While shadowing an attorney at the LA Superior Court’s Office of Diversion and Reentry, I watched a judge repeatedly attempt to reroute defendants struggling with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and severe addiction into diversion programs. Seeing individuals cycle through failed treatment attempts made me realize that "loss" in the mental health field isn't always sudden; often, it is a slow, systemic erosion. We are losing people to a cycle of institutional failure, housing instability, and untreated trauma long before they become a statistic. This profound sense of loss—witnessing communities lose their youth to the school-to-prison pipeline and families lose their loved ones to preventable crises—is what inspired me to enter the mental health field. Rather than focusing solely on the morality of these programs, I began to view mental health advocacy as a crucial management and structural challenge. I realized that our current systems often force a choice between institutional efficiency and actual, human support. Witnessing these gaps shaped my career aspirations: I do not just want to treat psychological struggles downstream; I want to design, manage, and scale the early intervention systems that prevent the loss of life and human potential in the first place. To bridge my passion for human behavior with strategic decision-making, I plan to focus my academic career on studying the root factors of externalizing behaviors, substance use, and criminality across diverse populations. Understanding the underlying genetics and environments behind disinhibition will allow me to help design data-driven pilot programs. My goal is to take a multi-dimensional approach to behavioral challenges, translating psychological insights into actionable, large-scale public systems. This systemic approach is exactly how I believe I can make a meaningful difference in suicide prevention. True prevention requires looking closely at educational institutions and catching the warning signs early. Many vulnerable youth go their entire lives without the resources to identify learning or behavioral challenges, only receiving attention after a cycle of disciplinary punishment or self-harm. I hope to work directly with school districts to re-engineer public schools' referral frameworks and enhance teacher training. By designing universal, proactive checks in schools, we can identify children who may not have the language or authority to ask for help, intercepting both the school-to-prison pipeline and the onset of suicidal ideation. Addressing mental health disparities and suicide prevention requires us to integrate clinical insight with institutional responsibility. Moving forward, I want to go beyond standard models of accountability and measure success through holistic, human outcomes. Ultimately, my aspiration is to design and manage sustainable systems that deliver individualized psychological care—balancing fairness, efficiency, and access to ensure that the most vulnerable communities are never left behind.

While shadowing an attorney at the LA Superior Court’s Office of Diversion and Reentry during my junior year, I felt anxiety while watching a judge repeatedly reroute defendants with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and addiction into diversion programs despite failed treatment attempts. Rather than focus on the morality of these programs, I began to question how the judicial system decides the allocation of psychological support, the conditions of the treatment, and the duration of the treatment. This led me to check our current systems more broadly: What is required to create well-managed diversion, education, and mental health systems that are ethical, scalable, and resistant to misuse? Observing countless cases that involved varying mental health needs revealed that the option to steer someone away from the criminal justice system was deeply institutional. Judges weighed a defendant's compliance history within the programs and whether they had a record of convictions alongside limited treatment spots—even before considering someone’s psychological background. The institutional constraints forced systems to sacrifice either its own efficiency or support for the receiver—based on cost efficiency in interventions—and how those choices shape the success rate of the help-seeking individual. I began to see diversion not as a moral gesture but as a management challenge: how institutions balance risk, structural inequalities, and efficiency under constraint. Through a psychology degree, I will translate my understanding of disinhibition into effective support systems for crime and mental illness that will go beyond accountability. Driven by the belief that individualized and targeted psychological support will best support struggling communities, this degree will help me implement interventions to transform lives. Because not all individuals have the same health and biology, systems should be designed based on one’s environment, age, sex, and experiences. Through management training, I would measure outcomes beyond recidivism and design pilot programs with psychological data. The integration of behavioral sciences and management in my studies will shift my perspective to tackle systemic issues, first within the court system. Then, exploring my curiosities in specific courses, I will be able to take a multi-dimensional approach to understanding behavioral problems that could translate into violence and crimes. I would work with school districts to begin working with children for whom intervention is most effective. Studying genetics and externalizing behaviors will allow me to research and design checks in schools to reduce the escalation of behavioral challenges, which, in turn, can intercept the school-to-prison pipeline. Additionally, I will be able to apply these early intervention models to educational institutions, creating an identification of learning and behavior needs for children who may not have the authority to ask for help. Some students can go their entire lives without the support or resources to identify specific behavior challenges, with most only finding out after a cycle of disciplinary punishment. I hope to explore how public schools’ referral framework and teacher training can expand access to psychological care. Though difficult, reevaluating and reflecting on our current judicial system is necessary, as demonstrated by systemic mental health disparities. My degree uniquely affords me the opportunities to integrate psychological insight with strategic decision-making to address complex moral and institutional challenges. In the future, I hope to design and manage systems delivering individualized psychological care while balancing fairness, accountability, and access for communities that might be left behind.