I was born at Virginia Hospital Center, then called Arlington Hospital, in February 2003. Sixteen years later, I spent four hours every Thursday night as a volunteer on the exact wing where I was born. I served postpartum mothers and newborns by bringing them supplies and assisting the nurses in any way they needed. I set up more rooms than I can count. I sanitized every surface in sight. I learned how to properly knock on a patient’s door, introduce myself, and asked if there was anything I could bring them. I remember walking onto the floor on a chilly December night to a tense nurse’s station. After a few minutes, I learned that there was a patient who didn’t speak English. The translator expressed concern that the patient spoke a unique dialect and he wasn’t familiar with it. Here she was, in a foreign country, giving birth and only understanding every couple of words. I couldn’t imagine what she was feeling at that moment, but I doubted that it could be very good. I grew up speaking English. Besides a couple years of Spanish and French, my ability to communicate with non-English speakers is incredibly limited. Unlike them, I have never struggled to find someone who could understand me, especially in a hospital setting. It broke my heart. I remember a mother walking onto the floor with an adoption agent in tow. She was young and single and likely had a plethora of obstacles that would make it harder for her to raise a child. She had chosen an open adoption, meaning she helped to pick out the adoptive parents. They arrived sometime during my shift. They sat expectantly in the waiting room. I watched as the mother paced back and forth in the hallway in her hospital gown and slippers. Blame it on the hormones or whatever, the woman was rethinking her decision to give up her child. I will never know what happened to these women. My shift was over, and I never saw or heard about them again. But their stories aren’t the ones that inspired me to choose nursing. It was the way the nurses on the floor responded to these emotional scenes. For the woman who didn’t speak English, they showed that caring for people surpasses language. For the woman grappling with the future of her child, the nurses showed incredible empathy and compassion with the singular goal of helping the mother recover and ensuring the baby’s health. I want to study nursing in order to become a pediatric nurse practitioner. Nursing has been my goal since I was a sophomore in High School. I was always drawn to science. I love people. I love to be an advocate for them. I especially love children. I have been a babysitter and nanny since I was 11. Most recently, I was a nanny to four children, including an infant who had serious medical issues. I didn't realize the affinity I had towards children until I held that baby in my arms. I saw the toll that his medical problems had on his parents and even on his other siblings. I saw how much they all wanted him to get better. I saw how much he wanted to get better too, even though he couldn't express it verbally. He was a fighter. He still is. I hope one day I get to tell him how much he inspired me to choose pediatric nursing.

In January of 2020 I was volunteering at a local hospital. A patient that I was caring for had been diagnosed with the flu. Her nurse told me to wear a surgical mask to prevent me from inhaling the virus. I found a box of blue surgical masks in the storage room and frowned because I had no idea how to put on the thin blue rectangle. After wrestling with it, I realized that the folds expand when you pull on the sides and the wire is meant to mold to the bridge of your nose. Less than two months later, wearing a mask similar to that one would be more than commonplace- it would be mandated. While I was struggling to adapt to online school, my parents were struggling with work and with the distance between us and our extended family. We desperately wanted to see them, hug them, eat with them, but there were six hundred miles between us and them. I remember the pained facetime calls. I remember the unspoken fear, knowing all of the conditions that make some of my family more vulnerable. I remember the hysteria. I remember feeling frustrated that the rules were changing every single day. I remember writing an essay for my AP English Language and Composition class about what we would tell our kids one day. I remember the guilt I felt knowing that I’ll have to tell my kids that I sat in bed all day and complained when they ask about 2020. And then, a light appeared at the end of the tunnel. I remember my parents announcing that we were moving closer to family. I remember the joy. I remember the unspoken plans: a new school, a new set of friends, a holiday spent together. I decided that I wanted to become a nurse my sophomore year of high school. Covid-19 set those plans in stone. I can’t imagine myself in a different career now. I desperately wanted to serve my community. I wanted to be on the front lines. In May of 2020, the hospital I volunteered at announced that they were halting their volunteer program. I remember reading that email in the grocery store parking lot and crying. I wanted to help so badly. And now hopefully, in a few years, I will. Ten years from now, maybe we’ll look back and laugh about toilet paper, zoom calls, and whipped coffee. But right now, the past holds the sharp reminder of how quickly life can change and how fast we can lose loved ones. Maybe in a year I will unlearn the habit of grabbing a mask before I leave the house or maybe I’ll stop subconsciously flinching when people stand closer than six feet. But right now, I’ll keep my space and hold on to hope about a future without masks and without distance between us and the people we love.

At precisely 6:30 every morning, my phone wakes me up. At 7:30, it reminds me to take my medications. At 8:00, it suggests the fastest route to school. During school, it alerts me whenever my friends send me anything. It contains a portfolio of every digital assignment I’ve done over the past seven years. After school, I often buy coffee by scanning my phone. When I go to a sports game, it instructs me where to turn and what lane to be in. For dinner, I’ll look up a recipe on my phone. At 11:30, it tells me that I should go to sleep and mutes itself. Then, the cycle begins again. I can’t imagine a time in the past week when I have been more than five feet from my phone. It pains me to say that because I sound like an addict and in a way, I am. My phone is my strain of heroine. I stress about my image online. I stress about missing texts or calls. I stress about the news I see online. Conversations online sometimes don’t ever end. They have gaps of time between responses, sure, but they often don’t have a finite stopping point. When I’m driving, I can hear it vibrate. I can guess what kind of alert it is based on the sound. One pulse for a snapchat. Two pulses for a text. Three pulses or more for a call. Every muscle in my body just wants to read what happened. I don’t want to be rude by making someone wait for my response. I just want to type out a quick answer, nevermind the fact that I’m controlling a vehicle going forty miles per hour. The other day I was driving to my friends house to pick her up to go to a basketball game. She recently moved so I had my phone giving me directions. As I was at a stoplight, I saw that I had gotten a text from her. It read “What are you wearing tonight?” In hindsight, my instant response wasn’t necessary. If one of us was under or overdressed, we could just change when I arrived. But, my fingers still itched to send a two word text back. I didn’t. I fought the urge. I decided that my eyes should stay on the road and my fingers should stay gripped around the wheel. But I know that the anxiety I felt to just send one more small text isn’t a problem that I face alone. One out of every four car accidents is caused by texting according to the National Safety Council. Those people, like me, suffered to separate our real physical lifes from our digital ones, likely, with bitter consequences.

I think normally when people’s testimonies begin with “I was raised in a Christian home,” we tend to roll our eyes because we know what’s coming next. We prefer the testimonies that reveal how God can truly move mountains. We want to hear about the recovering addicts, the ex-convicts, and the medical miracles. My story isn’t like that. In my case, God didn’t move mountains, but he did move me. Like so many others, I was raised deeply involved in Church and Christian school. “Sheltered” could not be more true. I distinctly remember being asked to write down the name of a nonchristian to pray for one day during Sunday School and I just stared at my paper, knowing full well that I didn’t know a single person who wasn’t a professing Christian. In middle school, I had an amazing mentor who pushed me to question whether my faith was truly my own. At the time, it wasn’t. But I grew tremendously in a short time and on Easter of my eighth grade year, she baptized me in front of my entire congregation. Normally, that’s the end of the story, but it really was just the beginning for mine. I thought I had my life planned out. I would attend the same school for high school and stay friends with the same people. I was content to stay within my bubble. I think God was probably laughing as he watched me make my five year plan. Two months after being baptized, my parents announced that we were moving to Washington DC in less than two weeks. God had thrown his metaphorical wrench in my plans for sure. I attended a public high school where I met people with widely different backgrounds. DC is one of the most international cities in the country and my friend group supported that statistic. I was the only Christian and one of two Americans. For the first time, I actually had nonchristians to pray about. In a way, it was bittersweet. Every time a Christian moves the first thing that people say is “find a Christian community,” but, here's the thing, they never tell you how to do that. I struggled a bit my freshman year. I was afraid to bring it up around my friends so I chose a more subtle method. I wore cross necklaces and WWJD bracelets to try to alert Christians around me of my faith. Looking back, I have no idea how that worked, but it did. A classmate of mine noticed and invited me to Young Life, a nondenominational Christian club devoted to outreach, and a Bible Study with other girls in our grade. Around junior year, I started to become comfortable in my surroundings. I brought up my faith in class. I argued with teachers who attacked Christianity. I became well-known as a Chrisitan within my school. I was interviewed for the school newspaper over my faith. Freshman Claire would never have imagined how confident in her faith she would become. And then God threw another wrench. Amidst job changes and a global pandemic, my family decided to move back to Indiana, again with a two week notice. I packed up my things, said goodbye over facetime, and got in the car for a new adventure. God is constantly testing my faith. When I get comfortable, he shakes the ground beneath me to motivate me to do more. Pray more. Trust more. Advocate more. Worship more. Fellowship more. Listen more. Right now, I’m a senior in high school preparing for nursing school. I don’t know where I’m going to end up or who I will be friends with. I don’t even know what state I’ll be living in in one years time. But I trust God to carry me through it.

There is no community without people. We cannot expect to reap the benefits of strong community engagement without contributing to its success. This looks like volunteering, helping in conservation, voting in local elections, voicing concerns about community-wide issues, and a million other things. For me, it looks like volunteering at the hospital that I was born in 17 years ago. At Virginia Hospital Center, I volunteered for four hours every Thursday on the postpartum unit. I set up beds for patients transferring from Labor and Delivery to Mom and Baby. I brought supplies to patients when their nurses were busy. I sanitized every surface in sight. I’ve met hundreds of patients days or even hours after giving birth. I’ve seen newborn babies of every race and every weight bracket. Months later, there are still patients I can’t forget. I remember a mother walking onto the floor with an adoption agent in tow. She was young and single and likely had a plethora of obstacles that would make it harder for her to raise a child. She had chosen an open adoption, meaning she helped to pick out the adoptive parents. They arrived sometime during my shift. They sat expectantly in the waiting room. I watched as the mother paced back and forth in the hallway in her hospital gown and slippers. Blame it on the hormones or whatnot, the woman was rethinking her decision to give up her child. And then I left. My four hour shift was up. I never got to hear the end of her story. I remember walking out of the elevator on a cold December night to a tense nurses’ station. After a few minutes, I discovered that we had a patient who didn’t speak English. This happens way more often that I expected. Hospitals have their own translators for situations like this. However, this time was different. The translator was expressing concern that our patient spoke a unique dialect that he wasn’t familiar with. Here she was, in a foreign country, giving birth and only understanding every couple of words. It was arguably one of the biggest events in her life and she was riding with blinders over her eyes, or ears. And then I left. My four hour shift was up. I never got to hear the end of her story. But being there for the endings doesn’t matter. I got to witness the nurses doing what was right in the moment in order to serve their patients effectively. It was times like these that solidified my desire to be a nurse. For the woman conflicted about her baby’s future, the nurses showed immense empathy and compassion. They offered neutral support with the singular goal of helping the mother recover and ensuring the baby’s health. For the woman who didn’t speak English, they showed me that caring for people surpasses language. It's understood in a way that doesn’t require two people to speak the same language or have the same background. Nursing exists to support people through life-changing events. They do things that the rest of the world considers gross. They deal with death. But they also deal with life. While learning the basics of care, I also learned that there is a desperate need for nurses in my community. This problem is almost nation-wide. Nearly every shift change, I saw the fear in the nurses’ eyes when they realized that they were understaffed yet again and therefore had to take on four, five, or even six moms AND babies at once. I did my best to aid in the little responsibilities, but I knew that it would never equate to the work of another nurse or two. In six months, I will take my first nursing classes. In four years, I will hopefully pass my NCLEX and become a registered nurse. For me, I will support my community by being part of the solution.

I was born at Virginia Hospital Center, then called Arlington Hospital, in February 2003. Sixteen years later, I spent four hours every Thursday night as a volunteer on the exact wing where I was born. I served postpartum mothers and newborns by bringing them supplies and assisting the nurses in any way they needed. I set up more rooms than I can count. I sanitized every surface in sight. Giving birth is one of the most important moments in a mother’s life; therefore, it was heartbreaking whenever a mother was doing it with barriers. As a volunteer, I learned that Hospitals provide translators in every major language. This works perfectly well for non-English speakers who speak Spanish or Mandarin. However, it leaves out non-English speakers who don’t speak one of these major languages. I remember walking onto the floor on a chilly December night to a tense nurse’s station. After a few minutes, I learned that there was a patient who didn’t speak English. The translator expressed concern that the patient spoke a unique dialect and he wasn’t familiar with it. Here she was, in a foreign country, giving birth and only understanding every couple of words. I couldn’t imagine what she was feeling at that moment, but I doubted that it could be very good. I grew up speaking English. Besides a couple years of Spanish and French, my ability to communicate with non-English speakers is incredibly limited. Unlike them, I have never struggled to find someone who could understand me, especially in a hospital setting. It broke my heart. I remember a mother walking onto the floor with an adoption agent in tow. She was young and single and likely had a plethora of obstacles that would make it harder for her to raise a child. She had chosen an open adoption, meaning she helped to pick out the adoptive parents. They arrived sometime during my shift. They sat expectantly in the waiting room. I watched as the mother paced back and forth in the hallway in her hospital gown. Blame it on the hormones or stress, the woman was rethinking her decision to give up her child. I want to study nursing in order to become a nurse practitioner. Nursing has been my goal since I was a sophomore in High School. I was always drawn to science. I love people. I love to be an advocate. I was elected to my high school’s sophomore class council, where I was asked to speak for my grade to administration. Then, the next year as a Junior, I was elected to represent my school to the county school board. In both positions, I had to listen to the needs and wants of my school and then reiterate those needs to people who had the authority to enact change. I realized that I had a passion for the direct-patient care that I saw the nurses providing. Receiving a scholarship will help facilitate my studies and make my goals more attainable.