There’s something about sharing those special, happy moments, or at least a piece of yourself that always has a way of turning someone's day upside. And doing things that other people can appreciate, like playing sports and cooking food, has made that lesson become more apparent in my life. I remember this one time, during a day of pickleball, I noticed a kid younger than me asking people in each court if he could play. He got turned away a lot – either they were doing a tournament, or they weren’t trying to play a beginner. I watched it happen a couple times before he just stopped. I could tell it bothered him. By the time my friends and I finished our third or fourth match, we needed a sub anyway, and I looked over and he was still out there, still hoping. I didn't think about it much — I just called him over. I made him my partner and told him to serve first so he could get comfortable. He double-faulted a couple times and kept apologizing, but I told him not to worry about it and just walked him through it point by point. By our second game together, he was actually landing his serves, and I could see him get a little more sure of himself every time it worked. It didn't take some big speech or a grand invitation – it took about five seconds, one sentence, something as simple as "hey, do you want to help me out? They're beating us bad." That same idea shows up at home, just in a different form. My mom's a nurse, and her shifts run long. she comes home some nights barely able to keep her eyes open. Cooking is something I actually enjoy, so I try to have a plate ready for her whenever I can. It's a complicated thing; usually just something simple I know she likes. But watching her sit down, take the first bite, and actually relax for the first time all day – sometimes she'll even start humming without realizing it – tells me – it matters more than the effort it took. Some nights it's a meal, other nights it's rubbing her feet or helping her dye her hair before bed. None of it takes much from me, but I can see what it gives back to her. I don't think joy has to be some big, planned-out thing. Most of the time it's just noticing when someone could use it – a kid on the sidelines, my mom walking through the door exhausted – and doing something small about it. Whether it's on a pickleball court or in my kitchen, I've learned that giving that little bit of myself doesn't just change someone else's day. It's taught me who I want to be.

Hours spent chasing down a single broken line of code, and the quiet satisfaction once a program finally runs the way it should, are what convinced me that engineering is where I belong. That satisfaction is not accidental. It comes from the same place my family has always pushed me toward: work hard, stay humble, and do not celebrate alone. I am Nigerian-American, and the values I was raised on were never separate from the ambitions I was raised to have. Humility and hard work were never framed as opposites in my house — they were framed as partners. Striving for success meant little if it was not paired with bringing others up along the way. That is the lens through which I see engineering. A degree is not just proof of what I can build; it is a responsibility to build things that reach people who need them. My own path into STEM started small, in a school robotics club, not a lab. My team was building a robot for competition, and for a long time, almost nothing worked. Motors failed. Sensors gave readings that made no sense. Code sent our robot moving in ways we never intended. We had every reason to get frustrated and quit. Instead, we kept adjusting, kept testing, and kept showing up for each other. When the robot finally worked, it did not just teach me that persistence pays off — it taught me that the best solutions usually come from people who refuse to solve problems alone. That lesson connects directly to something larger than any competition. Nigeria remains one of the most electricity-deprived countries in the world: roughly 43 percent of the population, about 85 million people, lack access to grid electricity at all, and in rural communities that number is far worse, with only around a quarter of households connected. Even those who are connected live with constant, unpredictable outages that hold back businesses, schools, and hospitals. My relatives may not be the ones standing in the dark, but millions of people who share my heritage are, and that is not something I can look past just because it does not touch my own household. This is why I am drawn to electrical engineering specifically, and why I hope to eventually work on power systems and infrastructure that can reach underserved communities, in Nigeria and beyond. I want to be part of closing that gap, not admiring it from a distance. Equally important to me is what I do with the knowledge along the way. I want to mentor younger students who are curious about engineering but unsure if they belong in it, the same way my own confidence was built one failed prototype at a time. Bringing people up with you is not a slogan in my family; it is an expectation. STEM gives me a way to honor where I come from while building toward where entire communities still need to go. That, to me, is the real purpose of this degree.

There is one thing I know we've all experienced that likely caused us frustration or even heartbreak: standing over the sink, bottle upside down, shaking it with the aggression of someone trying to wake the dead, and watching a teaspoon of ranch dribble out while you know there are still three more servings clinging to the walls. Then you cut it open with scissors like a surgeon scraping with a butter knife, spoon or fork, sacrificing a little skin off your knuckles for maybe one or two daps. Then you finally accept that you won't be getting any more. You throw away a bottle that is still, by any honest measure, a quarter full. Add that by mayo, honey, hot sauce, syrup, every sticky condiment in the fridge door, and you start to see the scale of the crime. Millions of bottles tossed every year, not empty, just unreachable. That is the problem I set out to solve. My answer is a bottle I call LastDrop, and the idea is almost embarrassingly simple once you say it out loud: what if the bottle opened from both ends? It looks and functions like any normal condiment bottle from the top, but the base is a secondary cap, sealed with a food-grade silicone gasket so nothing leaks in transit. When you're down to the dregs, you twist off the bottom, and a soft, flexible scraper, shaped to hug the curve of the walls, pulls upward in one motion, herding every last bit of sauce down into your palm or straight onto your plate. No knives. No waste. No guilt tossing something that still has value in it. If I had the money and team to make this real, here is the plan. First, I'd bring on a mechanical engineer with packaging experience, because the scraper has to work every time, one-handed, without the gasket wearing out. We'd prototype relentlessly, testing dozens of scraper shapes against different viscosities, since ketchup behaves nothing like honey or mayonnaise, and the product has to work for all of them or it isn't worth building. Second, materials matter enormously when a product touches food. I'd partner with a food-safe plastics manufacturer for BPA-free polymers, and if I really wanted to push for safety, medical-grade silicone. then run everything through compliance testing before a single unit reaches a shelf. Third, once the design is locked in, I'd need injection mold tools and a manufacturing partner, likely overseas at first to keep costs manageable, with a plan to shift domestic as volume grows. Packaging would be minimal and recyclable, because a product built around reducing waste has no business shipping in excess plastic. Fourth, I'd take LastDrop straight to the people who feel this daily: a Kickstarter built around that universal, almost comic frustration of the upside-down shake, and direct pitches to condiment brands, since there's no reason the design should live only as an aftermarket gadget when it could simply become how bottles are made. I think about my grandmother, who reuses everything twice and hates waste more than anyone I know, handing me an empty mustard bottle and insisting there was "plenty left in there, you just have to know how to get it." She was right every time. LastDrop is just me finally building the tool that proves her point, so nobody has to choose between patience and waste again.