that they are able to afford more things without the financial stress of the electricity bill being so high. I see myself helping around my church more and helping people in need in my community. I want to be involved in everything I am able to do with my life because I want to help teach that ending your life is never an option, there is so much more in life.

It started with a project in elementary school. I was in the sixth grade during our "wax museum fair," where we were to dress up as someone we looked up to. I had been waiting to do this project for so long, as I had seen lots of kids do this when I was older, so I knew exactly who to pick, Nikola Tesla. he made me feel like anything was possible if you were creative enough and put yourself out there. His accomplishments sparked my interest in electrical engineering, for I loved the look of circuits and the intricacy of each point. I would love to help with military contracting and make the world safer from harmful people. I want to have people feel safer from threats from other countries. I think that I could make a big impact with my STEM career by helping people and innovating how we deal with outside threats, and maybe in more humane ways than just bombs. I would love to find new ways to create non-lethal countermeasures. I find how the high-powered microwaves used to make engines stall very interesting, and making new ways that can branch off of that idea sounds very interesting to me. One of my favorite books is "Tesla: Inventor of the Electric Age" By W. Benard Carlson. One of the quotes that struck me the hardest was "The moment you construct a device to carry into practice a crude idea, you will find yourself inevitably engrossed with the details and defects of the apparatus" page 120. This makes me feel a sense of pride that engineering is not easy and shouldn't be, but is done for the love of knowledge and setbacks. I don't want to just study engineering-- I want to do something with it. Something that matters. I've always been drawn to defense-- not the loud, dramatic parts--but the quiet ones. The code no one sees, the systems that work in the background, keeping people safe without needing to be thanked. There's something about that kind of work that feels steady. solid. real. Electrical Engineering feels like the right foundation. It's the wires behind the walls, the language machines speak, the way ideas become action. I'm especially pulled toward the world of communications, radar, and the hidden tech that keeps things running when everything else shuts down. I don't know exactly where I'll end up-- maybe in a lab, on the edge of something classified-- but I know I want to be building the kinds of tools that serve a bigger purpose. Throughout college, my biggest goal is to learn networking and make connections with professors and peers to give me a head start after graduation. I have also thought of going into a part of the Navy after college to work hands-on as an engineer and go straight into the workforce. I would also love to get an internship at Lockheed Martin during one of my years at Montana Technological University. This scholarship would give me space to breathe, to focus, to become. It would open doors I might not be able to reach on my own. I'm not chasing prestige-- I'm chasing meaning. and this feels like a step toward something that matters

From the moment I started football, I knew I would be in for the funnest parts in my life. For me, it was my coaches who made the biggest impact on my character. They taught me how not to give up, how to be a responsible person. I started playing football when I was only 6 years old, playing little guy football, not knowing what to do. I learned how to be disciplined and not to give up. When I got to middle school, I started to play a more competitive version of the sport. I thought it was something you just went through the motions and didn't think all that much about it. I took it for granted for the two years I was in middle school. Then came my freshman year in high school, when football really got harder and very serious. I learned how to make actual connections with others and how to be a good teammate. learning how to be a teammate has helped me do great in other parts of my life, such as group projects in my Intro to Engineering class. The most eye-opening thing I've learned is from something that my coach said to us about how we are in the prime of our football times. because there are three stages in football: being the little kids looking up to the high school kids wanting to be them, being the kids who play for the high school, and finally being older, wishing to be able to play again. I took those words to heart. I have played even harder than I had ever worked before. pushing past my limits in the weight room and on the field. I wanted to be my very best self, so when I graduate from high school, I will have no regrets about my football career. I also use those words for how I act and do things in my everyday life, whether that is doing my homework and turning it in on time, or just as simple as helping someone on the street because I want to be my best self. Another thing that influenced me was when our team was on a 5-game losing streak, our head coach gave a speech, and the main part was "Why Not Us?" That quote has been inside me ever since then. Whenever I am thinking about something that I think I can't do, I remind myself, "Why not me?" Then I think of what I can do in order to be able to do that thing I thought was so far out of reach.

I think that calculus is the most important in the STEM field because it is the thing that everything we know about physics is built on. Isaac Newton, also known as the father of calculus, was the same person who made the laws of physics. This would mean that his ideas based on physics intertwine with his ideas of calculus because they are so deeply rooted that if we were to just ignore calculus, the laws of physics would change drastically. The use of calculus isn't just number crunching in class as busy work, but it teaches us the basic building blocks of every STEM field. Even though we might not even look at calculus again after graduation, we still use it in everyday life; we just don't look at it like that. If we weren't taught calculus, we would not have a base to learn the more detailed parts of the field we want to go into. For example, if we were to try to teach someone to be an architect without the base of calculus, sure, he might be able to make a good concept of how to design something, but he wouldn't know if it is structurally sound because he would need to use calculus to find the stress points and if it would hold for a long tim. Having the base of calculus is so important to everything STEM-related and even more so in the engineering world. Calculus is the most important because it helps us visualize the concept of infinity. The way to think of calculus is math with infinity. because all of the concepts talk about how something can be infinitely small or big, but still is a part of the solution, because it is considered the exact answer, because as you get closer to a point (infinitely closer), you will be so close that it is almost the same thing as being the right answer. The proof of pi is based on calculus, so if we removed calculus, it would change the way we find the equation of a circle. which would disproove everything that we use the circle for. like the unit circle and so much more. I believe that calculus is the most important, no matter what. It is also so fun to learn because it is so fascinating that we can have an answer by using an infinitely small number. I love all the concepts that calculus has, and I'm all here for it.

There are so many movies that have shaped who I am, and the impact they had put on me, but the greatest impact was when I first watched Interstellar. When I looked at the description, I thought that it would just be another cool sci-fi film with space travel and time warps. But that is the furthest from the truth. It was a story that really touched my heart. I was in eighth grade at the time--old enough to want to know more about science, but not knowing how to learn more. Interstellar changed that. It didn't just show me black holes and distant galaxies-- it showed me how imagination, sacrifice, and science can be so powerful when they are combined into one thing. The movie shows Cooper, a former NASA pilot who had become a farmer, who was asked to go to space to save the world because it was becoming uninhabitable. What hooked me was when I truly saw the emotional depth the movie had. The idea that science isn't just robots and no emotion, but it is the exact opposite, being deeply human. Cooper's love for his daughter is shown through the physics of time dilation and the vastness of space. It made me realize that science isn't just about numbers, but it is also about people. It's about using the knowledge gained through research to protect, preserve, and connect us as humans. Interstellar gave me another reason to become an electrical engineer. Watching the people solve problems in life-or-death situations makes me realize how powerful engineering really is. like how they found ways for machines to work in an alien environment, to just making electronics work in the cold darkness of space. I started to look at everything differently after that movie. I started to ask questions and wanted to find the answers to how things were made, like the microwave in the kitchen or even what the blinking lights on the Wi-Fi router actually meant. My curiosity has grown even more since then. I have even learned how to actually make circuits work and how to build them. Looking back, I have noticed that they had a real theoretical physicist working on the film to make sure the black holes and time dilation were accurate. This level of detail astonishes me that art and science can combine and make something beautiful. Since then, I have taken every STEM class that has been offered to me. I find everything fascinating and do my own research on the things that stick out to me. And I question why not me, why can't I be the one who makes the things we have today? interstellar didn't just give me the love of science but a love of not having the fear to question and wanting to learn more and make improvements.

I have participated in many sports during my life, but the two that have shaped who I am as a person are football and wrestling. My coaches over the years have taught me everything I know about hard work and dedication. My favorite thing that my wrestling coach says is that you get what you put in. The meaning of hard work has been with me since I started high school sports. The phrase "He shoots, I score; I shoot, I score" by Dan Gable has made me think that it's not just talking about wrestling, but rather it is talking about life as a whole, meaning that you can do anything you put your mind to. Whether it is just having a win in your day, no matter how little or small it is, it's still a win. No matter if you aren't the first person to do something, it doesn't mean you can't win. For me, wrestling has shown me that you need to be uncomfortable to grow. You need to think of ways to be better and more disciplined in whatever you do and to take pride in what you do because that is your "brand." Whatever you do, it is for your name, not anybody else. It shows others who you really are and cannot be ignored/thrown away. You should be able to say anything you did with pride and with no regrets. For football, I have learned teamwork and family outside of blood. It has made me realize that you don't have to like someone in order to be a good teammate. To be a teammate is to work together and not give up on each other, and keep pushing through the bad times and celebrate the bad times. The best way to describe it is to be called a dysfunctional family. My whole idea of work ethic has changed through the process of doing high school sports. Having the opportunity to go to practice and being able to have that human connection, which, for me, I had lost so much of this connection because of COVID-19 happening during the most crucial part of child development during the pre-teen era. My values connect to my community because in the small town of Butte, Montana, we are a big community in sports. We pride ourselves on our high school football team and college team. We also support the whole community of high school sports because it is our pride and joy to see our youth win and have fun. I also use my work ethic, which I have learned from my sports, to help give back to the community. I have helped with every volunteer opportunity I could have because I want to see this city thrive like it once did before I was alive.

I a a graduating high school senior from butte montana, I play two sports, football and wrestling. I have received a varsity letter from both sports and I’m very proud of my accomplishment. I have taken every opportunity to enroll in dual enrollment classes like AP gov, world history, US history, pre calculus and calculus. I am much more interested in math than I am in history. I think math is much more easier than any other class because it feels more rewarding for studying. I am also apart of my high schools national honors society. I have been for the past two years, I’ve volunteered a total of 127 hours of time to my community, whether it’s going and helping out kids at after school programs, to helping the elderly in homes or taking them to church. I’ve also recently joint my schools interact club which is a club that our school uses to help connect to the middle school and ease the transition for the incoming freshman to feel prepared and comfortable for high school. I love having an impact on my community no matter how big or how small; because I know that I am making a difference in a world filled with so much hate. My plans after high school is to attend Montana Technological University. I want to get my masters in Electrical Engineering and learn all there is to know about the field. From robotics all the way to communications, like quantum computing. I found out I wanted to be an electrical engineer when I was in my sixth grade “wax museum” where we would dress up as a person from history and give a speech on their life, and I chose Nikola Tesla. Which is a famous Electrical Engineer who made AC power cheaper and easier to access. I found his life so interesting and his pictures of him reading a book under his coils shooting millions of volts out was so cool and fascinating that I wanted to know why he felt so safe to where he would read a book right under something that could hurt you so badly. I had locked in my decision when my cousins fiancé was going into EE and I looked up to him like he was my hero because I finally knew that someone from a small town could become such an important person to the world. As for a charity I would start would be a Ehlers-Danlos syndrome research group, our mission would be to find a cure to this rare, horrible condition. We would help the people with the condition and find a way to cure it forever and not just mitigate the symptoms of it. The services we would perform would be the research and development of a cure. Because I have multiple family members with this condition and it breaks my heart that such a condition can create so many other problems in the human body. That it had almost killed my cousin early this summer.

I love math because it truly is the building block of everything the world has to offer, for me I use math in everything, even in English! I have used it to break down how to use the grammar rules a lot of the times. Making equations to solve grammar. Although it doesn’t make sense to most people, it makes sense to me. I love math because it is straight forward and easy to follow if you pay attention and study. It is not just an easy let’s not pay attention subject. A lot of it is just plain dedication and hard work. Most people don’t like to do the hard things in life so they take the easy way out and take as little math classes as they need but for me, I would love to do more math, I have helped tutor a lot of kids in my math classes over the years and spent volunteering at elementary schools to help teach kids in after school programs just because I wanted to help the your generations not hate math because it’s hard I wanted to show them that just because it’s hard doesn’t mean you can’t love it!

An experience that has shaped me into who I am to day must be my first time taking a dual enrollment class, taking calculus was a hard and challenging class teaching me how to study and how not to study ultimately making me a more disciplined student. A time my faith was tested was when my grandmother had died from an auto immune disease, which had thrown me into this deep depression and thoughts of why her, why not anyone else? I had lost all sense of hope and faith until one day when I felt a sense of hope again, and I chose to pray again later that night. I had a feeling of relief brought upon me. I had come to the belief that through her death it had brought me closer to God knowing that she was safe in heaven, for if I stopped believing I would never see her again. I want to pursue Electrical Engineering. My passion for going into this field if because of my cousin, she pushed me to go into something I really wanted to know more about and not only what pays the most. I find the idea of something so invisible such as electricity can make the whole world light up in unity and connect people across the globe. But my biggest reason is because I want to make the world a better place by researching more non lethal and ethical ways to deal with threats, so I want to go into military defense contracting and get a job at Boeing or Lockheed Martian.