Lorem ipsum, lol gotcha. If you thought this was going to be boring filler lorem ipsum text, you would be wrong. Well, since you’ve read it this far, I’ll tell you a few of my favorite dad jokes. Why don’t eggs tell jokes? They’d crack each other up! Haha, get it, they’d CRACK each other up! Oh no, you’re not laughing. That’s okay. I’ve got plenty more. What kind of car does an egg drive? A yolkswagen. Haha, it’s like Volkswagen, but eggs have yolk, so it’s YOLKSwagen! Oh goodness, you still aren’t laughing. Welp, those were the best joke I had. If that one didn’t make you CRACK a smile, I don’t know what will. Teehee, you probably didn’t see that one coming. You might be asking yourself, what’s up with this girl and egg jokes? And the answer to that is eggs are one of my favorite breakfast foods. They are so versatile, and there are like a million different ways to make eggs. Sunny side up, scrambled, boiled, poached. I literally could go on for hours, and don’t even get me started on the different seasoning combos you can use to make your eggs ten times better. Anyway, I’ll stop with all this egg talk. I hope these jokes made your day sunny…side up.

I strongly believe that children are the future of the world; as adults, it is our responsibility to build them up in such a way that they can reach their maximum potential. It is important that kids have an adult figure in their life that will inspire and encourage them to continue to progress upwards. As well as helping them fully explore their options with what they can do in life. I longed for this type of guidance as I was transitioning from high school to college because I was navigating a foreign world by myself. What I really found difficult was deciding what I wanted to do for the rest of my life when months prior, I had to ask for permission to use the washroom. I had no idea what types of jobs were out there that aligned with who I was as an individual. I struggled my first year of college trying to discover careers that I could see myself dedicating my life to. It wasn’t until I stumbled across UX design that I found my spark. And that was after many disheartening nights of feeling like I would never find a job that left me fulfilled. I want to be able to help young women skip the point where they feel lost and project them down their path. My passions extend beyond UX design and into social change for women in tech careers. I was never offered the opportunity to learn about jobs like this one until I had completed my own research. If I had been exposed to the endless possibility of careers earlier in life, even as a senior in high school, I would have jumped at the opportunity to learn more and pursue it academically much earlier. Once I graduate, I plan on giving back to the community by helping young women see UX design, computer science, and other tech-related fields as viable options to study and pursue following high school graduation. I want to make it easier for other young women in my community to feel confident in choosing their majors and areas of concentration and give them more opportunities to explore career fields that are generally male-dominated. I want to be remembered by those I have inspired as a mentor who told them that they could do just as much as boys can, and I want to be remembered by the world as the woman who helped build up the next generation of brilliant young women.

Most people know what career they want to pursue because they want to follow in someone’s footsteps or they had an inspirational teacher in a specific subject. That was not the case at all for me; oddly enough, my inspiration came from the social media app TikTok. As I was wrapping up the second semester of my freshman year of college, I felt like I had no direction in my studies and was just taking classes to stay enrolled in school. I never found interest in jobs that were suggested to me, like an accountant or a teacher, because they just weren’t for me. I started to panic because I needed to choose my major as soon as possible to begin taking classes related to that major in order to graduate on time. While searching for potential career fields, I came across UX design on TikTok, most notably known for short 15-second dance videos. So imagine my surprise after some random person on my phone just elevator pitched UX design as a career and actually sparked my interest. I looked into it further to get a more detailed explanation and fell in love. I immediately declared my major and enrolled in an online UX Design boot camp. This developed my skills early on and provided me with some much-needed insight into the profession and my possible future career path. Every spare moment between classes, work, and my boot camps, I would spend learning new ways to use Adobe and keeping up to date with the ever-changing standards of the design world. It was time-consuming but worth it because my passion and love for it grew every day. I continue working on projects to this day, most recently creating a mock brand identity for a faux swim company, as well as creating a new logo for the University of Nevada, Reno Electric Racing Club. My passions extend beyond the average UX designer and into social change for women in tech careers. I was never offered the opportunity to learn about careers like this one until I had completed my first year of university, and it was because of my own research. If I had been exposed to the endless possibility of careers earlier in life, even as a senior in high school, I would have jumped at the opportunity to learn more and pursue it academically much earlier. Recently I have been interested in books on women’s empowerment and women in tech. Both of these topics are incredibly important to me as I want to be involved with mentorship after I graduate. I feel like reading these books written by these amazing women has reinforced just how much I want to help build up the next generation of brilliant young women. Once I graduate, I plan on giving back to the community by helping young women see UX design, computer science, and other tech-related fields as viable options to study and pursue following high school graduation. I want to make it easier for other young women in my community to feel confident in choosing their majors and areas of concentration and give them more opportunities to explore career fields that are generally male-dominated.

I have always been a daydreamer and enjoy visualizing what I want out of life through meditation, so I have pictured my dream life many times. What I dream of most in life is to be happy. I want to feel content and fulfilled with everything I am doing in my life, from my career to my hobbies. I want to love what I am doing for work and enjoy the company's atmosphere. I want to be fulfilled with what I am creating for my job and the quality of work I am providing them. I want to come home from a long day of work to my significant other. I want to cook dinner with them as we talk about our crazy day at work and end our night winding down by watching our favorite show in bed. I want to spend my free time mentoring young girls about the endless possibilities of tech careers. I want to be able to provide them with what I was lacking while I was trying to decide what job I wanted to pursue. I want to be financially secure enough to be able to give back to students who need help with affording school. Above all else, I want nothing more out of life but to help young girls the way I wish someone would have helped me.

As children, we are constantly asked, “what do you want to be when you grow up?” My answer was always, without a doubt, a pastry chef. I always dreamt of being a world-renowned pastry chef with a cafe in France. I loved spending my time watching baking shows and attempting to recreate whatever complex dessert I saw on my television. As I got older, my career ambitions shifted and the dreams of my youth drifted away. Because of this shift, I found myself putting baking on the back burner, no pun intended, and had gone from making sweets several times a week to not even picking up a measuring cup. Eventually, I moved out of my parent's home and began navigating a new territory of living on my own for the first time. I transitioned into the college lifestyle and realized that I was in over my head. My brain scrambled, it looked for a healthy way to take my mind off of everything that was weighing me down. It didn’t take long for me to land on the idea of baking again. I knew that at this point in my life, it was no longer about trying to learn everything there is to know about baking but an outlet that I could have fun with. Additionally, it felt like I was making things right with the little girl whose big dreams got buried. Now that I have started up again, I realize that I forgot how much comfort I got from baking. When I was younger, it helped me work through any struggles I was facing both in the classroom and at home. It was an escape from normal life and a way of self-care. Now, it has become my escape from the pressures of young adult life, and is an outlet that allows me to be messy and not worry about outside critiques. It is one section of my life where I can let my creativity run free. In a sense, it allows me to be a kid again.

Throughout my life, I constantly struggled with finding balance. This internal battle often led to me falling into a catastrophizing mentality. Last year, I created a list of goals to help me land an internship, and I was determined to cross the finish line. I started off strong but ultimately slipped off the rails. I was so overwhelmed with how to juggle everything that I mentally paralyzed myself, which led to me feeling like I was wasting my life away. It was a mental struggle of wanting to better myself but not knowing where or how to start. Ultimately what sparked change was a conversation with my coworker. The morning of, I didn’t feel great, but something in me told me I needed to go. I expressed to her how I felt stuck in life and could never seem to achieve long-term goals. She then proceeded to give me the best advice I have ever received. Out of everything she said, what resonated with me was, “what can I do in this moment that can help me reach my long-term goals”? As soon as those words left her mouth, my world had been flipped upside down for the better. Once I left, it felt like an old version of me had died, and I was resurrected as the best version of myself. What she had said gave me the key to unlocking my issues with finding balance. From that moment forward, I have applied that quote to every aspect of my life. Anytime I get overwhelmed with life I take a step back and ask myself that simple question. It has helped me be much less hard on myself and actually able to maintain steady progress towards my goals on top of tackling my schooling and work.