Being Hispanic, the cultural emphasis placed on family means family has always been a driving force in my life. I’ve always felt their support and am eternally grateful that I’ve always had immediate relationships with my extended family. Being a middle child of 5, I never really felt alone in anything I did, especially with my twin sisters only being a year younger than me. This greatly shaped my individual personality, giving me the confidence to be more independent knowing I always had people in my corner. While it was never felt, I often was alone with new experiences; whether it be from non-academic activities like playing softball to school centered encounters like joining ASB and Puente. I had to be more outgoing and sure of myself in order to make the most of the activities I wanted to be involved with since community and school involvement was a great value of mine and something that differed in my older sibling’s academic paths. Both needing to follow great footsteps of my older siblings and trying to walk a model path for my younger sisters affected my struggle with identity. However, settling into roles rather than labels, especially in my family structure, has allowed for a greater sense of self that I know will help ensure success in all spheres of my future. I have done numerous things with clubs and programs including food drives, making care packages for shelters and gathering student feedback and amplifying their voices. However, the most rewarding project I’ve had the opportunity to work on is a redistricting effort with the Orange County Community Congregation Organization. With this, I was trained about what redistricting is and how it affects how communities focus on and address issues. After my own enlightenment, I worked as a door to door canvasser, educating and holding meaningful conversations with constituents who were passionate about their own personal experiences and concerns, ranging from graffiti and litter to investment in education and raising housing costs. It also focused on really being able to communicate and acknowledge all feedback received, which is why all canvassers were required to be bilingual in English and Spanish. This type of grassroots work is really only forged by working directly with people and what each individual has to offer in terms of experience and in terms of voice. By being able to directly hear the issues from the community itself, we were able to then take that information and allow for tangible change in the next steps of the initiative, which was relaying data and concerns to community leaders and council members. The importance of being able to share concerns over issues in a community cannot be understated because it allows for a sense of unity across neighborhoods and neighbors alike, fostering a stronger desire for involvement and individual participation, essentially what a community is built on. In the future, I hope to be able to do the similar work of community mobilization, more centered on education. Equality within education is something very important to me and near to my heart as my mother, as well as many relatives, works as a teacher. This really shaped how I viewed my education, both as a child and now. With my future study in neuroscience, I hope to be able to address how differences in cognitive abilities and neurodivergence in education are often disregarded, only effectively serving a percentage of students, especially children. While a broad goal, I hope to achieve perception changes at the community level through research in order to continue to educate and raise community voices.