My name is James Cancel. I was born on June 12, 2004 in Cleveland, Ohio, and I have two loving parents and one sister. I am the first person in my immediate family to attend college, which is at the main campus of The Ohio State University. What motivated me to pursue college as a first-generation student was to break the cycle of incompletion in my family. My mother wanted to go to college after graduating in 1988, but at the time her father's income was slightly higher than the maximum parental income required for her to receive scholarships, which to this day still upsets her. A select few from her side has post-secondary education, as most of them were raised on farms or only one parent worked and could only provide so much for the family. My father immediately went into the workforce after graduating high school in 1983, and has been working at the same company for 36 years. Out of seven, four dropped out, two went straight to work, and only one had the resources to attend college, and she is now a seasoned teacher in the Cleveland area. My ultimate goal, as a first-generation student, is to make my family proud, especially my parents, and show them that anything can be achieved if you have the support to do it. The STEM major I am pursuing is Atmospheric Science. This field is also known as meteorology, and has been a lifelong interest. My fascination with atmospheric science began in June 2010, when I just turned six years old. My mother was in the living room watching The Weather Channel, where Hurricane Alex was in the process of making landfall just south of the Texas-Mexico border. For reasons that may never be clear to me, I was very invested in weather and meteorological processes. My first major weather event came in the form of Hurricane Sandy in late-October 2012. Sandy was the largest tropical cyclone, by wind field, in the Western Hemisphere, and impacted nearly every state east of the Mississippi. Cleveland was drenched in four inches of rain, and high winds knocked electricity out for almost a day. From that moment forward, I knew that my life goal was to enter the field of atmospheric science. As an adult, studying anthropogenic climate change, how it strengthens weather patterns, and how those patterns impact people is important to me. As an urban Midwest resident, summers will become longer and hotter with increased droughts; winters will become shorter with more powerful winter storms and polar vortex events within that period; and rain events will increase in intensity and flooding risk. I want to pursue this field because my community will be impacted by these changes to our local climate, and I would like to contribute to the curbing of potential impacts through education and advocation for policy changes.

My name is James Cancel. I was born on June 12, 2004, in Cleveland, Ohio to wonderful parents and I have a sister who’s transgender. I have low-spectrum autism, and as a result, I prefer to keep to myself most of the time, and I have a very photographic memory. I always get good grades, and even graduated high school as valedictorian. Currently, I attend the main campus of The Ohio State University working to earn a bachelor’s degree in Atmospheric Sciences. My first real exposure to the LGBT+ community came in 2015 when my mom watched the moment the Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges that states were required to recognize same-sex marriages per the Fourteenth Amendment. My mom taught me that not everyone was straight and there were people out there that preferred to be in relationships with someone of the same gender. She was raised to accept everyone for who they are, regardless of identity by her now-deceased mom, and she transferred those ideals to me and my sister. A few years after this, I began to make lots of friends online who were in the LGBT+ community or were allies, and I learned that there were many different sexualities and that some people don’t identify as either male or female. In late 2020, I began to develop a crush on my friend Zhenya, who was non-binary and lives in Indiana. I confessed my love for them around Christmas time that year, and in February 2021, we made our relationship official, one that stands to this very day. When my feelings for Zhenya became apparent, I realized that I wasn’t heterosexual as I once thought, and over time I came to accept that love should not have any boundaries when it comes to sexual and gender identity, and as such I found my true self as a pansexual. Coming out to my mom was relatively easy because of her upbringing, but my dad didn’t understand what certain sexualities were besides the basic four (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) as he was raised in a more traditionalist household. So when me and eventually my sister came out to him, he took it hard at first, but came to terms with it and accepted us. The LGBT+ community impacts me more deeply than others, as being surrounded by friends and family that are part of it has allowed me to understand new perspectives on life and I will do my best to defend our rights in an increasingly hostile environment. As for why I chose to major in atmospheric sciences, the concept of weather has always interested me for years, and I want to use my education and experiences to warn others about the increasing amount of severe weather events due to global climate change.

I love math because there are so many different problem-solving methods and can be applied to just about anything. As an atmospheric sciences major, math is just as important as the science itself, as you need to solve different formulas to calculate pressure, density, thermodynamics, gas properties, or the conservation of mass. I am also part of a rather niche online community dedicated to collecting and analyzing social media statistics, where math is an integral and required part of it. For example, to figure out a YouTube channel’s daily subscriber growth based on their views, first you have to determine how long it took for that channel to go from one API to the next, as YouTube no longer allows its users to see their full subscriber count publicly. After you calculate the duration of the API update, you divide how much the channel jumped up or down by the number of minutes, hours, or days to get decimal averages. You will also need to constantly collect daily view growth from the site SocialBlade and put it on a Google Sheet. Once you’ve collected enough data, add up all the views and divide by the number of days they occurred between API updates, then divide the daily view average by the average daily subscriber growth. As a result, you will get a decimal that you will apply to the daily views to get estimated subscriber growth. This method is rudimentary as subscriber growth can rapidly increase or decrease with little variability in views.