For much of my life, I believed that if I could still get good grades, fulfill my responsibilities, and accomplish my goals, then I must be fine. From the outside, I looked successful. I immersed myself in academics, music, leadership, and service. I was constantly busy, constantly striving for the next achievement. I thought ambition was driving me. In reality, anxiety often was. While others saw discipline, I experienced something entirely different. Every task felt less like walking down a path and more like wading through a swamp. Anxiety insisted that everything was urgent and that I could never afford to slow down. Depression whispered the opposite—that nothing really mattered. I lived between those extremes, propelled forward by fear while weighed down by exhaustion. Accomplishments brought relief, but rarely joy. Whatever satisfaction I felt quickly faded, and the cycle began again. Because I could still function, I spent years convincing myself that I wasn't struggling enough to deserve help. I thought mental illness had to look dramatic and debilitating. I didn't realize it could look like waking up exhausted no matter how much I slept, feeling detached from my own life, or constantly needing noise and distractions because silence meant being alone with thoughts I didn't know how to quiet. I thought it was normal to wish that everything would simply stop, even if that meant death, Looking back, I realize how profoundly anxiety and depression shaped my relationships. I hid behind the image of being capable and fine, finding it easier to appear strong than to be vulnerable. I tied my worth to productivity and achievement, believing that if I accomplished enough, I would finally feel secure—that the next award, acceptance, or milestone would be the thing that made me happy. Instead, each success simply raised the bar higher, and I was stuck chasing a finish line that kept moving. Seeking professional help forced me to confront a belief I had carried for years: that struggling was something to overcome privately. Admitting that I needed support felt like admitting failure. Instead, I discovered that vulnerability and strength are not opposites. Healing is not a destination reached through perfect habits or enough accomplishments. It is an ongoing process that requires honesty, self-compassion, and the willingness to accept help. These experiences have transformed the way I understand others and myself. They have taught me that people deserve empathy long before they reach a breaking point and that suffering does not have to be visible to be real. Most importantly, they have taught me that being human does not require earning the right to struggle or the right to be helped. Today, those lessons shape both my relationships and my aspirations. I hope to pursue a career in healthcare research, but beyond developing treatments, I want to help create a world where people are met with understanding rather than shame. Because sometimes the people who appear to be doing everything right are the ones quietly carrying the heaviest burdens.

As an ESL interventionist, I worked with elementary school students who were learning English. Every week, I sat with students as they sounded out unfamiliar words, practiced reading passages, and worked through assignments. One student I tutored rarely spoke. Even when she knew the answer, she would lower her voice or stop mid-sentence, afraid that she would make a mistake in front of her classmates. At first, I tried to help her the way I thought a tutor should: reviewing vocabulary, practicing reading passages, and correcting grammar. But I quickly realized that her biggest obstacle wasn't English; it was fear. During one session, she apologized after stumbling over a word and admitted that she felt embarrassed whenever she made mistakes. I understood that feeling all too well. As someone who was once one of only two students in my elementary school in ESL, I remembered how self-conscious I felt speaking English. I told her that even after nearly ten years of learning the language, I was still making mistakes, even recently discovering that I've been mispronouncing "epitome" my whole life. I told her that mistakes never disappear entirely; you simply learn not to be ashamed of them. To ease her fear, I brought in some of my old essays from English II, their margins crowded with my teacher's comments and corrections. I showed her how, from assignment to assignment, the sea of red ink gradually shrank. What had once been mistakes became lessons learned. Instead of hiding my imperfections, I shared them, occasionally bringing in old assignments of mine, sharing stories of my time in ESL. Slowly, our lessons became less about avoiding mistakes and more about learning from them. She began reading aloud with more confidence, asking questions without hesitation, and worrying less about getting every word right. By the end of the school year, she became the kid who raised her hand the most. She stopped apologizing after every mistake she made, and even started encouraging her classmates to do the same. Helping her taught me that people in need do not always need someone with perfect answers. Sometimes, they need someone willing to share their own struggles and say, "I've been there too." By showing her that mistakes were not something to hide, I was able to give her something more valuable than vocabulary or grammar rules: the confidence to believe in her own ability to grow. In doing so, I was reminded of a lesson I had once learned myself--progress is not measured by how rarely we fail, but by our willingness to keep learning despite it. I hope to keep helping kids learn this lesson.

Cancer entered my life quietly at first. It was spoken in hushed conversations behind closed doors, in late-night phone calls that abruptly stopped when I entered the room, in the tense silence during car rides to doctor appointments. Before I fully understood what cancer was, I understood what fear looked like on my parents’ faces. As my mother underwent treatment, our household changed completely. The kitchen table became crowded with insurance papers, medication schedules, and hospital bills. Weekdays revolved around appointments and scans instead of normal routines. Some nights, I would hear my mother vomiting in the bathroom long after everyone else had gone to sleep. Other times, I watched her sit motionless on the couch, too exhausted to move. Cancer consumed more than her health. It consumed time, energy, and financial stability. My parents worked constantly to keep our family afloat while paying for treatments that seemed endless. Even as a child, I could feel the weight pressing down on our family. I stopped asking for things I knew cost money. I learned to distinguish between “want” and “need” at an early age. There was an unspoken understanding in our house that survival came first. For a long time, I was angry at cancer for what it stole from us. It stole pieces of my mother’s strength and joy. It stole normalcy from our family. But as I grew older, I began to notice something else: despite everything, my mother kept going. Even after exhausting treatments, she still woke up early for work. Even when she was terrified, she tried to make the rest of us feel safe. I remember one particular evening after a difficult appointment when she could barely keep her eyes open from fatigue, yet she still stood in the kitchen teaching me how to fold dumplings because she “wanted me to learn to do it myself because I might not always be here to show you again.” Moments like that reshaped my understanding of strength. Strength was not dramatic. It was quiet endurance. It was choosing to continue caring for others while suffering yourself. Watching my mother battle cancer also changed the direction of my future. Sitting in waiting rooms for hours, hearing doctors discuss treatments, and seeing the enormous impact medicine could have on someone’s life sparked my interest in STEM. I became fascinated by the science behind treatment development and the possibility of improving or saving lives through research. Today, I plan to major in chemical engineering and pursue pharmaceutical research and development because I want to contribute to the creation of treatments that give families more time, more hope, and fewer painful unknowns. Cancer permanently altered my family, but it also taught me resilience, sacrifice, and empathy. It taught me how deeply people can love each other even in moments of fear and exhaustion. Most importantly, it gave me purpose. My experiences showed me the human side of medicine—not just the science behind it, but the families sitting in waiting rooms praying for good news. That perspective is something I will carry with me throughout my education and future career.

What draws me most to STEM is the moment when something invisible becomes tangible--when an abstract idea suddenly reveals itself as something that can shape the real world. I remember the first time I saw an electric stove at my grandmother’s house. There was no flame, no smoke, yet at the press of a button, heat began to radiate, and the air above warped just like it did over an open fire. Later, I would learn about energy transfer, resistance, and electron movement. But at that moment, it felt like magic. Growing up meant losing some of that wonder. Engineering was how I refound that magic in reality. Building a wind turbine for Science Olympiad, despite it only generating 500 millivolts, felt like I successfully cast a spell, uttered wingardium leviosa, and watched the objects before me levitate. STEM, to me, is about preserving that sense of wonder while giving it structure. It is the process of asking why something works, then pushing further to understand how it can be used, improved, or reimagined. What excites me most is not just understanding these systems, but designing them. I am interested in chemical engineering because it transforms scientific principles into functional solutions. In the context of energy, this means developing technologies that are not only efficient but also accessible and sustainable. Being able to contribute to advancements like this, where scientific insight directly addresses global challenges, is what makes STEM feel purposeful to me. At the same time, STEM has taught me how to think. It demands persistence, precision, and a willingness to confront uncertainty. Not every experiment works, not every problem has a clean solution, and not every answer is immediately visible. But there is a quiet satisfaction in working through that process--revising assumptions, refining methods, and eventually arriving at that eureka moment where clarity dawns. Ultimately, what interests me most about STEM is its dual nature. It is both analytical and creative, both theoretical and deeply practical. It allows us to uncover the fundamental rules of the universe while also giving us the tools to change it. Whether it is developing cleaner energy systems, improving infrastructure, or advancing medical technology, STEM is the bridge between curiosity and impact. That is what I hope to be a part of--not just learning how the world works, but helping to build what it could become. STEM showed me that reality could be magical if you understood it deeply enough to shape it. Now, I want to study it because it’s where imagination meets discipline, and problems become invitations to build something better.

Freezing cold, thirty thousand steps, and a nose-bleed epidemic were not what I had expected at one of my Science Olympiad competitions. It was one of those early mornings where everyone is running on too little sleep and too much caffeine. Perhaps the tone of the day was already set when we all awoke dark and early at 5 am to snow-covered grounds greeting us. After getting settled into the room we were assigned, we started heading off to where our first event was. 20 minutes to get there--plenty of time, so I thought... As my partner and I started walking across campus to the building we were supposed to be in, one of our other teammates who had left earlier sprinted past us--no coat, nose bleeding, yelling something about a sautering gun. Baffled, we just kept walking until we realized we had gone the wrong way. By that point, we had 5 minutes to get to where we were supposed to be. So, we promptly started running. We got there just in time. Rough start, but we thought we were past the worst of it. We walked into the testing room with that quiet, rehearsed calm based on months of preparation. Then I got a nosebleed. Not something I could ignore. It was immediate, dramatic, and completely incompatible with the calm we were hoping for. I remember sitting there, staring at the test, thinking, this is happening right now. My partner froze. I froze. For a solid five seconds, neither of us did anything. Then, in a moment of panic-fueled logic, I grabbed the nearest thing I could find, a stack of scrap paper, and tried to manage the situation while also pretending I was still focused on calculating the velocity of the rocket--no wait, the plane, the boat? Needless to say, I was not. At some point, someone handed me actual tissues. At another point, I realized I had been reading the same question for several minutes without processing a single word. The entire situation had gone from “we're past the worst of it to “never mind, it can get worse" in record time. Eventually, the bleeding stopped, and we attempted to salvage what we could. Walking out of the room, we just started laughing--out of sheer disbelief and relief, it was over. We quickly (and without getting lost this time, I might add) made it back to our base room/building afterward. And, somehow, yet another one of our teammates had a nosebleed. Coincidence induced by the cold, dry air, and our high blood pressures, or a nosebleed epidemic? We'll never know. The competition continued, and the day moved on, comparatively disaster-free but still filled with lots of running and getting lost. Since then, I’ve gotten better at recognizing that things rarely go exactly as planned. Sometimes you walk in prepared, focused, and ready, and still end up improvising with a stack of scrap paper. It’s frustrating in the moment, but it’s also what makes those experiences memorable. Looking back, it’s one of those situations that only gets funnier with time. Not because it was perfect, but because it wasn’t--and because, somehow, everything turned out fine anyway.

For most of my life, I believed in a kind of “before and after.” There was the version of me working toward something—grades, leadership positions, college acceptances—and then, eventually, there would be a version of me who had made it. Everything I did felt like it belonged to the “before,” a necessary but temporary state on the way to something more meaningful. Watching Pixar's Soul challenged that idea. The film follows Joe Gardner, a middle school band teacher who finally gets the opportunity he believes will define his life: performing as a professional jazz musician with Dorothea Williams. But after an unexpected accident, he finds himself separated from his body, forced to confront what it actually means to live. What struck me most was not the plot itself, but the quiet realization at its center: that Joe had mistaken his “spark” for a singular purpose, when in reality, life was never meant to hinge on one defining achievement. That realization felt uncomfortably familiar. As someone who has spent years chasing academic and extracurricular goals, I’ve often measured my life in milestones—test scores, competition wins, leadership roles. In that mindset, the present becomes transactional. Every late night, every weekend spent working, every commitment is justified not because it matters on its own, but because it contributes to an eventual outcome. Soul challenged that way of thinking. There is a moment in the film when Joe finally achieves the dream he has spent his entire life working toward. And then—nothing changes. The world does not transform. He is still himself. It’s a quiet, almost disappointing realization, but an important one: purpose is not something deferred until a single moment of arrival. It is something that exists in the accumulation of ordinary experiences. Since watching the film, I have started to notice those moments differently. Not as checkpoints, but as something closer to the point itself. Things I once treated as purely instrumental—studying late into the night, science competitions, long weekend orchestra rehearsals—used to feel like pieces of a larger equation, valuable only for what they would eventually produce. Now, they feel less like sacrifices and more like experiences in their own right. I find myself paying attention in a way I didn’t before: to the quiet satisfaction of finally understanding a concept, to the small moments of laughter with teammates during competitions, to the gradual way all the instrument parts finally meld together during rehearsals. Even my commute has changed. I used to spend it working—laptop open, trying to make every minute productive. Now, I let it be a space where nothing is being optimized or achieved. I watch the streets pass, notice things I would have ignored, and allow myself to exist in the in-between instead of constantly chasing the destination. This shift hasn’t made me any less ambitious. I still care deeply about my goals, about pursuing engineering, about contributing to meaningful problems. But I no longer see my life as something that will only begin once I reach them. And that, I think, is the difference between having a goal be your life and having a life with a goal.