I press my fingers into the dough, copying my grandmother. Together, we pound, mold, knead the kahk, a crumbly biscuit that is an Egyptian favorite. I am distracted, mesmerized by the sea of women in bright red hijabs on television, scanning their faces for my aunt. They topple a regime, their chants resonating thirty minutes away from my grandparents’ house. It is January 2011, the cusp of the Arab Spring. My grandmother and I sit together, two generations of Egyptian women, supporting change for the country we love by baking kahk for those very crowds. The women, in particular, stay with me: the energy of their protests, their desire to see a better Egypt, the ferocity in their words. They do not crack, although their coarse hands make clear they have taken care of generations. I vow to become an Egyptian woman like them, like my aunt and like my grandmother: passionate, driven, empowered. But when, at ten, I move to the U.S. and no longer see and interact with women like them every day, I lose track of who exactly “they” are. Questions ricochet around me: Is your mother allowed to drive? Can Egyptian girls go to school? In the media, I see women who look like me being portrayed as victims, servants, even terrorists. I doubt my identity, question if my religion empowers women, and wonder if the pioneers I watched on television were as powerful as I had believed. My mind whirls with questions. So I abandon YA romance novels for dissertations about the rights of women in Islam. I set aside biology research projects to support fundraisers for underprivileged girls in Egypt. I turn to the Quran to learn about depictions of women in early Islam. I read book after book on the history of the Middle East and enroll in college courses on women, peace, and security. Eventually, I realize becoming a powerful Egyptian-American woman is not enough. I must help empower others. From the TEDx stage to the United Nations, I use my voice to advocate for the inclusion of young women and girls in peace-making and decision-making processes. I work with NGO’s across the Middle East, and, after learning that 10 million fewer girls will return to school in the fall of 2020 because of COVID-19, I organize #17for17: Advocating for Girls’ Education, a six-hour virtual event for my 17th birthday. I coordinate 17 speakers from Zimbabwe to the UAE, including the CEO of the Malala Fund and the Egyptian Minister of International Development, design the website, organize tech rehearsals, and act as MC. The event reaches 71,000 social media accounts, is featured by the Obama Foundation’s Girls Opportunity Alliance, the UN Girls’ Education Initiative, and the World Economic Forum, and receives international news coverage. But, as I intern with UN Women’s Rights advocate Alaa Murabit in the summer before my senior year, I am struck by how underrepresented young women and girls from the Middle East are in the fight for gender parity. While this realization was consistent with my personal experience as both a woman of Middle Eastern descent and someone heavily involved in realizing the women, peace, and security agenda, it only fueled my desire to see more women and girls at the decision-making helm. With their strength, resilience, and visionary drive, I firmly believe that young women will shape the Middle East’s future. At Harvard, where I will be attending my freshman year of college next year, my dream is to embolden and uplift these young women by creating and implementing a program that empowers Middle Eastern girls to become agents of peace and help them fight for a more equitable society. By dismantling the belief that young women play a limited role in challenging pre-existing power structures, I believe we can advance regional efforts to fight child marriage, enroll more girls in school, and curb rates of Gender Based Violence. Perhaps most importantly, I seek to uncover what I know each girl possesses: a vision and a voice. My current knowledge of how to develop such a program is limited to my own experiences with public speaking, advocacy, and the experiences of Middle Eastern women with whom I’ve interacted. In college, I will build on that foundation by learning from and working alongside talented, knowledgeable psychologists, historians, political scientists, and gender studies experts. By pursuing coursework in Middle Eastern Studies, Gender Studies, and International Relations, I’ll develop an in-depth, intersectional understanding of why young women have historically been absent from policy and peace-making spaces in the Middle East and what we can do to remedy that lack. Through engagement with Harvard’s Strong Women, Strong Girls initiative, I will observe firsthand what helps women and girls thrive. I will then bring that academic and extracurricular knowledge to practical fruition by implementing this program in select Middle Eastern schools. Having studied the legacy of colonialism and systems of disenfranchisement—many of which disproportionately affect women and girls, I will craft a thoughtful initial curriculum for the program, one focused on giving girls necessary advocacy, leadership, and peace-building skills. While implementing the program alongside fellow students, we will take field notes and documentary footage, which will help us strengthen the initiative for future. We’ll share these findings with peers and faculty at Harvard and beyond so they might adapt the program to serve other disenfranchised communities. Overall, I’ve consistently found that learning should not be confined to classrooms or study halls. Some of the most important lessons I’ve learned have come in off-campus spaces, through my activism. Ultimately, for me, learning is realizing you have endless additional questions to answer and problems to solve, and countless additional people with whom to discuss those queries. If I am fortunate enough to be awarded this scholarship, I will take advantage of the opportunity to thrive and to help others thrive, both in Cambridge and around the world.