I love to make lists. I will make lists about anything. Places to go, things to try, things to do, you name it. I love to organize. Being in a space that feels like everything is where it should be feels right to me. I love to organize lists of things that will eventually bring me joy. Eventually. I feel like I am never satisfied with the things I am doing or how I am doing them. I always feel like there is something to improve or be better at and I am never okay with things simply being okay. When there are so many things around me that I feel are out of my control or that I did not reach the internal goal I had for myself, I shut down entirely. I would feel so terrible about myself that I would take multiple melatonin a night to just make myself fall asleep and not have to deal with it anymore. I confided in a close spiritual mentor of mine when this sense of dissatisfaction got so bad I wanted to drop out of college during my sophomore year. That’s when I got a therapist for the first time and honestly, I did not have a lot of faith in therapists. I kind of thought that a close friend does just as well when it comes to talking about how you are feeling. I tried to open up to her but a lot of it felt like telling her what I thought she might want to hear. That I was controlling the narrative. We met for about 3 months until I decided it was not for me anymore. Classes continued and an opportunity came around for a 6-week meditation class for those who were not familiar with mediation strategies. By that time I was taking melatonin every night and smoking pot to have my mind quiet down and stop barking at me about how I could be doing better. Each week I would attend class and learn more and more about myself. I learned that I have a problem with control and anxiousness. I learned that being raised in an environment with uncertainty and a mother with severe Bi-Polar Disorder can cause feelings of needing to create control to manage another person's emotions. I learned that being from a low-income family can create financial insecurity and anxiety and make someone set an expectation for themselves to never be in a low-income situation again. But one of the biggest lessons that I learned was that life is a river that you have to let float by or you will be caught up in the turbulence of it. I am one year post-grad now, and I still think about how that class shaped me and taught me about myself. I reflect on how my mental health is the basis for how everything else flows in my day. To keep myself accountable on my mental health goals I use the Finch app that helps me manage my anxiety and encourages me to take each day as it is. I have a 587-day streak and plan to keep that streak, one day at a time.

I blamed a lot of my struggles and the struggles of my siblings on my mother. Until the age of 13, all I saw was a mother who was in pain. I would see a shell of a woman that would fill a hole in heart with oxycontin that would create more pain for her even when at one point they were intended to heal her. I also saw a woman intent on finding herself in a man. With 4 divorces under her belt by 30, it was hard to ever take her seriously with a man she wanted to make your new Dad. But I knew who my biological father was. He was also a man that I would hear make my mother cry in the other room. He was a man that would come home in the early hours of the night after a bender and give her those black eyes that she tried so hard to cover up with drugstore makeup when she asked where he was. He was a man who got deported from the United States on a drunk driving charge that killed a woman and her two children. That was the man that I felt love from until I was 5, and that love had slowly died each year without a phone call or a letter. My routine following would be to walk home from school through needle-littered and bed-bug-infested alleys, and arrive at a home settled deep in the west side of Columbus to a reality of dislike. A dislike for her, for the men who came around, how my siblings and I were living, and mainly a dislike for the thought that this life might be where I stay. Every day I felt this burning sense of ambition to prove to the world that I could do better than the environment I was given. To be better than parents without an education, stuck in a cycle of addiction and pain that made me live in a home surrounded by neighbors marked with the same indicators of poverty. But by the time I was 13, the world decided for me that it was time for a change of thinking. The home we lived in was still the same, but the dynamics inside the house were different. That’s when my Dad came into my life. No, not the one who abused my mother and siblings and never called or checked on me, but the stepdad who was so pure of heart that he showed me what a real man was. He showed me that a real man doesn’t lay his hands on a woman or drown his sorrows in the bottom of a bottle. He showed me that a real man comes to Pancakes and Papas Day at school and that he gives you his dog to be your first real friend. He showed me that real love can cure a person of addiction. My mother celebrated her 10 years of sobriety on October 19th, 2026. The older I got and the more love I was filled with, the more I realized what it meant for a woman to be hurt and what forgiveness meant. It became clearer to see that the environment I was living in, what we were living in, was not something that came from poor choices and bad decisions. It came from a much more sinister idea that people in low-income circumstances were meant to be kept there. Low education opportunities reinforce problems such as Machista culture and domestic violence situations. Addiction is pushed onto people who sought to be healed from their pain, yet doctors accepted payoffs to push more pills onto patients. Redlining neighborhoods to be left without any help from city taxes leaves people with unsanitary, depressing areas to live in. I see how these factors shaped me into the person I am today. Someone who is more forgiving of other people's faults, and someone who understands how the fulfillment of love can change a person, and the lack thereof. I also see now how these experiences have rooted in me a drive to constantly seek what I want in my life. I had always thought that my sense of ambition came from a place of unfulfillment and dislike, but it was actually a sense of fulfilling what everyone around me would have been able to do if life hadn't gotten in the way of achieving their own potential.

My name is Carlia Rose Lopez-Hernandez, but I go by Lia for short. While I am the child of immigrants and someone who checks all the boxes for a Low Student Aid Index on the FAFSA form, I am also a person who loves to build LEGO’s, read sci-fi books, and enjoy any and all types of sweets with friends and family. One of my defining characteristics is that people often say I demand accountability. At my undergraduate institution I was so upset with the lack of spaces for science-oriented POC that I took action in the form of being the chapter founder of the Society of Advancement for Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS) at Denison University. This allowed for traditionally marginalized student groups to make that first step of scientific connections at a national scale. I would also describe myself as an opportunist. I am okay with being told no, and try to receive at least 6 no’s a year on opportunities like fellowships and job applications, with the hopes of receiving at least 1 yes. But yet my persistence for the things I want for my future have granted me all the yes’s in my life I could ever hope for. A rejected dream job application as a National Geographic Explorer gave me the opportunity to receive a yes from my U.S. Fulbright application where I am currently updating the national tick inventory of Ecuador for the U.S, Department of State. For my future I see myself as a world-builder. I hope to one day use the Master’s of Veterinary Public Health degree I am seeking to become a medical entomologist stationed in Latin America. I hope to use my bilingual and entomological skills to reshape the strategic plan of Latin American health infrastructure to fight disease-ridden bugs from affecting low-resource Latino peoples. There is so much good to do in the world because of how much inequality persists around us, and I want to continue being one of the people to create change for the better.

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.