Prayer has gotten me through a lot over the years. Heartache, mean girls at school, bad grades, failing my driver's ed test. I am a Catholic, and I believe Jesus, God, and the Holy Spirit are one and the same, and that they are salvation. I have always had a good relationship with God, and been faithful that he would carry me towards what is meant for me, that I would see the brighter side of things eventually. Like many others, though, COVID-19 has rocked my world and changed how I see things. This past year has been the test of a lifetime, and my relationship with God is the only thing that got me through. Prior to the pandemic, I was already in a tight situation. My boyfriend of two years was at Marine Corps boot camp, which meant we were communicating solely through letters. I was a senior in high school, and when I was not writing to my boyfriend, I was working a job I hated or trying to make the daunting decision of what to do after high school. I was worn thin with stress and anxiety, for my boyfriend, for the future, for my next shift, for my next chemistry test. My relationship with God was truly tested, and some days I would just cry to God begging him to help me get through. Of course, COVID-19 soon entered the United States and any hope of seeing my boyfriend anytime soon or attending my dream school amid unemployment quickly vanished. Much worse, though, my grandfather passed away and I was unable to see him for months before he died because of the pandemic. My grandfather was my best friend, and losing him was the worst thing to ever happen to me. My world felt like it was caving in, and I was miserable for months. I tried and tried and tried to talk to God, to pray, to sing praise, to worship like I used to, but I was so deeply depressed that I could barely get out of bed, let alone face the shame of letting my relationship with God fall behind. Four months after my grandfather died, I woke up one morning, feeling just as down and sad as usual. I opened my blinds, and much to my surprise, I saw the most beautiful chickadee sitting on my window sill. I was enthralled, and for a split second, it felt like it was looking back at me until it flitted its wings and flew away. The strangest sight, just sitting there looking at me, but a welcome one. My grandfather's favorite bird was the chickadee. It was the nickname he called me, and he used to birdwatch and point them out when he saw them. That was a message from heaven, without a doubt. That was God and my grandfather, telling me it is ok, that he is safe. Since that day, my relationship with my savior Jesus Christ, and God the Father has flourished. My trust and faith lie solely in my religion, and my soul is at peace knowing my grandfather is in heaven with Jesus. I have my boyfriend back, and I am on a journey towards being a nurse. Every day, I make a conscious choice to follow Christ and trust in him. I worship him through my school, hoping to care for others just as he cares for us. I praise him more than ever before, and I sleep easy knowing he cares for me and guides me like a shepherd guides his flock. I am a child of Christ, of God the almighty creator, and that has prevailed through trial. Jesus saved me, and every time I see a chickadee flying by, or look over to see my boyfriend next to me, I know this is true.

Sergeant Lawrence Dale Paquette, United States Army. He was a small arms repair in Vietnam, and a good one at that, but there is something about him the Army does not know: he was also the best grandfather a girl could ask for. As a kid, he was everything to me. My parents both worked, and he cared for me like a father. He took me to school and picked me up, made my lunches, helped me study. He showed me how to fix old radios and use a printer. He taught me varying amounts of the handful of languages he knew. He taught me manners, and he told me stories about his youth, his time in the Army, and raising my dad. I still remember the look on his face when I told him I was going to join the military. It was a sad smile, but proud. All he said was “You don’t want to do that, the food is awful”. It felt humorous at the time, but looking back, I know he wanted to say more. A couple of months before he died, he told me he was proud of me, and that nothing he did in his life was as good as I was, as I turned out. The only time I saw him cry was as he sat there telling me he told all his friends at the American Legion about me and how proud he was of me. Nothing in life could have prepared me for that, nothing in life could have prepared me for losing him. A folded flag, an Army ring, a small pile of clothes, and his beat-up recliner were all he left behind, and staring at the remnants was haunting, a long life packed up in less than an hour. But the tangible objects mean little when I think about hearing him tell me he was proud of me. My grandfather's legacy is a happy marriage, two sons, successful and brave service in the Army in wartime, and myself. I am the only member of my family to follow in his steps, and I am who he left his dog tags and Army ring to. And one day, I will have my own of each, with the same last name on them. To me, that is the essence of legacy. I would like to say my goal is to change the world, stop one of the big-bads like hunger or poverty, but I know that just is not realistic within my skill set. To me, leaving a legacy means passing a passion onto those close to me that will inspire them long after I am gone, which is exactly what my grandfather did. I want my family to know love, care, and sustenance just as he provided me, and I want my family to know resilience, bravery, and strength, just as he taught me. I want to tell my children the stories he told me, and I want to tell them my own, some about him, and some about me. I want my children to grow up with “I am proud of you” fresh in their ears, and “I love you” warm in their hearts. I want to visit my grandfather at the Veteran’s cemetery and be able to speak with him about all I have accomplished since he left. I want a full life, and I want to pass on this passion for living to everyone around me, just like he did to me. I hope that someone is able to solve world hunger and reverse global warming. I hope a definitive cure for cancer is found within my lifetime, and I hope every animal in a shelter finds a loving home. All of these would be fantastic, and if I could accomplish any of these feats, I would without hesitation. To have a legacy like that would mean saving lives, which is fantastic in every way. I wish I could do that, but for who I am now, I am proud. I am one person, and I will always do my part. I will recycle, and pass on education, and volunteer. I am a nursing student, and right now my biggest goal is graduating and serving in the United States Military. Someday, I want to be a nurse researcher and make a positive impact there. I want to see positive change in the world, and that starts with me.

My younger sister, Evaline, has Down Syndrome. Before she was born, my family could anywhere and fly under the radar. Movies, grocery stores, community events, anywhere we wanted. Now, it is quite the opposite, and not because she has Down Syndrome. Evaline is the friendliest child you will ever meet. Since she was able to talk, she has greeted everyone she sees, told cashiers she loves them, waved at passersby. Now my community knows my family, and everywhere we go, someone is there that recognizes Evaline and my family. Having Evaline in my family has offered my family a very special connection with our community, and for that, I am grateful. In other ways, though, it has opened my eyes greatly to an extremely lacking form of social outreach and education. Evaline having an intellectual disability puts her at risk for extreme forms of discrimination in her lifetime, and that is the very reason community is important. My local community knows Evaline, but I grew up in a small town. When I got to high school, I went to school in a large city in a school with kids from all over my county. Everywhere you went, you heard students saying the offensive, pejorative “retard”, or making short bus jokes as if either of these were just everyday language. As upsetting as this is, this is the result of a detached, misinformed community. Many of these students had never heard of Down Syndrome, let alone met someone with it. Evaline changed my life for the better, she does so to everyone she meets, and although many attempts may be futile, I knew right away I needed to do something to make a difference in my new community to fix this disparity. As a freshman in high school, I started a club called RARE, which stood for Raising Awareness and Running Education. RARE took part in a variety of ventures through my time in high school to do exactly as the name states. We sat in on Special Olympics meetings, fundraised and volunteered for the Special Olympics, volunteered for a local soccer league for children with Autism, made flyers, and spoke with classmates about a variety of topics many individuals in the disabled community find important. For three years, this club ran and operated, and in those three years, we made a huge impact. A small club, about 15 people, in a school of 600 people may not seem like much. Especially when you consider all 600 students' families and friends who influence their lives as well, not to mention the media, social media, books, all the ways people get information. Still, after I gave a speech about the harmfulness of the word “retard(ed)”, I did not hear it said again. Students I heard frequently making extremely offensive, rude comments stopped. Teachers and classmates alike seemed to slowly open their minds. I am currently a nursing student, and while graduation is in the distant future, my plan is to go back to school and become a nurse researcher. I want to research, develop, and implement improvements and optimizations of patient care for individuals with Down Syndrome. I want to impact the global community, not just my local, by pioneering change that affects both the person I care about most, Evaline, and the entire global population of individuals with Down Syndrome. I will never stop speaking out for this community, just as I will never stop loving or caring for Evaline. She is my root to my community, and she is the wing that will take me to my career, and hopefully making tangible change in the world. Community involvement is imperative, because it is the single best way, in my opinion, to broaden your horizons and open your mind, which can be passed on. One individual in a community can create a ripple effect of kindness and open-mindedness. My impact, and Evaline’s, are tied to just the communities we know best, but there is so much more in store, for her and I.

11 years ago, my sister was born. She looked different, and she had to stay in the hospital for a while, and it took her a while to learn to do things. I did not know it 11 years ago, looking down at her in the hospital, but she has Down Syndrome. Taking care of my sister has been the great pleasure of my life. Getting to help her and watch her grow and succeed is beyond any tangible reward in this world. I love her more than anything, and while 9 years separate us in age, she truly is my best friend. I chose to study nursing as my primary degree, and health promotion as a minor. Nursing on its own is not a conventional form of STEM in many people's eyes, but nursing research is. My goal is to be a nurse researcher and to study patient care and optimization when patients have Down Syndrome like my sister. I am passionate about STEM and my STEM classes in nursing school because they are directly teaching me the skills I will need to be a good research professional. I may not perform many titrations or use a spectrophotometer very much after this year, but the skills in technique and analysis that I am learning from my classes where I use those will be the basis of my career someday. I love my sister, I love being a nursing student, and I love the progress I am making towards one day being able to make a direct, visible difference in the lives of others. STEM is more than just the content of the classes you take, more than just the hours spent in a lab or behind a desk studying. STEM is the skills you glean and the applications of them in a number of contexts. I am not a traditional STEM student, but I am a STEM student regardless, and I am passionate, excited, and prepared to make a difference in the world.

As a nursing student in the midst of COVID-19, many of my classes are incredibly relevant to society. The importance of aseptic technique and preventing cross-contamination of specimens are vital now more than ever, but they also make clear one thing: waste is a huge issue in the classroom and in practice. Seeing demonstrations where the same basic skill is tested in the lab over and over, wasting pipette tip after pipette tip, creating more and more biological waste is conflicting. On one hand, it is necessary that waste is created to prevent contamination, but in some ways, the constant waste feels extraneous and is without a doubt contributing to the ongoing crisis on our Earth. Even worse, the fact that melting ice caps can lead to microbes that had frozen being thawed out may lead to even more public health crises, thus leading to heightened lab safety and even the introduction of new waste products, such as disposable masks as with COVID-19. By no means am I saying I think stinginess on safe lab practices is necessary, rather I am saying this is a huge problem that is cyclic in nature. As we progress education and innovation, we produce more waste. come up with more costly and disruptive technologies. This is a problem that is both interesting and frightening to me. The solution also creates a puzzle just as intriguing as the problem itself: when we try and fix this, what are we sacrificing? One way that waste can be cut down is in classrooms, but in what ways can we supplement hands-on learning? Can virtual labs suffice? And what products can be improved upon? How safe would a patient feel knowing a safety item being used in their care is made using this new potential method? There are many issues posing the fields of biomedical engineering and healthcare as a whole, and I would like to play a role in tackling these issues. One way I plan on working on this problem is through the advocacy and promotion of using alternative gloves when possible. A number of gloves used in the STEM field have negative environmental impacts, and take a long time to biodegrade. There are a number of alternatives available that can be implemented in low-risk classroom environments. A similar idea is facial masks as are used as PPE. Disposable masks are commonly distributed and used, but these can have a negative impact on the environment, and cloth options would be better overall. Promotion of these cloth options is another way I plan on working on this problem. We only have one Earth. This is our home, and we have to take care of it. Between pollutants, increasing endangerment of wildlife, rising global temperatures, melting ice caps, and more, we need to step up and do what we can to help. I am not an engineer or a professional researcher, but I care, and I can make a difference, as can everyone else.

Before COVID-19 began, I had hope. I had gotten accepted to my dream school, had only two months left of high school, and my boyfriend was set to graduate Marine Corps Bootcamp during my spring break. Things were hard at times, sure, but there was always hope that better days were coming. As with many, COVID-19 changed all my plans and left me feeling hopeless and isolated. It started with school being called off and a bittersweet goodbye to my friends for an unknown amount of time. Then my boyfriend got word he would not be coming home from boot camp, instead going to the next phase of training. And finally, word that colleges would be online in the fall forced me to opt-out of attending the school of dreams (the amazing yet expensive Georgetown University) to attend a state school. I thought this was as bad as things could get, I really did. I was upset, I was lonely, I missed my friends and my boyfriend, and I was sad to miss out on my dream school, but of course, as things usually do, they got worse. My grandfather was my closest family member since childhood. He essentially raised me until I was about 6, and I stayed with him on weekends up until quarantine began. He was my heart in another person, we shared the same personality, just generations different. It turns out lung cancer is pretty hard to diagnose when doctors' appointments keep getting pushed back. He had stage four lung cancer that went undiagnosed until a week before he passed, and I did not get to see him before he died. In fact, the first time I saw my grandfather since the start of quarantine, was three months later in a funeral home. I was miserable. I spent weeks holed up in my room, either staring quietly at the wall in front of me or crying and trying to distract myself. Even when I could eventually video chat my boyfriend, I was still severely upset much of the time. My dream has always been to become a doctor, to help people, and when a scholarship for two summer classes arose, I applied and was fortunate enough to receive it. I took general chemistry and nutrition over the course of a month, and despite having learned the majority of the class in high school, I performed horribly in chemistry. This was the first bad grade I had ever received, and I was absolutely distraught. I was ashamed and embarrassed and did not feel like I was good enough to be a doctor, so I switched my major to nursing. Things did not really change until fall. I started my classes and found I absolutely loved them, and I got accepted into the nursing school at my university. My boyfriend came home for training for Christmas, and I got to see him for the first time since January 6. I began running, which makes me feel better about myself and my life. I began tutoring to help supplement at least some of the income I am not getting. I actually love my school, too. COVID-19 has changed everything in my life, and I am incredibly fortunate compared to many people. I am incredibly grateful to have made it out on the better side of things, but many were not as lucky as I am. If I have learned anything about myself it is that I am resiliant. Hard times come and hard times go, but I have made it through them before. I have learned that I like things I never thought I would. Things did not go my way, but I am happy nevertheless. As for the world? I learned about selfishness and I learned about selflessness above all else. I have seen people sobbing over the loss of a loved one and I have seen people refuse to wear a mask because of the slight inconvenience of a piece of cloth. I have seen nurses work doubles, one of them being my boyfriends pregnant sister, working doubles in the COVID floor. I have seen people out of work, myself being one of them, and I have seen people deny the disease that ruined so many lives. Our world is at ends, and it the simple trait of humanity that can save us. Before COVID-19 began, I had hope. I have hope now, too. I have hope that one day, kindness will prevail and it will no longer be an issue of self, rather an issue of humanity.

Today is January 19, 2021, and the death toll in America has reached 400,000. A COVID nurse named Lorie Marie Key sang Amazing Grace at the United States COVID memorial after a video of her singing on the job went viral. Nurses have been sources of strength and hope as they work tirelessly to help those in need. The world has changed in so many ways with the global pandemic. School is online, unemployment is soaring, and hope for many is falling. Lockdowns come and go and masks come on and off. A source of hope in all of this, though, is the long-awaited but miraculously ahead of expectations vaccine. Beyond this, Dr.Fauci is of near-celebrity status and along with nurses stepping up, so are nearly all other health professionals in some way. STEM occupations are important to help people adapt and thrive now more than ever, and in a post-pandemic world, they will be at the forefront of society. This pandemic has shown the world that we are vulnerable and we are weak by ourselves. Everyone must step up to help, and STEM is the way to do so. There are so many ways STEM will be emphasized. Vaccinations and regular checkups with a primary care physician will hopefully increase. Biomedical engineers may work out better means of treatment for similar catastrophes. Civil engineers may implement social distancing in their plans. Statisticians will forever have another event to analyze. Researchers made a vaccine in record time, and the field of microbiology will forever be expanding. Beyond this, though, STEM occupations were heroes in this time of tragedy and fear, and it will be long before the world forgets. Whether it is a family doctor lost to the virus, a nurse singing a hauntingly tragic hymn, the numbers of cases flashing on the television, or the feeling of getting the vaccine, these are core memories that will be studied in history books. STEM occupations are carrying the world through COVID and will carry the world out, if not by song than by intentional and strategic methods implemented to help mitigate the risk of a similar pandemic.

I adopted my dog, Jonah, from a shelter when he was 2. Even though he grew up on a farm, he loves the snow, which is perfect living in Michigan! He is my best friend through thick and thin!