My father was incarcerated when I was a child. Because of this, my mother was forced to raise me alone while was attending college. Before I turned 5 I had lost 1 parent and the other was too busy for me. That situation wasn't easy for me at such a young age, it felt abnormal to only have 1 parent when all the shows on TV showed kids with both moms and dads, and my peers had parental situations that I envied. My experience of having a single-parent household growing up has taught me two things. The first thing is that I don't want my children to go through that kind of struggle. My mother wasn't financially stable when I was young and had me questioning my youth very often. I often had low-self esteem from struggling as a child. I don't want my children to have to go through that, so I promised myself that I won't put myself in that same predicament ever. The second thing that I learned was that it was important to have a good relationship with my family and children. When my father was released from prison in my later high school years, there was a disconnect between us that seemed like a void. I never thought about how much we knew about each other compared to when I was younger and it led to some problems. For a while, we felt like strangers and it was even more depressing to have it in my life than not. For that, I want to make sure I have a good relationship with my children and family members, and always be a part of their lives. I want to know them as people and just as my kids. My experience of my father being in prison led to some emotional issues throughout my youth as well as the reason me and my mother struggled when I was younger. It shaped a large part of who I am and what I wanted to be. It made my younger self look at myself and say, "I don't want others to have to feel this way". For this reason, I focused on education all my youth, even becoming a salutatorian in high school. It also made me focus on a high-earning career that I had an interest in, so I study computer science. Incarceration negatively impacted my developing years, but ultimately made me want to work harder than ever and achieve greatness in my future.

Generational wealth to me is working hard enough that my children and children's children will never walk into life without anything. It doesn't necessarily means that I need to create enough wealth that my children will never need to work in their life. It does mean that when they get to the position I am in life, it will become easier for them to create wealth than it was for me. I hope to be able to support their education by building wealth to pay for their tuition. I hope that my wealth makes life easier for all my descent, whether directly or indirectly. By building generational wealth, my children will have the freedom that I may not be able to obtain right now. They will be able to follow their passion and build wealth with it rather than being pushed into a successful and competitive market. If my children want to work as dancers or musicians, titles that are passionate but aren't appreciated in our society as much as they should, I hope I can invest in their dreams without them being concerned about not making enough to survive. By creating generational wealth, I can help others create generational wealth. As a young black man, I recognize the aspects of history that prevent people like me from creating wealth. Aspects of society such as redlining, race-based hiring, the war on drugs, jim-crow and many more parts of history have prevented people like my parents and grandparents from being their most capable selves. I hope to be able to change that and give back to help others do the same thing for others like me whether through mentorship, advice, or investing. I want to create generational wealth by obtaining a high-paying job in my youth so that I can invest and build my own business later in life. Majoring in computer science, I hope to become competing in developing software that can help me in a competitive job market. I want to develop my skills and then use them to earn as much as I can while I am young. With that small amount, I want to invest in myself. I want to go into my other passion, video game development. With my years of experience and built wealth, I will then work on video games largely on the mobile scene where I can build a passive income to take care of myself and my family. With this I plan on continually investing in others, working on other people's plans to create generational wealth, whether that means investing in their local food chains, apartment leasing, etc. I want to focus on people in communities like mine, where even if they have ideas and ambition, oppurtinies are rare; if there are any at all. This way I can build generational wealth not only for me but for the people around me as well.

1. I grew up playing video games and watching science fiction all my life. Watching star wars and terminator. It may sound silly, but the technology in those movies seems so close to what we had back when I was a kid. The cars now only need to fly, it wasn't until I got older that I realized the logistics of bringing star wars level technology was unorthodox. Even though I wanted to bring the future to me, I wanted to touch the sci-fi on my screen with my bare hands, and to do so, I realized how much computers played a part in it. I became so engrossed in computers at a young age because they were so close to the future in my mind. As I got older I saw the more practical aspects of them, but even now I still see how they can be used to create the future, I want to learn how to use them properly and effectively, in a way that one day I can change the future in a significant way. 2. My dream job after receiving my degree is to become a game designer. One of my favorite things in life is to bring joy to others, as well as to use my imagination. I have so many stories and scenes in my head I've always wanted to experience, but not like a movie. I want to use a medium I enjoy the most, video games, to tell my stories. It might be a minor way to change the world, but I love to bring happiness to millions with games if I could. 3. I feel like I am the best candidate because I have a vision of how I want to change the world. Though I do not know any candidates, I'm sure they are just as passionate about their dream as I am. What makes their dream different is always the way, there are very few people who have influenced the world completely, whether through art, writing, film, medicine, technology, and many more aspects of humanity. Few ever do it for the world though. I want to be one of those people, who dream for the world. I want to create an impact that affects a large number of people positively, even if it is short-lived. I was to make millions of people's afternoons better, even for a moment. Even without my name attached, I just want to try and make the world a better place with the dreams I have.

My name is Cameron Bryant. I am from Chicago, Illinois in the United States of America. I am an undergraduate computer science major at the Illinois Institute of technology. I am estimated to graduate in May 2024. Coming to IIT(Illinois Institute of Technology) is more challenging than I expected it to be. I came to my school in 2020 during the pandemic unprepared and intimated for what was to come. Even after all these years, I am not sure I belong. The challenges of life and college feel like trials and tribulations that I can hardly handle. It makes a young 20 years question his path in life and makes it hard to believe in oneself. My first year practicing computer science at my school was extremely challenging. I had not had much practice in the field, and the high school I came from had few resources to work with. I felt extremely misplaced during my initial years of college, I didn't feel as if I belonged because so many other students had much more experience than I did. Some came from schools where they have 4 years of computer science courses, some had gone to paid boot camps where they learned to code in a few weeks. I had learned HTML for 3 months because my teachers kept quitting in my senior year of high school. Even as I learned more and more about my field, I never felt where I should be, but I also didn't know where else to do. This harmed my psyche and only made me contribute less work ethic than I had begun with. I was completing the bare minimum because I felt I wasn't worth my school's time and they weren't worth mine. It wasn't until I talked to other students and realized I wasn't alone, that anything changed. As I spoke to more people in my class, I realized, the feeling of no belonging was common, especially for people who looked like me. We worked together on certain assignments and built together against the weakest aspects of our skills. The most important part was that we talked our thoughts out, and build new mindsets from it. We spoke about how alone it felt to be in a predominantly white institution, how the teachers aren't very helpful, and how challenging the material is, not only for us but for everyone. This unity we built carried us through the rest of the semester, we worked harder than ever. Unfortunately, many of them transferred to other schools over time, and some stayed. Ultimately, this challenging part of my life, even though I still struggle now, what "turned up to 11" was my confidence and belief in myself. Sometimes I still feel like I don't belong, but I still put more than 100% into my work, I put in %110. The challenge I overcame was a mentality that prevented me from working at my best, now I work at my best every time I can. I still struggle, but that doesn't , mean I do not try.

What makes me resilient are the unseen sacrifices throughout my youth. My mom went to college to pursue an engineering degree. She left our home in Chicago to pursue knowledge in a city she had never been to. There, she would give me life during the end of her second year of college. As a child, life seemed so simple, I enjoyed every bit of it. I felt as though I had everything I could need in the world. I would stay at home all day looking at my mothers large blueprints like they were clouds I would touch. I would occupy myself with the same shows and movies everyday, watching Nemo on repeat until the sun would rise again. I look back so foundly on those days. I understand now, though that not everything was as magnificent as I imagined it to be. My mother was young, just turning 20 years old when I was born. A second year who was completing large amounts of math that even now, I would not even attempt to understand. It wouldn’t be long before my father was incarcerated. All that was left to take care of me was her and my father’s mother, a woman she had only met a year prior. Being a full time student, she shouldn’t have any time for a job, me, or herself. Shockingly, she did all 3. The will to continue school, having extensive assignments, working, and being a single mother in a foreign place, that is what makes me resilient. I imagine her trials and tribulations and they make me strong. Not only her but all of the people who were part of my life and even gave me what I have today. I imagine how hard it was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to battle an oppressive system through peaceful action. I imagine how hard it was for Frederick Douglass to fight as an abolitionist while knowing that many would listen to him because of the color of his skin. Most of all, I think of my mother and how she gave me the world, while sacrificing her own well being. That selflessness is what makes me resilient. How wrong would I be to take all their gifts and do nothing to pay back the world? They made a better place, whether they helped their son, or led a revolution. So many people sacrifice parts of themselves for things larger than them, and even things that aren’t. I refuse to do nothing and take us backwards. As they have done for me, I want to add a little good will to make the world a better place for someone else. I want to help people who are even less fortunate than I. One way I can do that is by starting working in community centers. Though I am pursuing a computer science degree, I want to be successful enough to help a large number of people in impoverished communities. Community centers help bring people together and provide a safe space for people who otherwise would be endangering themselves elsewhere. I would like to treat it differently though, by building it without destroying an area’s livelihood. Many community centers help impoverished areas, but unfortunately with their private investor in mind, it doesn't take long to begin steps toward gentrifying a neighborhood instead of helping it. This is why I need to do this with people in mind, people who actually care for the neighborhood, who know where they came from. People who see these areas as communities and not profit and investments.