I didn’t always think of myself as a leader. I used to picture a leader as someone in a suit, exuding confidence, authority, and power—commanding every room. Having been a library mouse as a kid and a people-pleasing, overcompensating high schooler, I was far from it. When I realized I wasn’t like the other girls in my eighth-grade class, but that I did "like-like" the other girls, I found myself alone. Raised Presbyterian in a conservative family in the rural South, I had never even heard of anyone like me outside of television. I was scared. Through a months-long series of incognito browser searches hidden among decoy tabs that I could quickly switch to, I eventually found my community online. Elder community members on forums gave me resources and encouragement. Other young people on social media whose icons were fictional characters and celebrities became some of my closest friends, all of them other queer and trans kids disguised for their safety and looking for connection. That frightening part of ourselves became the link that bound us. The LGBT+ community looked out for me when I needed someone, and has been a home for me since. I know what it feels like to be lost, and I know what it feels like to be found. That experience drives every second of my activism. Many leadership positions that I've held in my academic and personal lives have been formative and rewarding, but my proudest is an online support group I formed that currently hosts seventy members from across the globe. Each member is part of the LGBT+ community and, now, a friend. Our space full of love, laughter, and support crosses borders and oceans. I have never felt more like a leader than when I’m tending to this space and its people. When I established the group, it was something I had never done before, but I felt a pull to connect others. I pitched it online as a recurring virtual mixer for isolated LGBT+ adults to socialize and support one another. It quickly grew, doubling and then tripling in size and frequency as I reached out to more people I knew and hosted more events. Now, members chat day and night, help each other, and share mutual aid funds. As I write this, a member was kicked out by her family two months ago. She has since received a flood of financial support and housing resources, and is moving into an apartment next week. I have watched members practice for interviews with each other, cope with loss and grieve together, and sometimes spend hours just exchanging pet pictures. We host virtual holiday parties for those who can’t spend them with loved ones and sometimes just work quietly together on voice calls. Two members from Pennsylvania even met up recently for a trip to the zoo. I, myself, needed help putting together my first ever suit for a wedding. The group flooded with advice for gender-nonconforming formalwear. It was a simple kindness, but a moment that made me realize a new definition of what it means to be a leader. I think, now, that to lead is to see a need in one's community and grow a collective effort around it. To lead is to do so from a place of empathy, with a willingness to learn, to be led. I am a leader and I do wear a suit, but the suit is violet, tailored by a bisexual woman from Utah for a lesbian from North Carolina. I wish eighth-grade me could see us in it.

My friend Miley was the only one in the neighborhood with a basement, and she had four old school desks in it. Naturally, we played school. Everyone always wanted to be the students. You could pass notes, shoot spitballs at each other, or take the paper I passed out and crumple it up and throw it at me, because I was the teacher. Every time, happily. I have since earned a Bachelor’s degree in elementary education. I was standing in my very own classroom a week after graduation. I was hired to teach and learn every day with thirty tiny, trusting, hilarious kids. I'd gotten what I'd always wanted. Yet here I am, leaving my short stint in my dream job carefully off of my resume, working to fund graduate studies for a career shift. As it turns out, battling mental illness while taking care of children was a balancing act that I wasn’t cut out for. Around the same age as I was playing the Peanuts’ teacher in Miley’s basement, when the day was over and I wasn’t distracted by friends or second grade or Webkinz anymore, I was becoming preoccupied with something else. It made me hurt myself; made my stomach ache at night and before school and during little league games; made me cry under butterfly bedsheets. I didn’t know its name yet. I’m twenty-three now, and I know its name: OCD, obsessive-compulsive disorder. For seventeen years I’ve battled this illness, the anxiety, agoraphobia, and repetitive behaviors that stem from it. Among these, the devil I know best is severe skin-picking. Dermatillomania, also known as excoriation disorder, falls under the umbrella of obsessive-compulsive disorders. It’s an extremely strong compulsion to pick, scratch, or otherwise break one’s own skin. The only way that I can explain it is that I have an overwhelming, itching feeling that something is wrong with my skin, and the only way to make it better is to find every imagined flaw and destroy it, no matter how many hours it takes, no matter how badly it hurts. From what I understand, it’s not unlike the skin-picking compulsions that those struggling with methamphetamine addiction often experience. When I tell you I gave my skin no quarter, I mean it. I’ve hit subcutaneous layers you’ve never even heard of. Last year, one of my friends invited me to play disc golf. They had moved up north but were visiting home and I hadn’t seen them in months. It was summer in the South, eighty-one degrees. I did the math that I always do: will I have a heatstroke if I go out there in pants and long sleeves? At this point I hadn’t worn shorts or t-shirts since I was a kid— too many scars— so that was non-negotiable. I tried to go. I sat in my car as it struggled to cough up cold air for me, red-faced and lightheaded, sweat plastering my clothes to me already. And then I bursted into tears. It wasn’t about disc golf. It wasn’t about the jobs I couldn’t take, the clothes I didn’t wear, the relationships I never had. It was the things I did do: flaking, lying, hiding. Treating infected wounds while sitting on the edge of the tub, feeding the basin a pile of Band-Aid wrappers. Finding tools and cleaning them with rubbing alcohol, morbidly preparing to perform surgery on myself: needles, tweezers, razors— and don’t ever tell her I did this— my dental hygienist mother’s personal scaler. I was deeply ashamed of my illness. My skin was so littered with tight scars and raw wounds that it shined under a flashlight. Oftentimes it hurt to move, to shower, and to sleep. I thought I was insane. I had never told anyone but Mom. After years of increasingly frequent panic attacks and general suffering, it was my Southern, natural-medicine mama’s idea to stop pretending nothing was wrong. She ushered me into the house to hyperventilate in private, went out to my car and turned the engine off. That night, under her orders, I set up an appointment at the anxiety and OCD treatment center in the city. She drove me there. I was twenty-two, but my mom still drove me. My therapist is a nice lady who laughs at my jokes and looks like Andrea Anders. She also specializes in treating OCD through cognitive behavioral therapy. She told me to aim not for what is comfortable nor what is torture, but what I can tolerate. I have since been accepted into a graduate program which will prepare me for a career in an area of education that I’m extremely passionate about outside of the classroom. I meet with a support group; I made friends with a girl who wraps her legs up in cling wrap every night before bed, and who gives incredible hugs. I know how to breathe in sets of five and seven now, and squeeze ice cubes, and stand outside with my socks off. I’ve started wearing t-shirts around the house, scars and all. I’m brave enough now that I’ve begun to volunteer in studies being done on OCD, trying to put what I’ve struggled with to use by contributing to research that might shed light on a misunderstood disorder, might make it all mean something. My commitment over the past year to being open about my illness has forever changed the way I see and interact with others. I’ve had far more relate than judge me. I’ve sat around with friends and philosophized on trauma between the takeout being ordered and delivered. More loved ones than I would have ever feared have suffered panic attacks and eating disorders, self-harm and depression, psychotic episodes and addiction. If they haven’t survived suicide attempts or psychiatric hospitals themselves, they love someone who has. Why are we all hiding it from each other, crying in our cars? Life is hard enough. I refuse to be alone in it.

As a teacher of students with disabilities, a disabled student myself, and as a caretaker of a disabled sibling, accessibility or the lack thereof is a major factor in my and my loved ones’ daily lives, one that is often overlooked. In particular, as a student of education, I am committed to helping pioneer the movement toward making accessibility in training and instruction the standard. I am a recent graduate of an education Bachelor’s program planning to advance into the field of adult learning and development. I have been accepted into the Teaching, Training, and Educational Technology graduate program at North Carolina State University, with a chosen specialization in instructional design. I developed my interest in instructional design during my undergraduate education, during which I realized that for as much as I love the act of teaching, I especially relished in every opportunity to create engaging and differentiated curricula that could include, excite, and answer to the needs of each of my students, whether in regards to learning disabilities, physical disabilities, autism, ADHD, English-language learning, and more. I am fascinated with the science of how people learn, and the art of how I can make that learning easier for everyone. Having discovered that my skills and interests could be well suited to a career dedicated to crafting inclusive learning experiences, I have spent the past year since earning my Bachelor’s degree continuing to develop my skills and educate in my community as a substitute teacher for my local school district while planning my transition into the field of instructional design. My research interests during my graduate education will include approaches for prioritizing accessibility in my development of instructional content. During my undergraduate studies, I was motivated by the barriers to access (and dangers) that I noticed in digital media everywhere by looking at it through the eyes of my brother, who is autistic and epileptic. Websites and online learning content are often rife with harsh, contrasting colors; vague links and confusing idioms; overwhelming walls of text; and more clutter that makes a learning system, course, app, or webpage unnavigable for someone like my brother. Additionally, advertisements, videos, and on-screen effects with flashing lights or colors pose a very real threat to epileptic users’ safety, and yet this is all too common. Why are users, students, and employees with disabilities an afterthought in these digital spaces that could so easily accommodate them? The disabled members of our communities should not be treated as second-class citizens, and I am determined to be a part of this change. At Appalachian State University, I carried out a service and research project centered on methods of providing access to media for students with disabilities. As part of this project, I tested for and joined a volunteer organization known as the Distributed Proofreaders (DP) to participate in the digitizing of literature for contribution to nonprofit digital archives. These e-libraries create access to adaptable and screenreader-compatible e-books for readers with impaired sight, arthritis, cerebral palsy, dyslexia, and other reading barriers. My role with DP is to proofread the first drafts of an e-book generated by an optical character recognition processor for errors before passing it down the line to other volunteers who specialize in formatting, smooth reading pre-releases, or post-processing verification. I have continued over the past three years to work as a volunteer with DP, and am eager in my graduate studies to continue to advocate for accessible media and education, and to study universal design principles and strategies for integrating assistive technologies into digital instruction. Thank you for your consideration!

If you were to look up “gig economy” in the dictionary, you might find a picture of me. As I write this, I have six jobs. Depending on the day and the time, I am a substitute teacher, a national exam scorer, a research participant, a transcriptionist, an audiobook narrator, and a usability tester of apps, software, and devices. Not only am I attempting to fund my graduate education while paying off my existing student loans, but I am chronically ill and disabled, so I often have medical bills to pay. Independent contractor work allows me to work from home when I have a flare-up of my autoimmune disorder and to work on college assignments between jobs, which makes the availability of this kind of work a blessing to me— but my income has to come from multiple sources to add up to any substantial pay. Working so many jobs and keeping track of a wide variety of tasks and deadlines has forced me to become organized. I block out my time each day, have color-coded lists for each gig and its projects’ deadlines in ascending order, and I multitask. If I’m waiting for an audiobook recording to upload, I’ll quickly open my scoring window and grade an essay. Learning to be organized has also, by necessity, included finding ways to make time for my loved ones, my hobbies, and my health. I make sure that my Saturdays are spent with friends, with my brother and sister and our parents, dealing with personal tasks or doing something enjoyable, and cleaning my space. Saturdays are arguably the most important days of my week; if I didn’t strictly set aside time for these things, I don't know that they would get done. As an aspiring instructional designer, I expect that my average work day will look like working independently and likely from home on a project— meaning that my practiced abilities to meet deadlines and manage my time will be vital to my success. My current gigs in education have also provided me with practical skills applicable to my future career as an instructional designer. As a substitute teacher, I have had the opportunity to continue practicing different teaching methods, digital tools and learning spaces, and engagement strategies beyond my teaching internships. My understanding of how students learn and what effective learning experiences look like in action expands every day in this role. Working with diverse student populations has allowed me to further develop my intentionality in designing my instruction to meet the needs of all learners. Whether it's adapting content for students with disabilities or designing interactive activities for differing learning styles, I have been able via these gigs in education to keep nurturing my passion for accessible learning. These experiences and every mistake I have learned in the process will be incredibly meaningful in my role as an instructional designer, in which I intend to create learning experiences that are accessible, customizable, and engaging for every learner. Juggling many jobs while in school has had a profound impact on my ability to manage my time, and has bolstered my skills and knowledge related to teaching, curriculum development and design, and issues of accessibility, all of which will benefit me as an instructional designer. While it hasn’t been easy and is harder yet to explain when someone asks what I do for work, I am confident that my experiences working in education and wearing many hats will serve as a rock solid foundation for my future endeavors as an instructional designer. Maybe the payoff is a little better than I thought.

Do you remember that kid who tried to make everybody play “school” during recess, who wanted their pupils to take their lessons seriously and stay in their assigned seats? The one with the glasses and the weirdly particular positioning of their pencils on the desk? Yeah, that kid was me. My inclination for teaching, learning, and “didactic meticulousness,” as my friends and family might tactfully call it, have all persisted into adulthood and led me to my degree in education, and in the near future, ideally, a career in instructional design. I have been accepted to attend North Carolina State University to pursue a graduate certificate in Teaching, Training, and Educational Technology with a specialization in instructional design. I am a recent elementary education graduate advancing into the field of adult learning and development by pursuing higher education centered on organizational instructional design. I developed my interest in instructional design as an undergraduate at Appalachian State University, during which I realized that for as much as I love the act of teaching, I am doubly as interested in designing said instruction. I relished in every opportunity to create effective, technology-integrated, and differentiated curricula to answer to the needs of all of my students, whether accommodating physical or learning disabilities, autism, epilepsy, anxiety, second-language acquisition, and other learning differences. I am fascinated with the science of how individuals learn and the art of how I can make that learning easier for all. My curriculum development experience with learners of diverse needs and abilities who require intentional learning design, my experience as a physically disabled student, and my brother's journey as a learner with autism, epilepsy, and a speech impediment all fuel my commitment to this field. I hope to wield my curriculum, instruction, and educational technology experience as a strong foundation for building an inclusivity-led career in instructional design, hopefully paying all of the love and support that I have received forward by contributing to the accessibility and differentiation movements that are finally swelling in the field of education. I am a first-generation college student, so my parents and I did not know how to apply for scholarships when I enrolled at my undergraduate university. I paid my tuition with gig work, what my parents could spare to help me while raising my younger siblings, and in large part, federal loans. While planning my career transition, I have been substitute teaching when feeling well and working as an essay grader from home when my autoimmune disorder flares up, but my income isn't enough to support myself, pay off my student loans, and also fund my graduate education, which leads me to seek gifts of financial aid such as the Zamora Borose Goodwill Scholarship. As a curious, justice-minded teacher committed to designing inclusive adult instruction so that everyone has access to high-quality learning, I hope that my goals align with ZBG's mission to break down barriers to education. Thank you for your consideration!

My mom has always suggested three things when I don’t feel well: have a hot shower, do jumping jacks, eat a banana. In my freshman year of college, however, I got sick— badly enough that the holy trinity didn’t quite cut it. I was always sickly; it started when I was nine. I was weak, anxious, never not nauseous. I struggled with joint pain, headaches, anxiety, depression, and malnutrition. Then, nearly two decades of avoiding the doctor suddenly caught up to me under the stress of freshman year. I passed out on my way to sociology class one morning— I hadn’t been eating— and ended up in urgent care. Encouraged to see a specialist, I was tested and diagnosed with celiac disease. I was told I have the combination of HLA gene alleles that make me a “Super Celiac.” Worst superhero ever. Now, I’ve always tried to be healthy. Following my diagnosis, I made it my mission to restore my health. I started walking outside, adapted a whole foods diet, and got into yoga and weightlifting. My mental health, however, fell to the wayside. To maintain one's health as a student seems like an iron triangle; at each of its respective points is time, energy, and money. As far as I can tell, we can't have all three. Take access to healthy foods as a student in any sort of unusual circumstance for example. With my options in the dining hall extremely restricted by my celiac and cross-contamination precautions, I relied mainly on the on-campus market. Healthy options and fresh produce here were slim if any. My only other option as a student without a car was to catch two buses in sequence to the Wal-Mart, carefully budget as I shopped, and lug my plastic bags onto my two buses back to campus. This trip took two hours. It was a constant battle to find thirty uninterrupted minutes to squeeze exercise into. Yoga is a lot less relaxing when you’re also listening to an assigned NPR podcast on biopolitics. The idea that students should be able to work out when they have class from eight to four, work from four to eight, and homework from eight to ten (if you’re lucky) is kind of an absurd idea. Then there’s the elephant in the room: coping with mental health in college. While kind, one free therapy session at the counseling center and a golden retriever in the student union isn’t going to cut it as an answer to the college student suicide rate. To say that college is a challenging time for students without access to quality mental health resources is an egregious understatement. I’m grateful to finally be in the care of a team of mental healthcare providers, sorting through the stressors and milestones of being a non-binary lesbian in the rural South, one foot safely in the closet and one terrifyingly out. I’m grateful to be working on living with my OCD and enjoying the friends I've made in my support group. I only wish I could have started sooner. I will always encourage my fellow students to take what time, energy, and money they can spare for their health. I will never pretend, however, that most of us can afford more than a hot shower, jumping jacks, and a banana. To see colleges and universities reject the “grind” culture of higher education and instead prioritize their students’ health is the future I want for our kids, if not for us. We are no good to you sick, and we are no good to anyone dead. Peers, take care.

I owe so much of my academic success thus far to my family and my mentors: the teachers, professors, and members of my community who wanted to see me succeed— but I also owe myself, my drive to pursue my passions for instruction and accessibility whether the resources were there or not. I graduated summa cum laude from Appalachian State University in December of 2022 with a B.S. in Elementary Education and a concentration in English and Language Arts, along with a minor in English. I held a 3.98 GPA, achieving placement on the Chancellor’s List each semester. Upon completion of my student teaching I earned state licensure as a Professional Educator with a “highly- qualified teaching graduate” designation as a result of my EdTPA portfolio and licensure exam scores. Aside from my learning in my major coursework, I also had the opportunity to develop my writing, teaching, and leadership skills in my four years as an editor for the university’s literature and arts magazine, The Peel. As a graduate, I am planning now to advance into the field of learning and development by pursuing higher education centered on organizational instructional design. I developed my interest in instructional design during my undergraduate education, when I realized that for as much as I love the act of teaching, I am doubly as interested in designing said instruction. I relished in every opportunity to create effective, engaging, technology- integrated, and differentiated curricula. I am fascinated with the science of how people learn, and the art of how I can make that learning easier. I have been accepted into the Teaching, Training, and Educational Technology program with a chosen specialization in instructional design at the graduate school of North Carolina State University. My father, a mechanic, and my mother, a dental hygienist, supported me financially as much as they were able to throughout my undergraduate studies. I was determined to earn my Bachelor's degree in education, and at the time, we didn’t know how to apply for scholarships. I paid my tuition with part-time work, what my parents could spare to help me, and largely, federal loans. I have been substitute teaching for my local school district while planning my transition into the field of instructional design, and my income is not enough to support me, make my student loan payments, and also fund my post-baccalaureate education, leading me to seek gifts of financial aid such as the Grandmaster Nam K Hyong scholarship. If able to fund my pursuit of higher education, I hope to wield my curriculum, instruction, and educational technology experience as a foundation for furthering my instructional design education at NCSU. My research interests during my graduate education will include design principles and learning theory as they pertain to andragogy, as well as approaches for prioritizing accessibility in my development of instructional content. During my undergraduate studies, I was motivated by the barriers to access (and dangers) that I noticed in digital media everywhere by looking at it through the eyes of my brother, who is autistic and epileptic. Websites and online learning content are often rife with harsh, contrasting colors; vague links and buttons; confusing idioms; overwhelming walls of text; and more clutter that makes a learning system, course, app, or webpage nearly unnavigable for someone like my brother. Additionally, advertisements, videos, and on-screen effects with flashing lights or colors pose a very real threat to epileptic users’ safety, and yet this is all too common. Why are users, students, and employees with disabilities an afterthought in these digital spaces that could so easily accommodate them? I think it is far past time to change this. During my undergraduate studies, I carried out a service and research project under the supervision of Dr. Beth Campbell, chair of Appalachian State University’s Curriculum and Instruction Department, centered on methods of providing access to media for students with disabilities. As part of this project, I joined the Distributed Proofreaders (DP) as a volunteer to participate in the digitizing of literature for contribution to nonprofit digital archives. These e-libraries create access to adaptable and screenreader-compatible e- books for readers with impaired sight, arthritis, cerebral palsy, dyslexia, and other reading barriers. I have continued over the past three years to work as a volunteer with DP, and am eager in my graduate studies to continue to study universal design principles along with strategies for integrating assistive technologies into digital instructional content. In an increasingly digital world, access to learning resources is indispensable. From online research databases to educational software, these resources have expanded the scope of my learning beyond the classroom. Moreover, online courses and tutorials have allowed me to explore diverse subjects and enhance my skills, contributing to my academic success. I intend to pay it forward by using my graduate education to pursue a career in instructional design so that I can develop engaging, effective, and accessible learning experiences for adults with disabilities who are navigating digital instruction and educational resources, and everyone who would benefit from universal design of digital learning spaces. The Grandmaster Nam K Hyong scholarship would allow me to fund this education, so I thank you for the opportunity and for your consideration.