Anxiety isn’t always loud. Sometimes, it’s silent—buried in small moments that most people wouldn’t notice. It’s rereading a text ten times before hitting send. It’s sitting in class while your mind spirals over something you said last week. It’s getting a 94 on a test and wondering if you’re falling behind. My experience with anxiety has been like that: quiet but constant, always humming in the background, no matter how well things seemed to be going on the outside. For a long time, I thought I was just a perfectionist. I thought overthinking everything, losing sleep over assignments, and panicking over small mistakes was just me being “hardworking.” But over time, it became clear that this wasn’t healthy. I started noticing how much time I lost to self-doubt, how often I avoided opportunities because I was scared I’d mess up, and how much of my self-worth was tied to things I couldn’t always control—grades, accomplishments, other people’s approval. Even when I succeeded, anxiety would twist it into something negative. “You got lucky,” it would whisper. “You’re not actually smart. They’re going to find out.” One of the hardest moments was after the PSAT. I had studied for months—over 160 hours—and convinced myself that this was my ticket out. My family can only afford two years of dorms at ASU, and I thought a National Merit Scholarship would change everything. When I fell short, it shattered me. It felt like all that work, all those late nights, meant nothing. I spiraled into panic attacks and questioned everything I believed about myself. For a while, I lost my fight. I started thinking that maybe I really wasn’t good enough. But slowly, I came back. I aced a brutal calculus test I had been terrified of. I started studying again, not to prove anything to anyone else, but to remind myself of what I could do. I opened up to my friends about my mental health. I started therapy. I began healing. Anxiety didn’t magically disappear, but I stopped letting it control every decision I made. I realized that failing one test, one goal, or even one dream doesn’t make me a failure. It just makes me human. College, to me, is more than a degree. It’s freedom. It’s possibility. It’s a chance to leave survival mode behind and build a life where I can thrive. I want to be the first in my family to graduate not just for the pride, but because it would open doors I’ve never had access to. I want to study biological sciences, maybe work in neuropsychology or healthcare, and one day support people who are going through the same battles I’ve faced. I know college won’t fix everything. But it’s a step toward stability, toward independence, and toward becoming someone who lives boldly, not fearfully. My anxiety has shaped me, but it hasn’t broken me. It’s taught me how to fight for myself—even when no one else believed I could. And I’ll keep fighting, all the way to my degree.

My grandpa and I used to play this game when I was little. It was like hide and seek, except with our own special twist on it. He would call out my name, and every time I heard it, I had to hide in a new spot. When he found me, I would start running away, laughing as my little feet carried me away to the heavens. At that moment, it would just be me and my grandpa. We were going to last forever. That is until his Alzheimer's diagnosis came. He had become forgetful and often became confused. The news hurt me, but when he saw my stricken face, he promised me that nothing was going to change between us. It would still be me and him against the world. As time went on, his condition worsened. He soon forgot the names of his old college friends and distant relatives. He forgot how to play our game. "It's okay, Ong Ngoai," I said, "We can invent a new game!" I still went on, pretending that everything was okay, but it was not until he forgot who I was that I finally broke. We had to move him into a special kind of nursing center 30 miles away from his home in Saigon. His forgetfulness became more than just forgetting names and faces. He would struggle to perform his daily activities, needing help putting his shoes on or forgetting how to feed himself. The care that he needed was not available anywhere near us, and we had to send him to a facility where they could take care of him. We visit him every other weekend, and it takes everyone's combined efforts to keep their smiles on. We cannot cry. Not now. Not while Ong Ngoai is in his fragile state. Every time I saw him, my heart broke into another piece. My hurt was mixed with confusion as I did not understand why my grandpa would not get any better. I soon found out that there was no clear-cut cure for Alzheimer's. However, each tear I shed slowly began to transform into something new: ambition. My grandpa became my drive for wanting to pursue a career in the medical field. I aspire to become a neurologist in order to progress toward a cure for neural diseases such as the one that ails my grandfather. With this goal in mind, I have taken a variety of STEM classes in high school, working my hardest to understand each concept and its fundamental nuances. I have become the president of the HOSA chapter of my school, an organization encouraging students to pursue a healthcare career, and I have even competed at the international level for behavioral health. Additionally, I intend to major in biochemistry and neuroscience in my undergraduate years and pursue an education in medical school to achieve my career goal. My dream is to help as many people as possible through the development of neurological cures. Each stride I take is made with my grandpa in mind. While my Ong Ngoai may not be able to recognize me any longer, our society's future holds endless possibilities for the advancement of Alzheimer's and other neurological diseases. Through my hard work and ambition, I can create change for the betterment of our society by pursuing a career in the medical field. I thirst for a future where all grandparents can hold on to every memory and live each day knowing they are surrounded by love.

While some may believe that leaders are born rather than made, I thoroughly disagree with this perspective. Leaders rise through their ambition for what they are passionate about. And for me, that would be HOSA. During my freshman year of high school, I joined a club called HOSA (Health Occupations for Students of America) at my biology teacher’s encouragement. I would never have imagined that this club I joined on a whim would become crucial to my life. By the end of my sophomore year in HOSA, I grew to love this organization and all I wanted was to share this love with others. I had won first in my competitive event at the state competition and had the opportunity to travel to Texas for the international leadership conference. There, I got to meet other students who shared the same passions as me. They cared deeply about the club and inspired me to make a change. When I left the conference that summer, I knew I had to elevate my school’s chapter of HOSA. The HOSA chapter at my school was historically inadequate due to poor leadership and no one caring enough to make a change. The officers in the club tended to take on these positions for the sake of having a leadership position to put on college applications rather than because they had a sincere passion for the club. Interest was low and the few members that we did have were uninvolved. Our numbers were dwindling, and I feared that we were going to be shut down as a club due to a lack of interest. Even in my 2 years of doing HOSA, I knew that I loved it too much to let its potential die. Going into my junior year, I went straight to my advisor with a list of plans for the new HOSA school year. I had big dreams and changes that I wanted to see come true. Even though I was only the Vice President at that time, I exercised my leadership as much as I possibly could. I networked with other officers at the conferences to set up partnerships between schools and learned strategies to make HOSA better. I developed the ability to talk in front of large crowds of students and connect with them through my words. I took the initiative to email underclassmen science teachers to ask if I could speak to their class about HOSA. I learned how to take control of a poor situation and work at it until it was built to my ideals. I had taken my school’s chapter of HOSA from barely surpassing to a highly-awarded program that has generated schoolwide interest. Now, as the current president of the club, we have over 70 members- more members than we have had over the past 3 years combined. In my experience with HOSA, I have learned that being a leader means taking the initiative to change a situation that most had given up on. While my school’s chapter of HOSA had been insufficient since its inception, I wanted to do everything in my power to change it into a club where students can share the same passion as me. And through my efforts, I have been able to watch my club thrive.

My name is Emily Do. I am 17 years old, a senior in high school, and overall, a broke teenager. In the entirety of high school, I have taken almost all exclusively honors and AP courses, landed 5s on all my AP tests, am in the top 1% of my class, and uphold a 4.0. However, I will not have enough money to pay for my tuition at Arizona State University, the local college. When I was 13, my grandpa was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. While he was an extremely healthy man for his age, going out to the tennis courts every morning and having a good diet, even he could not prevent this illness. Watching his memory deteriorate has been heartbreaking. I have seen him slowly forget each piece of his life. He wakes up in confusion, his eyes wandering, desperate to find something familiar to cling to. While there has been research for the past decades on this condition, a cure is yet to be found. I aspire to become a neurologist in order to progress toward a cure for neural diseases such as the one that ails my grandfather. With this goal in mind, I have taken a variety of STEM classes in high school, working my hardest to understand each concept and its fundamental nuances. I have become the president of the HOSA chapter of my school, an organization encouraging students who thirst for discoveries to pursue healthcare careers, and I have even competed at the international level for behavioral health. Additionally, I intend to major in biochemistry and neuroscience in my undergraduate years and pursue an education in medical school to achieve my career goal. While my hopes and ambitions remain high, so does the cost of attending school. With this scholarship money, I would become one step closer to my dream- developing neurological cures, each stride with my grandpa in mind. While my Ong Ngoai may not be able to recognize me any longer, our society's future holds endless possibilities for the advancement of Alzheimer's and other neurological diseases. Through my hard work and ambition, I can create mountains of change through research into a cure for Alzheimer’s disease. I thirst for a future where all grandparents can hold on to every memory and live each day knowing they are surrounded by love and hope to bring the rest of society with me on this journey to a cure.

My grandpa and I used to play this game when I was little. It was like hide and seek, except with our own special twist on it. He would call out my name, and every time I heard it, I had to hide in a new spot. When he found me, I would start running away, laughing as my little feet carried me away to the heavens. At that moment, it would just be me and my grandpa. We were going to last forever. That is until his Alzheimer's diagnosis came. He had become forgetful and often became confused. The news hurt me, but when he saw my stricken face, he promised me that nothing was going to change between us. It would still be me and him against the world. As time went on, his condition worsened. He soon forgot the names of his old college friends and distant relatives. He forgot how to play our game. "It's okay, Ong Ngoai," I said, "We can invent a new game!" I still went on, pretending that everything was okay, but it was not until he forgot who I was that I finally broke. We had to move him into a special kind of nursing center 30 miles away from his home in Saigon. The care that he needed was not available anywhere near us, and we had to send him to a facility where they could take care of him. His forgetfulness became more than just forgetting names and faces. He would struggle to perform his daily activities, needing help putting his shoes on or forgetting how to feed himself. We visit him every other weekend, and it takes everyone's combined efforts to keep their smiles on. We cannot cry. Not now. Not while Ong Ngoai is in his fragile state. Every time I saw him, my heart broke into another piece. My hurt was mixed with confusion as I did not understand why my grandpa would not get any better. I soon found out that there was no clear-cut cure for Alzheimer's. However, each tear I shed slowly transformed into something new: ambition. My grandpa became my drive to pursue a career in the medical field. I intend to become a neurologist in order to progress toward a cure for neural diseases such as the one that ails my grandfather. With this goal in mind, I have taken a variety of STEM classes in high school, working my hardest to understand each concept and its fundamental nuances. I have become the president of the HOSA chapter of my school, an organization encouraging students to pursue a healthcare career, and I have even competed at the international level for behavioral health. Additionally, I intend to major in biochemistry and neuroscience in my undergraduate years and pursue an education in medical school to achieve my career goal. My dream is to help as many people as possible through the development of neurological cures. Each stride I take is made with my grandpa in mind. While my Ong Ngoai may not be able to recognize me any longer, our society's future holds endless possibilities for the advancement of Alzheimer's and other neurological diseases. Through my hard work and ambition, I can create change for the betterment of our society by pursuing a career in the medical field. I aspire for a future where all grandparents can hold on to every memory and live each day knowing they are surrounded by love.

In my household, STEM counts as another member of the family. It is my parents' third child, essentially deserving a spot at our dinner table with all the love we pour into it. My parents grew up in a life of poverty, as the collateral damage of their nation's civil war. They had learned from a young age to appreciate small wonders and quickly fell in love with STEM. They met, had my brother and me, and passed their love of science and mathematics onto us. While every other nine-year-old was running around playgrounds and making mud pies, I was sitting in the kitchen coming up with my own mathematical theorems. The thing about these strange shapes is that they are constant. Though they may be intangible concepts to the rest of the world, they remain solid underneath my fingertips. What I liked specifically about numbers is how they can never lie to you. Words can jumble into themselves and stories can have multiple meanings, but there is always one direct answer to every math problem. Life is so difficult in and of itself, so my nine-year-old self gawked at the attraction of always being able to find the right answer. Since then, mathematics and sciences have piqued my interest. STEM always had a logical flow. Solving problems felt like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. While it may be frustrating at times to get the right pieces together, slowly, and with patience, it all comes together into one intricate masterpiece. While I reveled in the security of consistently finding answers to the problems in my textbook, I soon realized that not all things in life can be explained with a bit of pencilwork. My grandfather's Alzheimer's diagnosis is one of them. While he was an extremely healthy man for his age, going out to the tennis courts every morning and having a good diet, even he could not prevent this illness. Watching his memory deteriorate has been heartbreaking. I have seen him slowly forget each piece of his life. He wakes up in confusion, his eyes wandering, desperate to find something familiar to cling to. While there has been research for the past decades on this condition, a cure is yet to be found. All these answers over calculators and theorems concocted, yet whenever I ask why my grandpa cannot remember me, I am met with unknowing eyes and unsure promises. I aspire to become a neurologist in order to progress toward a cure for neural diseases such as the one that ails my grandfather. With this goal in mind, I have taken a variety of STEM classes in high school, working my hardest to understand each concept and its fundamental nuances. I have become the president of the HOSA chapter of my school, an organization encouraging students to pursue a healthcare career, and I have even competed at the international level for behavioral health. Additionally, I intend to major in biochemistry and neuroscience in my undergrad years and pursue an education in medical school to achieve my career goal. My dream is to continue this path of science, inspire others to join me on this journey, and ultimately help as many people as I possibly can through the development of future neurological cures. While my Ong Ngoai may not be able to recognize me any longer, our society's future holds endless possibilities for the advancement of Alzheimer's and other neurological diseases. I aspire to contribute to a future where all grandparents can hold on to every memory and live each day knowing they are surrounded by love.