I knew I needed to be a journalist when I saw this summer’s presidential debate. What is supposed to help voters educate themselves has become an incoherent reality show. A person should not need deep political knowledge to avoid being misled by those who supposedly protect them. Current political media is so sensationalized that Americans know more about Trump’s love of Pavarotti than his “concepts of a plan”. When I look into the future, I do not feel pessimistic about the people, but the information they are being fed. I want to study journalism and political science to provide people with the information they need to make informed, authentic decisions in what will shape their futures.

I became Senior Class Secretary about a month ago. I knew I had it in the bag from the moment I finished my speech. I had hoped for this since freshman year and it was finally happening. I couldn't have contained my excitement for anything. As I walked off the stage, I thought about what my mother was doing at my age. The stark contrast between our teen years never fails to shock me. These thoughts often come during moments of achievement, reminding me how my life experiences shaped my aspirations. My mother was a star student, a talented cello player with straight A’s. Her journey took a turn when, as a sophomore, she dropped out of high school to support her family. The weight of an entire household fell on her shoulders, and any dreams she had were put on hold. After getting her GED at 18, she faced another soap-opera moment: becoming a teen mother. At 17, I often feel the weight of my mother’s life obstacles. There are dueling pressures that I face: a desire to follow my own dreams and the underlying expectation that I must excel to make up for my mother. This has become especially true in the face of college applications. In many ways, I’m not only striving for my own success; I am carrying my family’s legacy on my shoulders. While I am not a first-generation college student, I will be the first in my family to attend an out-of-state college. This carries both great pride and tremendous pressure. The expectation to succeed is heavy, but it also serves as motivation. I’ve had to confront the complexities of what it means to be the child of a teen mom. In this process, I’ve realized that “breaking the cycle” has a different meaning for me than it might for others. To me, it is not solely financial success or fulfilling expectations; it’s recognizing my own potential and aspirations as well. I have come to a realization: I can believe in my future without an emblem of my family’s past. I want to support my family and rise above our circumstances while also pursuing my own path. I believe this to be “rising above my circumstances” in a way that simply having a well-paid job never could be. I am empowered to make choices based more on my dreams than the well-being of my family, like my mother never could. My experience with teen motherhood at the core of my life perspective. It instilled in me a desire to succeed, but also taught me the importance of self-belief and personal fulfillment. As I approach adulthood, I am committed to a life that honors both my mother's sacrifices and myself. By doing so, I will break the cycle in creating a future defined by passion and purpose.

I spent a lot of my life flitting back and forth between “dream jobs”. From neurosurgeon to art curator, I have considered nearly every career on Earth. A lot of things seemed interesting, but nothing had any lasting power. As my friends discovered their passions, the murkiness of my future felt alienating. Everyone was working toward something and I felt directionless. That is, until I joined newspaper. My first newspaper meeting was at the beginning of my junior year. The editors, two of my friends, were assigning columns to the new members. I volunteered to do op-eds because nobody else was and I wanted to help my friends out. At first, I had no idea what to write. Then I remembered an article I read a few weeks before about Stanford’s “war on fun”.  Reading it, I felt a certain kinship to what Stanford students were feeling. My school's administration had undergone a dramatic transformation in recent years. This included a lot of shifts that made a lot of my peers, myself included, feel lost and frustrated. Inspired by this op-ed, I decided to write about my school’s own war. Shortly after I submitted the piece to my editors and teacher advisor, I got an email from the Dean of Students. She wanted to discuss what I wrote. She told me that the article felt “harmful” and that she hoped I would withdraw it. Initially, I was terrified. I had never been in an administrative office to be reprimanded. The threat of disciplinary action looming over my head almost drove me to pull the story. It did not end with that meeting, though. This op-ed became over a week of vague, wishy-washy emails about whether I would be allowed to print my piece. After yet another meeting of beat-around-the-bush guilt tripping, I became fed up. I felt determined to fight for this op-ed to go to print. It was not as if I was the only one who felt this way, after all. That article was the culmination of countless conversations with my friends. It did not only speak for myself, but for a large part of my community. Our feelings deserved a voice, no matter how unsavory they were to the people in power. I finally found something I could stand behind after 16 years of searching. I am a leader because I will not give up on something I believe in, even in the face of adversity. It took me longer than a lot of my peers to find what drives me, but now that I have I will never let go of it. My desire to give others a voice and willingness to fight for those voices to be heard will never stop.

I spent a lot of my life flitting back and forth between “dream jobs”. From neurosurgeon to art curator, I have considered nearly every career on Earth. A lot of things seemed interesting, but nothing had any lasting power. As my friends discovered their passions, the murkiness of my future felt alienating. Everyone was working toward something and I felt directionless. That is, until I joined newspaper. My first newspaper meeting was at the beginning of my junior year. The editors, two of my friends, were assigning columns to the new members. I volunteered to do op-eds because nobody else was and I wanted to help my friends out. At first, I had no idea what to write. Then I remembered an article I read a few weeks before about Stanford’s “war on fun”.  Reading it, I felt a certain kinship to what Stanford students were feeling. My school's administration had undergone a dramatic transformation in recent years. This included a lot of shifts that made a lot of my peers, myself included, feel lost and frustrated. Inspired by this op-ed, I decided to write about my school’s own war. Shortly after I submitted the piece to my editors and teacher advisor, I got an email from the Dean of Students. She wanted to discuss what I wrote. She told me that the article felt “harmful” and that she hoped I would withdraw it. Initially, I was terrified. I had never been in an administrative office to be reprimanded. The threat of disciplinary action looming over my head almost drove me to pull the story. It did not end with that meeting, though. This op-ed became over a week of vague, wishy-washy emails about whether I would be allowed to print my piece. After yet another meeting of beat-around-the-bush guilt tripping, I became fed up. I felt determined to fight for this op-ed to go to print. It was not as if I was the only one who felt this way, after all. That article was the culmination of countless conversations with my friends. It did not only speak for myself, but for a large part of my community. Our feelings deserved a voice, no matter how unsavory they were to the people in power. I finally found something I could stand behind after 16 years of searching. I am a leader because I will not give up on something I believe in, even in the face of adversity. It took me longer than a lot of my peers to find what drives me, but now that I have I will never let go of it. My desire to give others a voice and willingness to fight for those voices to be heard will never stop.

“Wonderin’ ‘bout whether I think I deserve commercial success / It’s runnin’ through my mind / Sometimes I really think it would be cool to rewind” My favorite song on BRAT is “Rewind”. I think it captures both sides of the album–party tracks and vulnerability–in a way that the rest of the songs do not. True brat girl essence is the ability to embrace both forces, no matter how messy they can be. This song is, in my opinion, the most vulnerable listeners have ever been able to witness Charli XCX. Most of her other vulnerable songs are either vague or reactions to external forces. “Rewind” is purely her reflection on the person she has become. I am at an age where the decisions I make will undoubtedly change my life forever. Sometimes this is exciting, but a lot of the time it feels like an intense amount of pressure. While I am far from famous, it can be difficult to acknowledge the things I have worked hard for and earned, particularly in terms of applying to college. There are a lot of points where I wish that I could take a second and go back to when things were “easier”. “Rewind” is a very cathartic song during those times. Especially because the music is so upbeat, it allows me to feel those emotions without letting it consume me in the way sad-sounding music does. I will forever be shocked at how underrated it is. Justice for “Rewind”!!!

During the Eras Tour, Taylor Swift released The Tortured Poets Department. I am embarrassed to admit it, but I hated it my first listen. Like the majority of Swifties in this time period (or the majority of people all the time), anything reminiscent of Matty Healy makes my skin burn; so naturally I came into the listen with a preconceived bad taste in my mouth. Then, “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” came on and I was hooked. Junior year was a huge transitional period in my life. My sister had been in and out of the hospital for the past year. I had just started eating disorder recovery. Peers talking about college plans made me even more aware of the small-fish feeling that being a low-income student amongst Tesla owners brings. It felt like there was no escape. Nowhere I went was safe from the tornado that my life had become. School was just a series of tests–literal and figurative–that I had to pass. No matter how broken I felt, I wanted to make the shattered pieces into something worthwhile. I just did not know how. Never fear, though, I am a real tough kid who learned she could handle it. At the same time, I was an running two clubs, taking 3 AP classes (and won an AP Scholar award from them 😉), and writing an op-ed column of the school newspaper that made me school-famous. “They said ‘Babe, you gotta fake it til you make it.’ AND I DID.” Finding the strength within myself to work hard and persevere through these life-changing things did not come easy, but I did it. Whenever I feel myself go back to that dark place, like the pieces of me are shattered while the crowd is chanting more, I put on this song. It has taught me some incredible things. Bad things are inevitable, but they do not have to destroy me. My life is so much bigger and has so much more potential than the things I cannot control. There are still days that I feel like I am faking it and unworthy, but then I remind myself that I will make it one day. If Taylor Swift has taught me anything, it is that I can handle anything. If she can spend over a year touring after an intense breakup, I can do this. This song is proof.

“And I bought all the clothes that they told me to buy / I chased some dumb ideal my whole fucking life / And none of it matters, and none of it ends / You just feel like shit over and over again / No, it’ll never change” I used to be afraid to go outside. I spent hours looking in the mirror writing a list of everything someone could judge me for. Yes, an actual, physical, paper list. I put it on my bedside table to remind myself of all my faults and “keep myself in check”. Every morning, I woke up and decided which thing I would focus on that day. Sometimes it was my personality–having been called too talkative for as long as I can remember–but it was more often than not my body. I got my first “boyfriend” when I was 13 years old. He was both skinnier and shorter than me, so naturally I was mortified (exaggerating, kind of). The scrutiny I was putting my body under got more and more intense, culminating in me developing an eating disorder. I had never been called pretty on the scale that I was when I was starving. The compliments I was getting kept me going, but I was floating further away from myself. Isolation turned me into a shell of who I was. I was, for the first time in my life, “pretty”. That was enough for me for a long time. Reaching this standard is the precipice of success for so many teenagers; and I was there. I joined the Body Project chapter at my school in freshman year. At first, it was just because my best friend was in it. By the end of the year, though, I was running for club president. What started as a platonic obligation became so much more. Through this club, I was able to find a community of people who were going through the same thing as me and, whether they knew it or not, actively pushed me into recovery. Body Project became a sanctuary and I wanted to help it reach its full potential. I became president to give back to this club that has given me so much. I am still afraid to go outside sometimes, but what else can I do besides doing it anyways? I could get plastic surgery or keep starving myself or whatever new trend is supposed to make me prettier but there will always be something societally “wrong” with me. I think this realization is a key part of the teenage experience. Unfortunately, it is not one that we are encouraged to have. I do not know if I would be at this point if not for the community I have found and built for myself. So many teenagers spend day after day picking themselves apart; and it breaks my heart to think about how many of us are experiencing the exact same insecurities. Going into adulthood, I know I want to continue being a part of the shift in conversation, hopefully on a larger scale.

“I could build a castle out of all the bricks they threw at me.” 2023 was the year of the brick. Last year brought the frequent hospitalizations of my younger sister, the crumbling of my years-old friend group, and the peak of an eating disorder. Basically, my life completely fell apart. I was lost and had no idea where to begin rebuilding everything that had been destroyed. When 2024 started I knew I had to start making changes or I would not make it through the coming year. This was initially very hard because it forced me to acknowledge how much my life had shifted from the year before. Every single relationship in my life was completely different than it had been. Embracing this change meant that I was able to focus on what I want my life to be rather than what it was. I made new friends and tried things I had never considered before, like cooking. In the midst of eating disorder recovery, cooking felt incredibly scary. Up to this point, the only way I was able to eat three meals a day was by not knowing what was in them, which was already scary in and of itself. Now, I was confronted with a whole new challenge: knowing exactly what was in my food and making it anyway. This was not something I had to face alone, though. From my therapist to my best friends, I have a warm support system that helped my brick castles stand tall. I heard 1989 for the first time almost 10 years ago. At first, “New Romantics” was a throwaway song for me. It was fun when it came on but I never felt the urge to listen to it. As I got older and life got more complicated, though, I find myself yearning for the freedom of spirit that this song embodies. When I hear this song, I think of dancing at prom this year with my best friends and running through the grass as fireworks went off on the 4th of July. My life is far from perfect, but the “New Romantics” moments are what keep me grounded. For me, this song is not just a representation of my current life but also what I want my life to be. 17 is a very intense age. Straddling the line between being a teenager and an adult is a lot of pressure; and I have spent much of 2024 figuring out the kind of life I want to build for myself. While I know that it is important to take things seriously, I do not want the chapters of my life to be defined by the hardships I faced as they have in the past. Excitement and joy will be the center of my universe no matter what I am facing.

Growing up with a single dad who had not yet graduated college meant that much of his time was spent working. As a consequence, much of my time as a kid was spent either in the care of other relatives or on my own. A childhood of constant flitting between houses and often having to fend for myself led to me very quickly learning how to get along on my own. This taught me discipline, accountability, and responsibility. These traits have proven to be incredibly valuable both personally and academically. When things have gotten tough at home, or just in life as a whole, I have been able to maintain consistency in my work and how I take care of myself. Academically, “fending for myself” often meant not getting help from people at home and not knowing how to ask for help from my teachers. While I did not usually need help in elementary school, my struggle asking for help became a challenge once I moved from low-income public school to a highly-ranked charter school. It took me many years and more than a few bad test scores to understand that I did not have a choice in asking for help. This transition was extremely difficult at first, but it was the most important transformation I have ever undergone. It also transformed my personal life in that I became more open to asking for emotional support in times of need. In college, I want to study journalism and public policy. My ultimate career goal is to report on political changes and how they affect low-income communities. As someone who grew up poor, I have firsthand experience with a lot of these effects and want to be part of educating those without this experience. Ideally, this job would allow me to travel and gain a sense of independence in a newer, more joyful way. I plan on being the first person in my family to move out of state for college, which has been a very convoluted process so far. As a low-income student with very few family members who have gone to college, there is a lot I have had to figure out on my own. As well as helping to make this change a bit easier, this scholarship will help me make a life for myself through the skills I’ve learned in the past 17 years while also being able to give something back to the people in my current life.