A younger me always believed she was an architect. Whether it was folding together paper dioramas of grocery stores for her My Little Ponies to shop in, pasting custom wallpaper on cardboard-box dollhouses with mom, or spending countless hours gleefully working on a new Minecraft build, the art of space was nothing but a medium for her to ardently embrace. Despite this, I hadn't actually considered architecture by its name until a year into highschool. Growing up, the word "architect" brought images of businessmen like Ted Mosby, corporate offices, skyscrapers, and boring-looking blueprints to mind, not the colorful and nameless art I'd grown so fond of. I began to reconsider after attending a NOMA Project Pipeline program, where I'd finished the week by constructing a funky-looking cardboard model of a recreational center, accompanied with its own glue-wrinkled vision board of colorful magazine strips - I loved every moment of making it. The beauty of sharing an experience through the environment became profoundly fascinating to me. In a world in which you may never completely understand the full experiences and feelings of another person, architecture is a bridge to enclose, encompass, and connect experiences through structure. Even beyond the lives of the original people who lived in a historic apartment, others will sit by its window and share the same view they did. People carry their own memories, but timeless structure tells stories that will be reverberated throughout generations. That is what makes it so special. My appreciation of architecture has only grown with time, as its multifaceted intrigue eventually intertwined with my identity and values, building its potential for socio-economic advocacy. In sophomore year, I came across a YouTube video essay detailing how single-use zoning policy exacerbated both the housing crisis and a decline in architecture quality. The symbiotic relationship between policy and architecture immediately interested me, and I went down a rabbit-hole of research towards the greater implications of the built environment. When I began researching causes of the housing crisis, urban isolation, sprawl, and smog, I found that poor design tied a common thread between them. I could see the issues addressed in my research reflected in my own city; while San Antonio planners focused on beautifying the inner regions of the city that lured tourists with exaggerated price tags, the local residents of the outer city suffered from the demolition of important community housing and public space in exchange for extraneous stadiums, luxury condominiums, and concrete strip malls. As my interest developed, the art of “pretty buildings” soon became a method of promoting accessibility rights for my friends with disabilities, preserving the cultural history of Tejano communities, advocating transportation justice, creating affordable housing in sprawled cities, and practicing environmental consciousness. The profound implications has led me to pursue my college education diligently, so that I may one day establish an architecture firm that actively funds and advocates to address crucial needs in cities and influence change towards a more sustainable future for the people within them.