For most of my life, graduating from college was not something I knew how to imagine for myself. My parents came to the United States from Mexico and worked hard to keep our family afloat, but neither of them had attended college. Their advice to me was practical: find work, make money, and build something stable. Given our financial situation, I understood why. For years, I listened. I worked regular jobs and tried to convince myself that was enough. Eventually, I could not ignore the feeling that I was standing still while the rest of the world moved around me. I enrolled at my local community college and began paying for classes through work. There was no family roadmap for transferring, internships, networking, or building a career. I had to learn those things as I went. One of the moments I remember most happened during my first major cybersecurity competition. My community college sent our team to compete against universities from across the West Coast. We stayed in a hotel and met professionals from companies I had only heard about before. I went into that three-day competition with twenty dollars that I had borrowed from my parents. My phone service was cut off halfway through because I did not have enough money in my account, and I spent the trip figuring out how to stretch what little I had for food. But I was there. That weekend showed me a world I had never known existed. I met people working in cybersecurity, competed against students from major universities, and realized that I could belong in the same rooms they did. I was hoping college would change my life, but eventually I realized that college had given me the opportunity to change it myself. After that competition, I helped revive my community college's cybersecurity club and eventually became its president. I began leading competition teams, teaching workshops, and working as a cybersecurity instructor for high school, community college, and adult students. I later transferred to California State University, Fullerton to study computer science with a concentration in cybersecurity. Since then, I have helped build competition environments, led student teams, and helped organize a cybersecurity conference attended by hundreds of people. Being Mexican-American and first-generation makes earning my degree mean something beyond getting a better job. My parents knew how to work incredibly hard, but they could not teach me how to navigate a world they had never been allowed to experience themselves. I have had to make mistakes, ask questions, find mentors, and build my own path through higher education. Now I can make that path easier for someone else. I have taught students who look like me, helped beginners enter cybersecurity, and built communities where students can share opportunities instead of figuring everything out alone. I want to continue working in cybersecurity, deepen my technical knowledge, and eventually build a company of my own. When I graduate, I will be the first in my family to cross that line. I do not see that as finishing something. I see it as creating a starting point. My parents gave me the chance to build a life here. I want my education to make sure the people who come after me can begin with more options than I had.

When I first started learning about hacking with more experienced friends, I could not understand the terms they threw around or the phrases on my computer screen. I remember sitting in front of my laptop, trying to log in to a virtual computer. It took me two hours just to figure out how to get past the login screen. I had no idea what I was doing, but I thought computers were incredibly fun. There was something exciting about being given a problem, having absolutely no idea how to solve it, and slowly figuring it out. I turned this one experience into a cybersecurity club at my community college. I wanted other students who were just as inexperienced as I was to have somewhere to start. We competed together, held workshops, practiced, broke things, fixed them, and learned from people who knew more than us. Over time, I went from being the person constantly asking questions to being someone newer students could ask for help. Then, when I transferred to a university, I set out to build community, not just practice hacking and defending against hacks. I quickly built a team of ten students to compete in hacking competitions. We spent countless hours building networks, defending servers, troubleshooting problems, and preparing for competitions. Sometimes we did well, and sometimes everything went wrong. Either way, I loved it. Two years later, that experience grew into more than 100 volunteers for a hacker conference I helped create. I invited local universities and their cybersecurity clubs to come hack, defend, compete, and show off their talents. We built several competitions, found volunteers, brought organizations together, and created a space where people who normally only saw each other across competition rooms could actually meet each other. To my surprise, more than 200 attendees came. And everyone seemed to love it. People were running between competitions, talking about whatever they were working on, meeting students from other schools, teaching each other things, and laughing when something inevitably broke. It was not a perfectly polished corporate technology conference, and I did not want it to be. It was students, hackers, beginners, and experienced people all sharing the same space and having fun with computers. People kept coming up to me afterward to tell me how much they enjoyed it, but what made me happiest was watching everyone enjoy what we had created. Students met other hackers who cared about the same things they did. Beginners got to try things they had never done before. Clubs that normally operated independently suddenly knew one another. That meant more to me than winning. I did not win all the competitions I entered with my teams, nor was I the best or smartest hacker in the room. There were always people who understood some exploit faster than me, knew more about a system, or could solve a challenge I could not. But I did manage to create a community. I helped create a place where hackers could feel welcome, meet each other, talk shop, teach each other strange things, and break computers together. I think that is one of the things I love most about hacking. You can spend hours figuring something out by yourself, but it becomes much more fun when you turn around and show someone else what you discovered. It started with me taking two hours to get past a login screen. Eventually, it became hundreds of people hacking together.

One year ago I was an inexperienced, uninvolved, and first-generation Hispanic remote community college student participating in my first cybersecurity competition against Stanford and two dozen other universities. Six months later, I was the president of my community college’s cybersecurity club, had a part-time job in cybersecurity, and was accepted as a transfer student to the University of California Fullerton. This wasn’t easy, however, as my parents had always advocated for pursuing work instead of attending college. I listened to their advice and worked in retail unhappily for years. I knew this wasn’t right for me, so I eventually decided to do things my way and enrolled in my local community college. I was hoping school would change my life but it didn’t, it was me. I chose to branch out into cybersecurity and put myself out there in every way possible. Luckily the cybersecurity community is strong and I was able to find a home within it. I have since transferred to pursue a Bachelor's in computer science with a concentration in cybersecurity and I’m looking into obtaining a Master's in cybersecurity. This isn’t just a major anymore, it is my life and I wouldn’t trade it for any other. Before I started cybersecurity I was taking classes remotely and spent my time helping those who fell behind or couldn’t understand the content. It was through helping my peers that I met a friend who invited me to a cybersecurity competition. We had the minimum team size to compete, and though I was a complete beginner the team welcomed me. We ended up in the regional finals one month later competing against the top Western universities. We stayed three nights at a hotel, met countless sponsors, and had fun defending our network against hackers. A week later I ended up in the school newspaper, website, blog, and professors suddenly knew who I was. I also found myself speaking in front of my peers about cybersecurity. I felt alive and wanted others to join me, so alongside my friend, we revived our school’s cybersecurity club. We then reached out to other universities and community colleges, and within months we were doing events and workshops together. We created a community both at our school and in our area. Through my experiences, I became passionate and heavily involved in my field. However, there is still much I aspire to do at my new university. Within two months of transferring, I found myself leading my new club’s blue team, leading the blue village in a conference we are creating, and finding an advisor to help propose security research at our school. I soon hope to do my master's and focus on studying cybersecurity. Pursuing my Master’s will also allow me more time to network and prepare to create my own business. I’m not sure what I want to create or if I will even be successful. But I will try and do my best as always. In summary, I want to continue learning and getting involved in the cybersecurity community. This scholarship will allow me the opportunity to push toward that goal and succeed academically.