I am the youngest of four children, but the only one from my mother and my father. My father, William Derek Shawk, served as a marine in the Desert Storm war. He was stationed in Afghanistan, and his job in the military was as an artillery driver. He never loved to share his experiences from the military, I could tell it took a toll on him to remember the past, and his friends he had lost. Growing up, and for a large part of my childhood, my dad wasn't present. I don't mean that he left, he always lived in the same house, was always there for dinner in the evening, and was at most of us kids’ sporting events. But he wasn't present in his mind. He was somewhere else, and when he did become present it was usually in the form of anger. Since I've gotten older, we've had conversations, and I now know that this is how his mind dealt with his post-traumatic stress disorder. The word "PTSD" was something that I became very familiar with at a very young age. I knew that my father struggled with it, as well as my uncle, and I knew that it was from their time served in the military. I knew not to wake my dad up super abruptly, and that he couldn't be in a room with loud noises that sounded like guns or explosions, like the balloons popping at my 5th grade father daughter dance. I also knew that sometimes he would have what we called "outbursts" where he couldn't handle his anger. And I knew that he was on medication that was supposed to help him with these things. Me and my sister like to call them his "happy pills" because there was always a big difference when he didn't take them. While I knew these facts starting at a young age, I did not know what PTSD was, or how exactly it worked in my father’s everyday life. Now that I am older, I know. My father suffers from anxiety and chronic depression. He hates crowded spaces, especially if he can’t see the exit. He can’t handle loud noises because it brings him back to his time in the desert, and it’s the same thing with dark rooms. Every time we are in a restaurant, he must be in a seat facing the exit, and must know where all the exits are in case he needs to get his family out of there. PTSD is something my dad has had to learn to cope with every day since getting out of the military, which means that I have had to learn to live with it in a way too.

Growing up I had a friend named Cate. When I was younger, if you asked me about her i would tell you she was one of my best friends. We would walk home from elementary school every day together. Cate was quite a bit shorter than me, but I had always been one of the taller people in my grade even among the boys, she was small in stature, especially compared to me, had bright blonde hair with straight across bangs that almost covered her bright blue eyes, and a laugh that could be heard from across the playground and make you laugh along even if you didn't know her. I can’t remember very many of mine and Cates conversations, I just know that they were always happy. We would share our experiences of the school day, talk about any "drama" that was currently going on in our 5th grade lives, and make funny musically on our phones on the walk home. Once we got to middle school, we drifted. But I remember seeing her in the hallways, and hearing that same intoxicating laugh she had always shared with the world. Then I moved to California for a year, and after that me and Cate never reconnected again. At the beginning of junior year, I started seeing social media posts about a memorial for a girl in the area who committed suicide. This was always a hard subject for me, so immediately my heart felt heavy for the family and friends of the young girl who took her own life. As the days went on, I started seeing more posts about the memorial. And then I saw one that made my heart sink. "Memorial for Cate Salgado" There she was. A picture of the same blonde-haired girl I spent every day walking home with in elementary school. The girl who'd I lost contact with once teenage hormones started. The girl who had the intoxicating laugh and a smile bright like the sun. I reached out to one of my friends who was on the same dance team as her to discuss details of the memorial and make sure I was able to attend. After losing contact, I felt it was the least I could do. Cate and I were not close in the recent years leading to her death, but that only made me wonder what would have been different if we never lost contact. Would anything be different? Would she have talked to me about her struggles? Would I have been able to help her? The morning of her memorial, the only thing I could think was, "What does someone wear to their childhood best friend’s funeral?". That sounds like something I'm making it up, or like I didn't care. But that's the truth of the matter. That morning, that was the only thing I could think of. I don't want kids to feel like suicide is their only option, and battle with the emotions that Cate was feeling. I also don't want friends and families to have to decide what to wear to the kid’s funeral. I hope that just by spreading awareness, and showing that there is always someone there, I can make a difference in even just one teen’s life. I am not going into the medical field, but I am going into the education system, as a psychologist, and I hope I can help kids struggling with thoughts of harm and suicide and become a safe place for them if no one else can.

In my high school career I explored many options, mainly through Honors, AP, and Dual Credit classes. Starting in my sophomore year I took on a heavy workload of honors classes, starting with honors English, advanced honors math, honors chemistry, and AP history classes. From there, in junior year I then took AP Language, AP Environmental Science, and AP U.S History. On top of my core classes, I also took two years of honors Graphic Design, and I am in my third year of an early childhood program that is offered at my school. The biggest impact that I've had in my education career would be this early childhood education program that I have had offered to me. The program is called Teaching and Training, and it is a career and technical education program. In the last three years, I have been able to get real world life experience, experience working with kids, and will be graduating with college credits, as well as so many other valuable skills. With this program, I have been able to open my mind to educational and career opportunities that I had never even imagined before. I have always loved working with kids, but I did not know how I wanted to work with them in the future. In this class, I got the experience of working with kids one on one, and in groups with other high schools and really learning what it is like to be a teacher and some of the knowledge that I need to do that as a career. On top of this, it also opened the doors to so many other opportunities in the education field other than being a teacher. I now know that I want to go to a University of Nevada Reno to study school psychology and then become a psychologist in the school district to work one on one with kids and diagnose them and be able to help those families and kids on the journey through their diagnosis. For a while now I have known I want to be a child psychologist, But I also knew I wanted to still be able to do something in the education field. I did not know how to incorporate those two, until talking with a teacher whom I am an intern for, and she introduced me to the idea of being a school psychologist and informed me of the duties of that job. My family has never been the best off financially, but we have always gotten by. Some months comfortably, some months not. Since my father and I first started talking about me attending college, his biggest thing was that he never wanted me to worry about the expenses. No matter where I wanted to go, no matter what I wanted to peruse or how much it would cost, he never wanted me to worry. My father is a veteran, and so I benefit from his GI bill for college, but that only pays for so much. I have had two other siblings go through college, and both have had to pull out student loans to pay for their education, and my parents are already helping pay those back. This scholarship would lighten the cost of my tuition at UNR and help my family out tremendously with the stress of our financial situation.