In the first two years of college, I woke up every morning with a feeling of otherness, sheathed in white-passing skin that even though everyone around me looked somewhat like me, they felt foreign in relatability. I passed through classes worrying about saying anything that would make the imaginary forehead label of, “POOR” standout even more than I felt it was. I fell asleep on my twin XL dorm bed, begging for the week to be over so I could go back to the socio-economic and racial comforts of home that I was used to. Everyone around me, my family, friends, and neighbors, were all colorful mirages of black and brown bodies that made a community of people that struggled, but saw hope through that struggle that developed into character. My feeling of marginalization from campus life got so bad at one point I had to go through 1.5 years of therapy as my anxiety and depression paralyzed me from my joy and motivation of learning. Sometimes I would get frustrated that my parents couldn’t help me properly fill out university forms, what’s best for my major track, or how to deal with these sentiments of being so separated from my college community. But how could I blame someone for something that they don’t know anything about? The lack of helpfulness was a reality that I just had to accept and grow with in time. I am thankful though that at least I had mentors through the First-Generation Student Organization and biology department to help me talk through my sense of otherness and navigate through college life. Those were the places that really instilled in me that these were not random or selfish feelings I was experiencing, but rather an all too common sentiment shared between many FGLI students, especially at predominantly white institutions (PWI’s). This slowly developing sense of ownership over who I was and my place on campus was a constant battle of self-control. Control to not let myself slip into my depression and anxiety, and fear of feeling that my only attribute on campus was to fulfill a university statistic or an affirmative action quota. I started to attend more First-Gen Student Org meetings, run for a cabinet position for the Denison Questbridge Chapter, and become a mentor for our Scholars in STEM program. I became more confident in who I was and that I was meant to be here. That I was meant to be the first person in my family that would trailblaze through college and take all of those struggles and turn it into something beautiful. As an FGLI student, going to college means so much more than going to school and getting a degree. It means placing myself in a situation that is so uncomfortable and so hard, yet still getting things done. Both for the sake of my future, and my family's future. It means working 10 percent harder than everyone else so that I can keep up and prove to myself that I am meant to be here. I want to be part of the 4% of Latina entomologists in the US someday. And I want to be part of the 1% of Latina’s that hold a doctoral degree. And soon enough, I will be the 1 person in my family who will be a college graduate. I want to be everything that I can be to lift my family, and myself, from the generational burdens that have weighed us down from the opportunities of life.

If I had one opportunity to travel to any point in time, I would go back to when my mom was a 21 year-old young adult, as I am now. I wish I could have had the opportunity to be a friend and support system to her when she needed it the most. At 21 years old, my mother was already the divorcee of a deadbeat, narcotic-abusing and violent ex-husband of a father, with two young children attached to her hip. She raised my two older siblings off of nothing but a measly bi-weekly paycheck from the Springfield, Ohio Cracker Barrel and a fired sense of doing better than how her parents raised her. At 21 years old, I am a two-semesters-away and first-gen college graduate, currently in a loving relationship of two years, and I am studying abroad in Quito, Ecuador fulfilling my career dream of conducting urban ecology work. When I start to think about how wildly different our two paths were in life and what caused us to be where we both were at this age, I am filled with nothing but gratitude towards her. Gratitude that as a mother, she broke the generational cycle of pain and abuse that would have been passed down to me and my siblings if her trauma was dealt with differently. Gratitude that as a woman, she made sure that her daughters received words of encouragement, wisdom, care, and love that she never received. I am filled with gratitude everyday when I look at her withered hands and deep smile lines that formed from decades of love and laughter that she filled our childhoods with despite the absence of it in hers. If I could go back and be a friend to her, could I have made her life just a bit easier? Could I have been the one person that would have supported her struggle as a single mother? What would have happened to my life if she decided to give up and find solace in addiction and substance abuse in the raging Ohio opioid epidemic of the 2000’s? No matter the thousands of what-ifs I find myself cycling through, I do find a concrete sentiment that my mom has been a force of good for this world, and that I could not have asked for God to give me anyone better as a mother and a role model. Her tenacity with the pains of life has shown me that nothing in this world is worth giving up on myself or the things I love in life. I reflect on the struggles that she took from the world and how many times the devil wanted her to fail, and in that I see how hard she fought for me, for us, to have a better shot at life than what was ever given to her. Her sacrifices and struggles in life have given me the chance to thrive and soak up all of the opportunities that the world has to offer. And for that, I thank her everyday in my heart.

Every year, West Nile Virus (WNV) causes 111 deaths across the United States, with 182 deaths reported in 2023 alone (CDC, 2025). This arbovirus disease is transmitted from the Culex family, as it travels from WNV-infected birds, female-vector mosquitoes, and human or horse-infected hosts. As climate change and urban sprawl continue to grow at an unprecedented rate, WNV has the potential to become a death sentence that will shake the world of community public health as we know it. Fortunately, the early 2000’s creation of Rapid Analyte Measurement Platform (RAMP) technology is one of the most accurate biomedical tools available for mosquito surveillance protocols across the globe. While it does not prove a cure for those who contract WNV, it does allow for researchers such as myself to properly inform a community about their transmission risk while helping to develop appropriate surveillance protocols. RAMP testing technology inspires me to continue researching towards developing surveillance and prevention protocols to improve the community public health of mosquito-laden communities. My work studying WNV presence and transmission risk in Columbus, Ohio has inspired me to seek graduate school at The Ohio State University, one of the only two places in the state that has this technology on hand. Mosquitoes are one of the most dangerous killers in the world, but having technology to properly identify arbovirus potential has the potential to save countless lives from infection and disease. While it is a costly and not a cure-all technology, it is one step closer to combatting one of the largest impending biomedical threats of our time.

From a young age, I knew that I needed to be the breadwinner in my family. I had no option to choose whether I wanted to truly pursue higher education. Rather, it was expected of me. I needed to be the first in my family to earn a 4-year college degree, attain a well-paying job, and support my parents and myself with what I would make of my education. This, in turn, had impacted my career goals by focusing my undergraduate efforts within the STEM field. Not only does this offer a guaranteed-sense of job employment, but it would also connect me to governmental work that can provide me with a sense of civic duty, great benefits, and generational pride. I have decided to follow the career path of becoming an urban ecologist, specifically investigating plant-pollinator-person interactions. This work will allow me to actively give back to the communities that shaped me into the young professional that I am today. Through the opportunities that the Columbus-based community has helped me attain as a First Generation Low Income (FGLI) student, I want to use my vocation as an environmental steward to contribute to a greener, happier place for those that surround me. Raising and encouraging a FGLI student goes beyond the parent- it takes a community. Lifting the generational burdens through education will positively impact not only my family, but also the community that has raised me.