Feminism to me means embracing femininity while rejecting traditional gender roles and striving for women to have equal standing in society. As a woman who is going into the STEM field, feminism is important to me because there is a huge gender gap in STEM and women have historically been discriminated against in the field. I contribute to feminism because I hope to close the gender gap in STEM and help women achieve equal pay and equal opportunity in the field. I have been a member of Girls of Steel Robotics for five years. We are a women and gender minority exclusive team based out of Carnegie Mellon University and we compete at the FRC level of FIRST Robotics. On our team, we empower women and nonbinary individuals to pursue STEM and gain confidence in their abilities. Since I joined, I have become confident in myself and I have discovered that I have a passion for mathematics that I now want to pursue in college. Our team does outreach within our community and tries to further our message. We have built our chassis project, a portable robot kit that can be built in under an hour, with local girl scout troops. The troops said afterward that the kids loved the experience and loved seeing a female-run robotics team as it inspired them. Our team has contributed to the feminist movement by empowering women and girls to believe they are capable of success in STEM. As someone who loves punk music, a huge inspiration to me is Laura Jane Grace, lead singer of Against Me!. Laura came out as a trans woman in 2012 and since then has made music examining the harmful stigma around women and trans women in particular. Her music gives me an outlet for the frustration I sometimes feel being a woman in a male-dominated field. The lyrics to some of her songs such as “Searching for a Former Clarity” and “Yesterday Pt. II” describe emotions I feel that I have never been able to describe and make me feel seen. As for Laura, she has inspired me when it comes to embracing my femininity in a way that makes me feel comfortable. From her, I’ve realized that how I look to others does not matter and if I don’t like wearing dresses, that doesn’t make me less of a woman. I love to wear black clothes or my punk vest or wear combat boots with camo pants, and that is just my form of femininity. Laura Jane Grace has made me see feminism as an inclusive movement. As we women fight for equal pay in the workplace or fight against sexual assault, we must not forget our trans sisters. They are one of us and bring such valuable experiences with them to the movement. Laura has been open about the transphobia she faces and the discrimination for being a woman she also faces. Our trans sisters must march with us as we pursue our goal of rejecting gender roles and fight for equal standing in society. Laura has been such an inspiration for me as her songs speak to my experiences, she has changed my view on gender norms and femininity, and she has shown me that feminism is an inclusive movement.

Enrolling in a college or university is like signing up for years of student loan payments and a lifetime of debt unless you know how to manage your finances like a champion. As a student, my goal is to graduate debt-free with a bachelor’s degree and the only way to do that is to manage my finances and control my spending. My main goal in managing my finances is to avoid going into debt, and one way I am trying to do that is by applying to as many scholarships as I can so that I can continue to chip away at the cost of college. Scholarships such as this are allowing me to help pay for my college which then helps prevent me from getting into financial trouble later on. Along with scholarships, I track my spending and earnings on paper or my phone. Since I now have a credit card, it is easy to simply swipe a card and not see it as a real transaction. To combat this, I write down each purchase I make with my credit card so that I remember and can easily see how much I spent in a week or in a month. When I first got a credit card, I hit the monthly limit in three weeks and it blindsided me. That is what inspired me to use my current system as I am now more conscious of my spending and I focus on saving my money. There is no reason that carefully managing your finances means excluding any participation in hobbies. I love sewing and quilting, but unfortunately, sewing can be an expensive hobby. However, that doesn’t mean I gave it up when I became more financially conscious. Instead, I now put a budget on each project I do and also utilize coupons and sales. I recently made a backpack and chose corduroy, a notoriously expensive fabric, as my material. My list of the materials I needed was long, but I said to myself that I wanted to buy everything for $30 or less. I scouted out the sales at my local craft and fabric stores and managed to never pay full price for an item. I actually had fun cutting out coupons and reading the fine print on those to see what I could apply them to for the maximum discount. By the end, I had purchased all my materials for the backpack for $28 and I have never felt happier. With quilting, I like to use old shirts and clothes as my material as it makes a more personal project and it also allows me to make a quilt from materials I already have and am not using. All of this allows me to continue pursuing sewing as my main passion, but do it in an affordable and fulfilling way. By tracking my spending and putting an emphasis on saving money, I hope to accomplish my goal of graduating college debt-free while continuing to pursue my hobbies of sewing and quilting.

I started taking AP Environmental Science this year because I was considering pursuing a minor in environmental science. Before this, I tried to be environmentally conscious in my everyday life, but now I feel I have sufficient knowledge to accomplish my goal. I try to limit my water usage every day by taking shorter showers and washing my car at water-efficient car washes. As gross as it sounds, I also learned in my class this year the phrase “If it’s yellow, let it mellow.” Most water wasted in households is wasted by flushing toilets frequently, but not flushing after simply peeing can save gallons of water. Although the concept may seem gross, it is an easy and safe way to limit your daily water usage. With my showers, I’ve adopted the routine of listening to two songs in the shower as it guarantees my shower will be short and gives me a rhythm to pace myself to. I learned this year about how the meat industry affects the environment through high greenhouse gas emissions and large land uses. Because of this, I have also limited the number of times I eat meat a week. I already do not enjoy meat too much, so it is easy for me to try and achieve a primarily vegetarian diet, and it helps me lower my carbon footprint. The grocery stores I shop at usually sell local produce that my family buys. Local produce goes through less transportation which means emissions from truck transport are lowered. I try to make sustainable food choices so I can leave a positive impact on the environment. A huge blow to the environment comes from the rise of the fast-fashion industry which promotes clothes that take many resources to make and fall apart quickly. As someone who loves to sew, I just hate that instead of spending money on clothes made to last, people just buy these clothes that fall apart quickly. I’m not great at sewing clothes, but I’ve made some clothes out of thrifted materials that I have made very sturdy so I can wear them for some time. In general, many resources go into making clothes, so I try not to collect too many pairs of shirts and I also try to thrift my clothes and recycle old clothes. When I need to buy clothes, I try to buy clothes that were made sustainably and were built to last, like clothes from CHNGE.org. AP Environmental Science has made me more environmentally conscious and heightened my awareness of how our daily choices impact the world around us. I hope to continue to make sustainable choices throughout my life and hopefully minor in environmental science and further awareness about climate change and environmental degradation.

I started swimming lessons and soccer at our local YMCA when I was only three years old. I was enrolled in the former as my parents firmly believed swimming was a life and survival skill, and my passion for swimming never extended past splashing around in the summer heat. Soccer, however, is what I fell in love with. Once I could start playing at our U8 community level for soccer, I started to meet some new friends and also have an outlet for the huge amounts of energy I had in me at all times. My team, the Yellow Stingrays, was led by my first coach, Coach Kirk, and we were a formidable team of seven-year-olds. Well, we would’ve been if we weren’t constantly missing kids every game. Soccer taught me discipline. I learned to love running drills at practices and taking tips from my coaches on how to improve. I played community so our games were never super competitive, but that worked best for me. Honestly, I didn’t like the competitive nature of soccer as much as the teamwork and practice that went into it. I loved being kept active and healthy with soccer practices weekly. When I started playing soccer for our middle school team, the daily practices led to me being in the best shape of my life and I felt very good about myself. I stopped playing soccer because my robotics team started taking up most of my time, but I still love to get outside and play disc golf or kick around a soccer ball at the park to stay in shape and get time outside. Soccer was great because it taught me how to cooperate within a team and it taught me discipline. I learned to own up to mistakes I made during games and accepted feedback on how to be better. My coaches became some of the most important people in my life. It saddens me to say that my two childhood coaches, Coach Rick and Coach Dave, passed away within the past few years, but the practices I spent with them and their words of encouragement will live with me forever. I miss playing soccer and hope to join an intramural soccer team in college. Soccer, and athletics in general, have kept me happy and healthy throughout my life and introduced me to coaches whose words still motivate me today throughout all of life’s challenges. I go through my life now hoping that if Coach Rick and Coach Dave were to see me, they’d be proud of the person I've become, and I’d love to be able to tell them just how much they positively impacted my life.

I have always been a very careful spender. I track my purchases for a month, limit the number of times I eat out, and try to not buy anything I do not need. Saying this, I also do not completely deprive myself of things I want to purchase for fun. I love sewing, and I allow myself to buy fabric and patterns but I am careful and look for sales and coupons. When I enter college and apply for my first credit card, I plan on tracking my purchases either on my phone or in a little notebook since I am a pen-and-paper person. I want to do this at first so that I don’t see a credit card as a card full of instant money. Each swipe needs to register as a purchase to me and this is a way that I think will work. I also want to limit how much I eat out in college and take advantage of the food on campus. When I go into college, I want to come out with as little debt as possible. To do this, I plan on educating myself on student loans to totally understand what I am signing up for. I know I qualify for a federal loan but I want to do my research to understand when I would need to pay the loan back. To come out with little debt, I plan on also working during college and saving money to pay off tuition and other expenses. My dad has helped me when it comes to considering finances. We both know how to save money while still treating ourselves when we deserve it. I want to be a good example to my friends like my dad was for me. I would love to help my friends save money so that after college we will not be drowned in debt. I know people now who spend money like it's going out of style and it is not a sustainable lifestyle. I will discipline myself to put aside a certain amount of my paycheck for savings so that I will always have an amount of money for emergencies and special occasions. I have work to do when it comes to educating myself on finances, but I feel I have a good foundation thanks to my dad. I hope to continue to save money and track my purchases through my last months of high school and college. My ultimate goal would be to graduate debt-free, and I will use my knowledge of finances to achieve that goal.

My dad and I have always been close since I was young. We’ve bonded over our love of hockey and camping and disc golf, but we’ve bonded the most over our passion for ice cream. One of my favorite series of pictures in my baby book is pictures of me sharing ice cream with my dad with a beaming smile on my face. One summer, maybe five years ago, we received a local magazine that listed the top 33 ice cream shops in about an hour radius of us. My dad pinned this list to the fridge and like Bilbo running from the Shire, we were off on an adventure. Every couple of days we would pick an ice cream place on the list and set out to try it. We went to little shacks off country roads and trendy shops in the city. I had some delicious ice cream, and I had ice cream that put a startling emphasis on the “ice” part. We acted like we were doing a great job for the world as we ranked these ice cream places. If a place was good, we reviewed it as if it were a classic piece of literature and recommended it to everyone we knew. A certain stand, however, drew heavy criticism from us as it was always talked so highly of and instead was overpriced normal soft serve. Now, we never talked badly about this place to others, but if we were driving past it together a snarky comment was bound to be said. Anytime I had a friend over that summer, my dad would take us out for ice cream at a place on our list. Now, up until this point we’d only ever really gone to these together and I was not aware that our pace of eating ice cream was scarily fast. That is until my friends watched in wonder as my dad and I devoured the sweet treat in front of us as if it was our first meal in a month. My friends frequently lamented how they felt like such slow eaters as usually my dad and I would finish so fast that for ten minutes we simply watched my friend eat ice cream. I assured them that we were a pair that had trained for many years in the art of eating ice cream and that really, they were eating at a normal pace. I forgot about my friends being amazed at the speed I eat ice cream, that was until I took my friend Miles out for ice cream last year. We sat down with our respective cups and I watched as he started into his dessert like a ravenous dog. I asked what was happening and he looked at me with an astonished look on his face. “Remember when your dad took me and you to get ice cream that time? You both finished so fast, I felt strange for taking so long. Since then, I eat my ice cream as fast as you two,” he said. I just started laughing. I told him that indeed, I used to eat really fast, but now I’m turning a new leaf and savoring my ice cream. He just shook his head, saying how I changed the way he approached ice cream eating only to change myself. It’s now a joke between us about how I trained him into eating fast and he trained me to eat slower. I look back at that summer with such fond memories that I still talk about it with friends today.

When I was 13, my mom told me about her friend’s daughter who was on a robotics team at Carnegie Mellon University. She told me that it was an all-girls team and they traveled all over for competitions. As she was telling me this, I was thinking “would this be for me?” because I wanted to be a lawyer at the time. A year later, I was sitting with my parents at the 2018 Girls of Steel Symposium surrounded by girls who talked about their great experiences on the team. I saw videos of FIRST Robotics competitions that had bleachers alive with excitement as if they were watching hockey. My true love had appeared before my eyes and it was the fascinating world of STEM. I applied to the program that same year and on my birthday, I got the email that I was accepted to Girls of Steel. I ran into my parent’s room to tell them the good news. In my first year, our small team of six competed in the FIRST Tech Challenge competition and built our first robot together, affectionately named Wheelson. I learned how to make something from a pile of parts, and as our 20-pound robot came to life before us, I thought back on that kid who wanted to be a lawyer and realized that kid was gone. This kid wanted to be an engineer. The next year, I joined the FIRST Robotics Competition team for Girls of Steel. My rookie season was spent learning from all of the seniors on the team and hand-tapping standoffs for hours on end, but I also started learning what it was about STEM that I truly liked. I was drawn to the hands-on building our team did, but I really enjoyed watching our older members and mentors work through calculations to figure out what gear ratio we needed or where we needed to mount different parts to make a balanced robot. Math was calling to me. Around this same time, I started volunteering as a math tutor at Anchorpoint Counseling Ministry. I was paired up with local elementary students and helped them complete homework and study for upcoming tests. It was so weird seeing problems I hadn’t done since elementary school, but I had so much fun re-learning alongside the kids. The kids I tutored were awesome, and there was nothing more rewarding than seeing them smile as they showed me their latest test with a greatly improved score. I started looking forward to those hour-long sessions all week. Meanwhile, at school, my calculus teacher and my physics teacher cemented that math was what I wanted to pursue. Calculus just made sense to me. It seemed like a way to solve any problem, and it combined every previous math concept I’d learned. In physics, I was able to apply all I had learned in calculus. Calculus became my favorite subject as it was the first math I’d taken that I understood the purpose of. At robotics, before meetings officially started, some of us would work together on whatever challenging math problems were assigned for homework that night. At one meeting, we filled up an entire whiteboard trying to figure out an integral problem someone was stuck on. We sat there for half an hour pointing out where we may have made a mistake or what other ways we could try to solve this problem. It was so much fun and I’d never known math could be so interactive. I will always be interested in robotics, but I realized math was my true passion at that moment.

If someone told me that I would spend my high school years building a robot with fifty other girls and traveling to compete with it, I may have called them crazy. Girls of Steel Robotics is an all-girls FIRST Robotics team based out of Carnegie Mellon, and the team has made me who I am today. I’ve learned machine shop skills, presentation skills, and how to build a robot from nothing in six weeks. For the five years I have been a member, I have met some of my best friends and become proficient in a variety of technical skills that will help me when I pursue a career in STEM. I am committed to our Girls of Steel mission of empowering women and girls to pursue STEM education, and as a result, I have attended many outreach events in my community. My teammates and I ran a table at Discovery Day 2022 at the local convention center and met more than 300 students who were interested in robotics and our program. We also host Cub Scouts and Girl Scouts at our practice area to help them get hands-on experience and a badge in robotics. Along with Girls of Steel, I volunteered as a tutor for three years at Anchorpoint Counseling Ministry and helped younger kids with math. I loved working with kids and seeing the smile they got on their faces when they understood a new concept. During the summer of 2022, I worked as a teen intern at the Rosalinda Sauro Sirianni Memorial Garden with North Hills Community Outreach to support the organic farm run there. The produce we harvested went to food banks in the surrounding area to allow people to have access to fresh-grown food at no price. I learned about organic farming as well as how to best support those in the community who need help. We connected with other teens from community farms to share our experiences. I have also been a zoo teen at the Pittsburgh Zoo for three summers. There, I supported keepers in caring for education animals and guiding visitors through different exhibits. I became an expert on our tigers at the zoo and taught guests about them while also answering any questions they had. I would also sometimes help with zoo camp, the summer program for elementary-age kids, and I had a lot of fun interacting with these young kids who were as interested in animals as I was. I love helping within my community, whether it be teaching a child how to build a robot or sharing fun facts about our zoo’s animals with them.