If you could have a superpower, what would it be and why? I have always wanted to travel back in time and relive certain parts of my life, not necessarily to redo anything, but to just live through those memories again. However, going back in time is unrealistic--or is it? Minecraft has an innate ability to send the player back in time simply by playing the game. That is my favorite part about Minecraft: When I play, it feels like I am seven years old in my childhood home playing Minecraft again for the first time. As I scroll through worlds that are years old and go untouched, every memory comes back to me. Memories of seeing how many dogs I could tame to put in my oak wood square house, playing the tutorial world to learn how to craft and build, and being genuinely horrified by the mobs that haunted the nights. The phrase "Time flies when you're having fun" started to make sense to me once I played Minecraft. I would spend hours staring up at my TV chasing the sheep to make my new bed before nightfall, and then next thing I knew hours had passed and I too needed to go to bed. Minecraft absorbed my childhood, shaping many of my memories. Memories of collecting as many mini figure blind boxes as I could, trying to cross-console join games, and playing Minecraft song parodies as I learned how to build inefficient staircases to the second floor of my gravel and oak homes. People will argue that time travel is a figment of the imagination and that society will never be able to reach that level of technology--that it is impossible. Anyone who thinks time travel is unrealistic has obviously never played Minecraft.

There is no shortage of information we can learn from the brain and each other. That is why I have decided to pursue an education to double major in psychology and neuroscience and take that into a research career. To kickstart my learning progress, I am attending Concordia College - Moorhead in the 2025 fall semester. I have been interested in psychology for as long as I can remember because, for my whole life, I have been affected by mental illness in some way. My mother was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder in the early 2000s and my father was diagnosed with General Anxiety Disorder when he was a teenager. Having mental illness run on both sides of my family, affecting my aunts, uncles, and grandparents too, there was no surprise when I was diagnosed with depression and anxiety at 12 years old. Having many personal connections and experiences with mental health, I decided to nose-dive into psychology. During my junior year of high school, I wanted to get a head start so I took College In Schools psychology through the University of Minnesota. This helped solidify my ever-growing love for studying the brain. The reason I want to get into research is because I want to find new ways for people to better understand one another and to learn more about the uniqueness of each brain.