The Last Black Man San Francisco is not only one of the most eloquently, profoundly told stories about gentrification in America, but it also contains images, sounds, and feelings that stick with the viewer for the rest of their lives—and that is why it is my favorite film. Just mentioning the title, I am immediately brought back to scenes of Jimmie Fails skateboarding down the bright, steep hills of San Francisco with Mont behind him, curiously staring into the passing space as if he’s looking for inspiration for his next play. The film is a love story, but in the most unconventional sense: it’s a love story between Jimmie and his family home, and more largely a love story between a people and their imperfect but beautiful city, from which they are now being heartlessly rejected. I love the way Jimmie interacts with a home he no longer owns, and the way the film’s director interacts with San Francisco. These relationships between people and their homes are complicated (one of my favorite quotes is when Jimmie talks about San Francisco to some strangers on the bus and says: “You can’t hate until you love it”), but it’s loving, it’s real, and at times it’s desperate. This film paints the struggle and the personality of the victims of gentrification, and, to me, it’s also one of the most poignant love stories I have ever witnessed on the screen. The Last Black Man in San Francisco masterfully connects America’s urban socioeconomic issues and Jimmie’s emotional story with his family, his home, and the residents of a new San Francisco. The viewer walks away from this film with a greater understanding of what it means to lose a home, and perhaps what it means to truly find one.

"Sciences provide an understanding of a universal experience, Arts are a universal understanding of a personal experience... they are both a part of us and a manifestation of the same thing." When I heard this quote from Mae Jemison for the first time, I thought no words had ever resonated within me more. Jemison is an absolute inspiration in countless ways; the first black woman to travel into space, she nurtured and fought for her passions without fear of boundaries or failure. She not only represents the greatest determination and intellect when it comes to pursuing a STEM career, but she proves that a love for the arts is crucial for a successful engineer and, beyond that, a developing humanity.

When a professor asked me what the leading source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States is, I was surprised to realize I had no clue. "Transportation?" I guessed. He told me I was wrong, as I suspected, but the right answer shocked me. In the United States, electricity production is the leading cause of growing greenhouse gas emissions. Moreover, about two thirds of the nation's electricity comes from burning fossil fuels, like coal and natural gas—meanwhile, renewable energy only represents about 15 percent of electricity production. The moment I heard that was an essential moment of realization for me. Our energy problem is the aspect of climate change that interests me most, and it's a part of the crisis that I believe is one of the most solvable. We scientifically know that moving towards renewable energy is a big step in moving towards a healthier climate, so it should be with the greatest urgency and determination that we act on becoming a society that lives on clean energy. The overarching solution to this problem is generally simple and widely known: we need to get off of fossil fuels and other nonrenewable energy sources as soon and as completely as possible, and we need to move to clean and sustainable energy sources. Despite this being regarded as a truth not just in the scientific community but in the general public, there hasn't been enough practical action to accomplish it. In my future, I hope to push these necessary actions. There are so many ways of getting renewable, clean energy that excite me, including ways of combining the collection of solar, wind, and/or hydropower in single systems. I would love to work with engineers and policy officials to create the standards for renewable energy systems that can be implemented on a large scale in my area, my country and beyond. Right now, my focus is on the learning portion of this journey. As an undergraduate student at Brown University, I am just beginning my educational and professional path to working on what I am passionate about. However, just because I'm occupied in the classroom doesn't mean I can't act practically on a smaller scale for advancing renewable energy now. I am currently working with a group of peers to install solar-powered phone and laptop chargers through my college campus. We are deep in the planning stages now, and hope to provide this easily accessible form of renewable energy to the student body in the near future. I am also looking forward to doing research projects with my professors, hopefully looking deeper into the energy crisis and its part in our climate crisis. As I charge forward in my educational and professional career, I can't wait to see how I can help push the solutions to climate change in action.