I’m currently seventeen years old and I live in Lubbock Texas. I’ve lived here my entire life and I’m about to make the drastic move to Waterbury, Connecticut. I recently graduated from Estacado High School with NJHS, AVID, ON-RAMPS, Honors, High Honors, Early College, and Academic Decathlon. In other words, I earned every other cord and stole other than military and ROTC. I believe that I have worked hard during my high school years. This is true since I’ve received a lot of gratification and awards during award assemblies. It’s been a rough past four years, my first few years of high school were horrible. It was similar to those cliche high school movies where someone is constantly picked on. That was me. I am a young african american female who attends an all-white middle school. The demographics of other African Americans didn’t reach 5%. While I was there, I received nothing but racial slurs and monkey noises. I already had the thought that middle school kids wouldn’t be very friendly, but that was quite disturbing to me. On the same hand, I went to an all-black school for my health. While there, I figured that it would have been a lot better and there wouldn’t be a lot of discrimination. However, I was extremely wrong. I was constantly picked on and told that I wouldn’t amount to anything because of being a minority. Again, this is coming from other fourteen, fifteen-year-old kids. My second year of high school is my main motivation for wanting to be in criminal justice. I recall seeing a lot of crime that happened in the back of the school. Such as dealing with marijuana and purchasing vape pens. My criminal justice interest started as wanting to be an undercover officer who did random “shakedowns”. That’s when I started to look into youtube and watch raw footage of body cams and surveillance footage of robberies or other crimes. I watched Code Blue Cam, LivePD, Explore With Us, and COPS. I felt some sort of joy watching people be taken down for their crimes and being arrested. Even though the videos happened years ago, it calmed me down knowing that a drug dealer was taken off the streets. My ultimate goal is to graduate from Post University and transfer over to Harvard long enough to graduate with a doctorate; to further my studies in Criminal Justice. I plan on joining the Federal Bureau of Investigation or the Central Intelligence Agency. I’ve already started learning a few other languages to help enhance my resume when I apply. When I am accepted into the Federal Agency, I honestly plan on doing my best in putting my six years to good use. (word count:453)

As a child, I was always told that people will look down on me for being a “minority”. Minorities include pretty much every ethnicity or race that isn’t your common white person. Another “minority” would be a female. During my childhood and high school years, I experienced a lot of discrimination between my job and school. I’ve been commonly told that I should practically give up on my ideas and dreams because I wouldn’t amount to what I want my career path to be. The movie my mother showed me as a child was, “Hidden Figures.” I recalled feeling disgusted by my skin tone, as well as being a female. I hated watching how the cops treated them at the beginning and the people in their workspace that also treated them like crap. The reason behind watching that, was so my mom could show me that I’ve been sheltered and this is how others treat people with my skin. I didn’t understand it at first, as during that time I was extremely naive and didn’t believe that people had it in their hearts to be so derogatory towards others. I knew from the very beginning of high school that middle school wasn’t the start of how disgusting people could be. Just a few days ago, my mom asked me, “Do you think that there will be more than one female that does what you want to do?” At first, I felt upset and unmotivated to continue down my career path. I know that there are still a few jobs where men tend to look down on women. I know that I will have to work hard and put forth my best effort and motivation into doing what I want to do. It will not be easy, as I will experience a lot of stress and frustration while trying to get on that path. I plan to graduate from Post University in Waterbury, CT, and attend there long enough to graduate with a Bachelor. Once I graduate there, I plan on attending Harvard University for my Doctorate or Masters in Law school. My ultimate goal is to join the Federal Agency. Most people don’t know the city of Lubbock, as it doesn’t come up on the map of the United States. It only shows up on the map of Texas. The only “recognizable” person that we have is Buddy Holly, a white man. He’s the only “famous” person that we have from here. My ambition has been and will continue to strive to make me the PROUD young African American female. Who will cause the crime rates to decline? Giavonni Jackson. (word count: 443)

My first few years of high school have been extremely rough. I’m sure everyone has said that, however I feel as if i’d be a good candidate for this scholarship. For the reason being, I had a father figure who was addicted to drugs, and that tore apart my family. I couldn’t sleep at all, and was constantly staying awake from the arguments that led into the early hours of the nights. 2019-2020 was my freshman year in high school. I attended Estacado High school, and was planning on going to Lubbock High. Estacado High is located in the “east side” of Lubbock Texas and the demographics consist of 90% population of African Americans. My mom transferred me into this school after enduring a lot of racism while at Hutchinson middle school. While I was in school, I experienced a lot of racism even from people of my same skin tone. Or I got bullied because I refused to say the n-slur and didn’t talk in slang. That ontop of my problems at home, only added onto my anxiety and depression. Which turned into two suicide attempts. David ( not his real name), was the main root of this and instead of being comforting, he left. My mother and I lost our home, and we didn’t have a motor vehicle for the longest time. The previous few years, I was a part of the 1% of African Americans at my middle school. That came along with its struggles, such as being called racial slurs and being taunted with monkey noises. I felt alone, constantly. I continued to inform my mom of the racism that I was experiencing during middle school. As you’ve probably figured, I received the: “they’re just jealous of you”. I wasn’t a bad child, and didn’t want people to be jealous of me. I want everyone to know that aside from everything, I've pushed on. I don’t want to dwell on the past, and I haven’t been. I want to be able to have my name in the news, saying that I was the one who brought down the crime population and drug trafficking. I want to push myself to be the best version of myself and be happy. My plan is to graduate from Post University in Waterbury, CT and attend there long enough to graduate with a Doctorate degree or Masters. Afterwards, I plan on joining the Federal Agency and working with the government to assist in trafficking and other crimes that destroy our nation.

I am a young African American female, and I went to an all white school.I went to Hutchinson middle school in lubbock texas, and it was probably the worst experience I’ve had at a school. I remember getting called multiple derogatory and degrading names by the students who were there. There was only two other african american females there, and one more who was a male. i was the type who always was quiet and didn’t do very much in a social standpoint. I remember the kids calling me such words as “oreo” or saying that I would be the next school shooter. I would dread getting out of bed and going to school because I didn’t want to experience that type of bulling and mental abuse that I was enduring at such a young age with people who were my same age. It made learning a lot more difficult since I was always in class full of white students and white teachers, the students would of course always make certain snide remarks. Such as, “why are you here at school? aren’t you supposed to be in the streets as a drug dealer?” That was only in sixth grade, it got worse as we became a lot older. Thankfully, I talked to my mom about these sorts of issues and we were able to get me transferred into a school out of my district. The school that I go to has teachers that aren’t very supportive of my goals in the future. I plan on becoming an astrophysicist, veterinarian or a CIA agent. I have been told multiple times by the teachers here that I should lower the expectations of myself. I don’t know why they told me this, but when I asked them why they keep discouraging me about what I should do, they said that it isn’t likely with a woman of my background to achieve such “unrealistic goals”. I just like every other rebellious teenager plan on proving them wrong. I face things like this every single day, people always talk to me and try to encourage me to change my goals and lower my standards. I personally know that I can do anything that I put my mind to. I remember a quote from Albert Einstein, he wrote multiplication problems on the board. 9 x 1=9…. and so on, until he got to 9 x 10=91. Everyone started to laugh and make fun of him for the mistake, and he said something along the lines of, “I wrote nine problems correct, and one wrong. yet, no one congratulated me on the problems that I got right.” That just proves that even when you are known to be the smartest man on planet earth, people will point out your mistakes. In a sense, this quote made me feel better. I felt a lot better at that time because I would always get embarrassed by people who made fun of me for the smallest of mistakes. It reassured me that people are who they are, and they push others down to make themselves feel better. I’ve overcame this by knowing that there is always going to be someone who’ll find one thing to say that I did wrong, instead of congratulating me for the things that i’ve done right. Since then, i’ve learned how to ignore the things that people say out of hate and narcissism, and continue working on bettering myself, for my own priorities.