In my life I have had many different educational experiences. I started school in Minnesota, attending up until fourth grade. In fourth grade my family moved to Las Vegas, Nevada. In sixth grade, I began the school year online. I did not have a lot of friends in person and am very introverted; I just wanted to stay home. However, my parents enrolled me late, causing me to start the year with 30 missing assignments. Turns out, online school was not for me. Throughout that first semester I stopped doing my schoolwork. I had fallen into depression, and my mom did not supervise me. In December of that year my online school unenrolled me due to the lack of activity. Starting in the spring semester of that school year, I started attending my local middle school. Then COVID-19 happened. That school year had the biggest impact on my educational journey as a whole. I had started depressed because of online school, and then I was forced to do online school only two and a half months after I switched to in-person. My whole sixth grade year I practically did nothing. I felt terrible about myself. But then, once I started seventh grade online, I was a changed person. Throughout elementary school I was often absent or tardy. Once I hit seventh grade I attended every single Google Meet. I did almost every assignment early. I became obsessed with getting straight As. I had perfect attendance and straight As that year. Same with my eighth grade year. In my ninth grade year, I continued this pattern. In tenth grade, I had straight As, one absent day, and one tardy. In eleventh grade I was back to perfect attendance and straight As. And now, in my senior year of high school, I had straight As and two absent days. Getting removed from online school in sixth grade, with COVID happening directly after, set me on the straight and narrow. Now, I have been accepted into Pennsylvania State University. I am pursuing a bachelor’s in forensic science. This will allow me to achieve my overall life goal of becoming a forensic analyst, specifically a latent fingerprint analyst. I am going to do this in order to hopefully get a federal forensics job. However, to attend my dream school of Penn State, I need financial assistance. Currently, my dad is making too much money for me to get a large amount of financial aid federally or from PSU. But, given that we are a one income household, and I have two younger siblings my parents need to care for, I need scholarships to make my education plans pan out. This scholarship represents something important to me: pursuing education. I see many of my peers give up on further education. But I am of the belief that knowledge is power, and to do that I want to learn more at an amazing institution for forensic science. This scholarship will help me achieve my goal.