Focus on your studies, graduate, go to college, get out of the trailer park. That was the mantra repeated by my father after he would get home from the navy yard and by my mother when she was taking care of my siblings and me. Neither had the opportunity to attend college, but they are the hardest workers I know. They instilled a drive in me to excel both in and out of a classroom. To them, a college education was a golden ticket to success. It was always clear growing up that there was not a college fund or any family financial support to go to college- their words of encouragement were all they were able to provide me in my academic ventures. When I was accepted into the University of North Florida in 2018, I made a vow to myself to graduate debt free. (I then had to take out two loans to pay for my first semester.) I had a weekend job at a pet grooming shop, but I knew that I would need to do more. So, I got a second job on campus doing phone polling during election season. It wasn’t as glamorous as cleaning kennels, but I was able to save enough to start paying off my loans and to cover my next semester. I continued working multiple jobs on top of my classes in order to avoid taking out more loans. I even paid off the two loans from my first semester before graduation, which came much sooner for me than I anticipated. I had gone into the University of North Florida with my Associates Degree and double majored in Economics and Political Sciences to have a May 2022 graduation date. However, I had to take a geospatial sciences class for an internship, fell in love with the subject, changed my major in the beginning of 2020, and my graduation date got brought forward to December 2020. I immediately started looking into graduate programs to pursue after my Bachelor’s, but life had other plans. I graduated into a pandemic as my father received his cancer diagnosis and got too sick to work. I decided to wait on attending graduate school. I moved back home and found work with a schedule flexible enough to allow me to be there for him and help my mother as we navigated this new and scary chapter of our lives. I am glad to have made that choice but now that a year has passed since he has left us, I am ready to go back and continue my education. Continuing my education will provide me with opportunities that will allow me to excel. I will be studying geospatial sciences with a focus in remote sensing. I am particularly interested in its application in meteorology. As someone who has grown up in Florida, I know how scary enduring hurricanes can be. Remote sensing can be used to help with emergency responding and damage assessment in storms, and I would love to do work to help protect those who may be vulnerable to storms.