When I was growing up in the United States as an immigrant from China, I felt like I never really fit in because of a pretty large language barrier and it was really difficult for me to make friends especially in elementary school, where there were no other kids from China. However, I used to play a lot of classical piano and simply being by myself and working on classical pieces made me feel that much less lonely and really helped me throughout elementary and the beginning of middle school. I also began to play the saxophone at the end of elementary school, and fell in love with the instrument as well as jazz music, and it was really through learning music that I made my first really good friends and I felt like I fit in with others. I am primarily a jazz saxophonist, and a lot of my improvisation stems from my roots as a Chinese immigrant to the United States and a lot of my improvisational vocabulary was inspired by a lot of the Chinese traditional pop music that my parents grew up with. Growing up as someone who didn’t fit in, I want to go to college to study music education so that I can have a positive impact on young kids, as my music teachers did for me. I currently teach private lessons for sax and piano and I participate in our high school music mentoring program, where we tutor elementary school kids in music and musicianship, and these experiences have been so rewarding for me, and I felt that I had a beneficial impact on the young musicians and hopefully inspired them to make more music in the future. My parents first gave me a private teacher for saxophone when I was in sixth grade, and I’ve been studying privately with him for 7 years and still am studying with him currently in my senior year in high school. He had made such a big impact on my development as a person because he was an American adult, someone who I was able to talk to weekly with, and who treated me like an equal, and I want to have that impact on others that he did on me. This scholarship would help pay for my music education degree that I want to have in college and help me help so many other young people in the future.