Music was my first passion. The exact moment I fell in love with it was in the third grade, when I was singing “All of Me” by John Legend in the living room. My father, a man of few words, walked in and complimented my voice. This simple action of his filled me with pride and inspired me to continue developing and training my voice. After moving from the city to the suburbs the next year--and all of the other changes I’ve experienced in my life since--music was the one constant. I continued to learn vocal technique and music theory by taking private lessons, and chorus and music theory classes in school---the latter for which I earned college credit--but now with a genuine love for music as my guiding reason for doing so. Ever since moving in elementary school and leaving behind the only friends I'd ever had, I became socially awkward and introverted. I was too shy to make new friends, much less sing on a stage for an audience. However, my love for music was too strong, and I was drawn into the spotlight. In my eighth-grade chorus class, my teacher was able to notice my talent despite my reclusion. He encouraged me to audition for his select extracurricular choir, and that was my first solo performance. Ever since then, he encouraged me to push my boundaries and step out of my comfort zone. While it was uncomfortable, the opportunity to devote more and more of myself to something I loved so much was enough to make me overcome my fears and share my music. Being on stage helped me gain confidence and poise. The kids in my choir became some of my closest friends, and this year they all came to my graduation ceremony to cheer me on as I sang our Alma Mater and a final farewell song. I never would've had any of those people in my life or been given the opportunity to sing at that ceremony had it not been for music drawing me out of my little shell. I've learned to view the world as I do music: even if you mess up a note or miss an entrance, you just have to keep singing. The worst thing you could do in a performance is stop before the end. This philosophy helped me learn to worry less about messing up and more about taking chances. It helped me overcome my social and performance anxieties and grow into a confident and sociable leader. My hard work paid off and I’ve consistently received county-wide honors in music since the 8th grade. I scored a 100 on my all-county NYSSMA solo audition and a 98 on my all-state one. Today, I’m the president of my school’s all-female vocal ensemble, and of our select mixed choir, which means I get to share my love of music with kids of all levels of talent and experience. I'm also Dance Captain--the equivalent of being president--for our musical theatre department. I've been nominated twice for a local acting award that covers over twenty school districts. This year I was a lead in the Sound of Music, in which I played the Mother Abbess. The most meaningful experience to me is being able to do for the kids in my clubs what my father did for me: encourage them to find their love for music.

This summer I will be attending the University of Pennsylvania on the pre-med track where I will be majoring in Health and Societies. I haven't declared my concentration yet, but I think it will be in the intersections between gender, sexuality, and health, which are topics I'm passionate about as a bisexual woman of color. I'm very grateful to be attending an Ivy League University, but it certainly doesn't come cheap: I will have to pay over $85,000 each year. Receiving this scholarship will help make pursuing this field of study even more possible. I always knew I’d follow my parents’ path and become a physician, but then I had the opportunity to participate in a public health project, the INSIGHT summer research program at The University of Washington. Students researched traffic safety by auditing locations and comparing traffic accident data. I’ve since joined my school district’s Health and Wellness Committee, which focuses on school health policy. I’m also a daughter of immigrants with a large extended family in India and Europe. I spent my childhood traveling to multiple countries and noticing how their societies often worked differently than ours. I consider these experiences a gift that has afforded me a very global perspective on health. The most important reason, however, for why I chose to pursue this field of study, is because I believe it would mesh very well with my long-held commitment to justice and activism and research experience. I was especially inspired by the research I’d done for my announcements for my Gay-Straight Alliance through which I learned all about the inequity faced by LGBT+ people in the AIDS epidemic, how gay and bisexual men were only until a few months ago prevented from donating blood and still face difficulties in doing so, the monkeypox epidemic, the attack on abortion rights, and the attack on transgender youth’s access to gender-affirming healthcare all over the United States currently. These are all issues I want to address in my studies. As the two-year president and four-year member of my GSA, I've spent my whole high school career being involved with my local LGBTQ+ community. I run our social media account, with which I network with local LGBTQ+ figures and organizations and learn about the diverse experiences of LGBTQ+ people in my community. I've learned about how little people know about LGBTQ+ history, and how little my peers know about sexual health for same-sex relations. I view my future as one in which I address all of these issues. Health is a basic human right, but we queer people receive unequal access, treatment, and knowledge. With the help of this scholarship, I want to change that.

The best piece of financial advice that I have learned thus far came from social media influencers / creators, but it has surprisingly worked very well for me and has saved me hundreds of dollars. It is not some gimmick or an app or product you need to buy. It is nothing marketed, over-hyped, or glorified. It is a solid piece of advice that I would not have thought of as a first - generation American teenager born and raised in the middle class. @your.richbff, whose real name is Vivian Tu, is a social media influencer who retired from Wall Street and now provides free financial advice to her followers. As a daughter of immigrants, the United States’s financial systems were confusing and unknown to me, but her content made some parts about if easier to understand, and at least told me what I needed to know. Other influencers as well, such as @salarytransparentstreet, run by soon -to - be married couple Hannah and James, and @firstgenliving, whose real name is Maria Melchor, work to demystify finance and all things money related to their followers. Watching or listening to content created by reputable professionals—not limited to these three, especially if you don’t live in the U.S. because their content is entirely based on American laws, systems, and currency—is a great way to learn helpful tips and tricks, and also major life-changing advice, about almost any subject, finances being only one of them. The most valuable lesson I have learned about finances is one I had found in content from each of them. This lesson is to measure the value of an expense not in the cost of the expense itself, but to measure it in hours of work. For example, before buying new handbag that costs $15.00, if you earn a salary of $15.00 an hour, stop and consider if that purchase is really worth an hour of work. If you earn $20.00, and you want to buy a watch that’s $80.00, that’s four hours of work! For an outdated piece of equipment! But, if you’re a watch enthusiast, it’s your birthday, and it has some significance to you, then maybe that purchase is worth it to you. If you do not get paid by the hour, and you only know your yearly salary (or your income at some other rate) you can roughly convert your salary to an hourly rate to make an estimate and use this as your basis to compare your purchases to. An hour of work is a lot more tangible than a year, and a smaller amount of money is an easier baseline for everyday purchases than a five-figure number. Doing this will help reduce excess expenditures, because it will help contextualize your purchases as not just a waste of money, but also a waste of time and effort. It has definitely stopped me from making impulse buys or purchases that I would regret later. On the other hand, this technique also helps me reduce guilt over spending money when I do need or deserve it. For example, instead of feeling guilty when I want to take a well-deserved vacation, and thus have to pay all the travel expenses while also missing out on work (and / or your parents’ work), you can keep in mind that you have only spent a specific amount of days’ worth of money, and you can calculate whether or not you can feasibly make that amount back with future smart choices and continued hard work after you return. The idea behind this technique is to change our view of “spending” from something that might be hurting a hypothetical and immaterial goal into a something that is a computable and manageable amount. Practicing this technique helps to both reduce impulse buys and unnecessary purchases, but also to justify spending where it is necessary and / or deserved. During my college years and beyond, every time I want to buy some random product my Instagram ads or TikTok feed are pushing me to buy, I’ll stop and consider not only how much money I am spending on it, but also how much time and effort. Did I really spend an hour flipping burgers or cleaning houses for this?

When I was in the fifth grade, my best friend came out to me as bisexual. She’d expected rejection, but all she got was confusion—I had no idea what “bisexual” was. She explained to me that not all girls marry guys: some marry those of other gender identities. And that’s when I realized that I'm bisexual. But living with this truth was nowhere as easy as realizing it was for me. In the fifth grade especially, most people had never even thought about the possibility of sexually-diverse relationships. All we’d ever seen on TV were boys with girls, so realizing I was bisexual was an incredibly isolating experience. Even as we grew older and started getting exposed to the idea of homosexuality, bisexuality was still this unknown, mysterious thing that people didn’t understand. At first, I was defensive. If anyone made assumptions or even asked me questions about my sexuality, I immediately assumed they were trying to belittle or demean me, and I shut them down. I never gave people a chance to learn what I wished they just knew. Then, in the eighth grade, that same friend came out to me again. This time as genderqueer. And again, she was met with confusion. So far, I’d learned about different sexualities and the generally-known concept of being transgender (a person who was born physically as one gender but identifies as another), but I didn’t know that people could identify as neither, or both. Yet again, she explained it to me, and I realized that I too was genderqueer. Furthermore, what I realized was that my lack of knowledge was not purposeful, and I had no intention of offending her when I asked about her gender—so why was I so defensive of it myself? Why didn’t I help others understand too? When this friend of mine had helped learn so much about myself twice just by explaining her own experiences to me, how many could I have helped, just by answering a question or being more open? From then on, I tried to follow my friend’s example, and tried my best to educate myself and others. I found myself becoming someone people felt like they could talk to and confide in. To some people who I once wrote off as homophobic, I became the first person they came out to. People who once threw around the word “gay” as an insult or joke began to tell others off for doing so after I explained to them that I found it hurtful. Eventually, after entering the 9th grade and joining my high school’s Gay-Straight Alliance, I restarted an old tradition they had of doing “GSA PSAs” (Gay Straight Alliance’s Public Service Announcements) over the loud speaker once a week, sharing information and current events to help increase school-wide awareness of LGBTQ+ issues and introducing words that were once shied away from, like “gay”, into the school atmosphere. Eventually, in my junior year, I became the president of the club, after having been vice president the previous year. Every year, I’d help organize campaigns such as one for National Coming Out Day and National Day of Silence. I also create posts for and run our Instagram account. I’ve learned from that friend that instead of getting offended by ignorance, we should take it as an opportunity to educate others, because as long as we’re all open to learn, we should all be open to teach.