“Nice looking robot you’ve got there. Glad you have a girl on the team to make it look that pretty.” As the only girl on my robotics team for nearly seven years, I have experienced countless male faculty direct their attention solely toward my male teammates, dismissing my ideas until they were repeated by a male counterpart. Most upsetting of all, I felt my own pride and excitement trampled at the peak of my accomplishment in robotics. In April 2023, my team won the FIRST Robotics World Championship Division Inspire Award– the highest distinction in our division, awarded to only four teams worldwide each year. Soon after winning, my elation evaporated when an event organizer walked by our booth and remarked, “Nice looking robot you’ve got there. Glad you have a girl on the team to make it look that pretty.” I stood reeling long after he walked away, the heat rising in my cheeks. I indignantly wanted to respond, “I was responsible for the physics torque calculations, technical documentation, and strategy development, and I’m Dean’s List Finalist and Co-Captain of this team!” But those words never came–only the feelings. While his comment stings even now, I have chosen to use this pain as fuel. As Co-President of Girl Up Club, a chapter of the United Nations nonprofit organization, I championed the formation of an all-girls team and founded a summer robotics program specifically targeted at empowering middle school girls in STEM. To ensure the legacy of these programs, my robotics teammates and I created a proposal in 2022 to construct our town’s first Robotics and Engineering Lab and collaborated in raising $100,000 in funding. We then created an instructional lab-building playbook and are now using this playbook to support the founding of 18 FIRST teams across Zimbabwe, Lesotho, and Malawi. Through founding these inclusive programs and mentoring FIRST Lego League students on a weekly basis, I have witnessed the joy on students’ faces as they tinker and begin their careers in STEM. I have not only reclaimed the sense of possibility I felt when I first joined robotics, but I have fostered that excitement and wonder in students of all ages and genders. Passionate about making science exciting and accessible to all– particularly those without a scientific background– I founded Ageless Science (agelessscience.org), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that brings high school students to senior living communities to lead scientific discussions. Together, we unite different generations by developing accessible discussion curriculums on topics ranging from nuclear energy to CRISPR gene editing. Leveraging these experiences, I plan to develop an elementary education curriculum to introduce students of all backgrounds to engineering at a young age. Further, my science blog on the Ageless Science website has led me to discover my enthusiasm for science journalism. I am committed to publishing accessible scientific writing that bridges the gap between STEM and the humanities. These leadership initiatives have sparked my lifelong passion for expanding universal scientific opportunities for students of all ages. Together, we can create a future where age and gender are just numbers and letters– a world in which we are united over our passions rather than divided by our differences.