February 22nd, 2021 is the day I lost my father. Right in the middle of COVID-19 in my freshman year of high school, my father passed away at just fifty from an unexpected heart condition. Never again will I visit him, and never again will I get any advice or love from him. When he went into the hospital for chest pains, we were hopeful, but in just twenty days I lost half my support system. My mom had the job of taking care of two children at once, and there were many times we were living on the edge financially at the condo. This did not stop my mother from being the best she could for us. Only just now has she finally started school again, all my life she has been working to provide for me. Only now have I learned the sacrifices she has made for both me and my sister, constantly working and going on trips to provide a stable living for us. Even with how often she has to work, she has always tried to be here for me. When my father died, she was there with me all along the way. The most difficult challenge of my life was my father's passing, and coping with the idea of never seeing him again. I couldn’t ask him for advice, or give my mom time and be taken care of by someone else. How does one manage losing a parent? It isn't easy, and there were many times when I was filled with despair and anger towards the world. No child should have to grow up with only one parent. I recall many days at school where I wasn't able to focus or pay attention, and on a couple of days, I physically cried thinking about him. Despite this tragedy, we made it through. My mom took care of me where my father could not, and I continued pushing myself in my education. I decided when I was little I was going to go to college and become an engineer, and my mom has been pushing me and assisting me since then in making the right choices to achieve that goal. She has been there reminding me what I want, and thanks to her encouragement I have been able to graduate in the top ten percent of my class, and I am now attending the University of Nevada Reno, and I can because of her help. My father was a veteran, and he planned to use his benefits to help me pay for school, but due to his sudden passing, he wasn't able to transfer benefits to me to pay for college. Now we are faced with a large fee blocking my education, and it is with this interest in mind that I apply for this scholarship. This scholarship will help lift the barrier where my mother and I cannot. Because I lost my father, the only way forward is to push myself to find money wherever I can, and in his memory, I plan to achieve that. My mom helped me cope with his passing and she assisted me in making it through school. Now it is my turn to go through college and become the engineer I want to be, even if my father isn't here to see it.

My name is Joseph Bernard, and I am an undergraduate of University of Nevada Reno. Scouts and highschool are the two defining factors that make me who I am. In Scouts I learned much about what it is to be an adult, and I gained much of my affection for the outdoors along with my determination to do good for the world. I participated in countless eagle projects to help the older boys, and at the age of sixteen I achieved Eagle Scout, and I am proud of my project and the impact it had, remodeling the prairie reserve fencing made the place look nicer, and the shed has helped many volunteers be able to use tools they don’t have themselves. Highschool also had a large impact on my life. Freshman year, at just fourteen I lost my father to a heart condition no one knew about. It was unexpected, he was just fifty years old, and it hurt my very soul. I still tear up three years later, thinking about how I will never see him again. I hated the world for what was taken from me, why did he have to die? My father was a great man, and I loved him dearly. I still miss him to this day, but this pain and tragedy did not stop me from achieving my goals. I continued to push myself thereafter, making sure to maintain high grades in my classes, because he would not have wanted me to give up. I will not give up. The wheel of time keeps going, and it's up to me to keep going also. After freshman year, I branched out into my interests and found some I had never dreamed of. I started a club at my school, which I led till graduation. I also participated in the national honor society, ran track, achieved my CTE in engineering, and learned graphic design, something I would have never thought I would be interested in, but now I find that I want to mesh both it and my passion for engineering into my career for the future. As stated previously, I have a passion for engineering, and this is what I have attended college for, specifically to learn how rockets and aerospace engineering work, and how I will be able to impact and change the industry. I have wanted to be an inventor since I was a kid, and my engineering class at my alma mater Buckingham only solidified this, sending me on a dedicated journey of college courses and AP’s to prepare the best I could for college. This scholarship will help me achieve my goals as it will allow me to worry less about financial security, and instead focus on what I am there for, to learn and make connections. This is why I write to you, asking for this scholarship so that I may achieve my dreams of learning how to leave a lasting impact on the world.

February 22nd, 2021 is the day I lost my father. Right in the middle of COVID-19 in my freshman year of high school, my father passed away at just fifty from an unexpected heart condition. Never again will I visit him, and never again will I get any advice or love from him. When he went into the hospital for chest pains, we were hopeful, but in just twenty days I lost half my support system. My mom had the job of taking care of two children at once, and there were many times we were living on the edge financially at the condo. This did not stop my mother from being the best she could for us. Only just now has she finally started school again, all my life she has been working to provide for me. Only now have I learned the sacrifices she has made for both me and my sister, constantly working and going on trips to provide a stable living for us. Even with how often she has to work, she has always tried to be here for me. When my father died, she was there with me all along the way. The most difficult challenge of my life was my father's passing, and coping with the idea of never seeing him again. I couldn’t ask him for advice, or give my mom time and be taken care of by someone else. How does one manage losing a parent? It isn't easy, and there were many times when I was filled with despair and anger towards the world. No child should have to grow up with only one parent. I recall many days at school where I wasn't able to focus or pay attention, and on a couple of days, I physically cried thinking about him. Despite this tragedy, we made it through. My mom took care of me where my father could not, and I continued pushing myself in my education. I decided when I was little I was going to go to college and become an engineer, and my mom has been pushing me and assisting me since then in making the right choices to achieve that goal. She has been there reminding me what I want, and thanks to her encouragement I have been able to graduate in the top ten percent of my class, and I am now admitted and going to attend the University of Nevada Reno. My father was a veteran, and he planned to use his benefits to help me pay for school, but due to his sudden passing, he wasn't able to transfer benefits to me to pay for college. Now we are faced with a large fee blocking my education, and it is with this interest in mind that I apply for this scholarship. This scholarship will help lift the barrier where my mother and I cannot. Because I lost my father, the only way forward is to push myself to find money wherever I can, and in his memory, I plan to achieve that. My mom helped me cope with his passing and she assisted me in making it through school. Now it is my turn to go through college and become the engineer I want to be, even if my father isn't here to see it.

Everyone suffered during the social distancing of COVID-19, and many look back on those years with feelings of regret and remorse. I too suffered during what was supposed to be just a two-week break. In February of 2021, I was getting ready for my monthly trip to see my father when he went into the hospital for chest pains. They performed surgery on him that same night tearing him open, which allowed them to operate on his heart successfully, and everything seemed fine. However, during the procedure, the stress on his body had been too much, and he had a seizure. Little more than twenty days passed before I got the phone call that my father was dead. My father passed away unexpectedly at just fifty-one due to a heart condition no one knew about. I was fourteen at the time, just getting into the spring semester of my freshman year. How does one prepare for losing a parent? My mom was my comfort, and eventually, we had his funeral. I hated the world, and how everyone could go on functioning. I was fourteen years old, and my father had just passed away, in the most isolated moments of my life. COVID-19 made it so I couldn’t even see him in his last moments. I didn’t know how I could go on functioning in life, how does someone go on when life challenges them like this? Once we got back, I realized life will throw people unexpected scenarios, and it's up to them how to handle it. The challenge I was given was losing a parent. No matter what I do I will never see my father again. I will never hear my father again. Never again. Now, I am going into college at the University of Nevada Reno pursuing a degree in mechanical engineering as well as a minor in aerospace engineering. Before my dad died, I wanted to grow up to work on rockets and revolutionize the way we explore space. All throughout my childhood, I loved designing and creating crafts, and I often entertained new inventions I wanted to introduce to the world. I took three years of engineering and completed the CTE pathway at my high school, finally understanding what I really wanted to do with my life. I am fascinated with just the brief glimpses into the engineering and physics I was shown, and I plan to learn and expand those horizons of our understanding. Three years later that is still my mission. I did not give up, no matter how hard it was I knew my dad loved me and he did everything he could for me. He’s up there in heaven, watching over me, and it is my job to do him proud. I need money to achieve my mission and my dream, and this is why I am applying for this scholarship. I will not give up on my goals, and even with the difficulty of having only my mom to back me financially and emotionally in college, I will succeed. NASA doesn’t quit after a setback, and neither will I.

When NASA launches a rocket and it doesn’t explode, they state “Launch successful”. When I flew the planes we made in my engineering class, try after try after try, I eventually landed it, and it was a success. These events have in common the idea that a goal was set out, that goal was accomplished, and there was more to be done afterward. My time in high school has defined my life in various ways, both with my dreams of impacting Aerospace, and the hardest moment of my life, losing my father. I had my freshman year over Zoom, and then in February, my father died at just fifty years old. It shocked us all, but I pushed through, continuing to learn and push forward in life, it's what he would have wanted. NASA is not satisfied with just one launch, and I am not done with just high school engineering courses. My courses have given me a glimpse into fluid dynamics, mechanical forces, and thermodynamics, and my mind has been expanded to think more about how rockets and planes work. A goal I possess is to attend an institution that will provide me with further knowledge of our current understanding of aerospace mechanics. While going to college, I must work because my family can’t send me fully paid. If I have a scholarship, I can focus on my passion, to change the industry. I want to enter this industry and change it, so success in my job would look like me achieving this goal, leaving a lasting and impactful trace on the aerospace industry. I believe that some way I can work with materials as well as devise different designs for how to make our rockets safer, more fuel-efficient, and faster. I am passionate about space crafts and flight, and I can help a lot of people by revolutionizing that, but I need to gain knowledge from a university to achieve this. The reason I want to impact this industry is because I like rockets. I built model rockets both as a kid and a teen, and visiting museums with them has always been a great experience seeing these machines. I want to do more for this industry because that would be the most fun and fulfilling goal in my life. But these dreams of mine rely on me having the time to achieve them, and with how expensive college is, debt is certain to dissolve my plans. This is why I write, to ask for a scholarship to help me get through college and make a larger impact on this world than I can right now.

When NASA launches a rocket and it doesn’t explode, they state “Launch successful”. When I flew the planes we made in my engineering class and landed it, after try after try, it was a success. These events have in common the idea that a goal was set out, that goal was accomplished, and there was more to be done afterward. NASA is not satisfied with just one launch, and I am not done with just high school engineering courses. A goal I possess is to attend an institution that will provide me with knowledge of our current understanding of aerospace mechanics. Should I achieve that goal, I would have been successful in college. I then would have more ahead, and therefore this is what my first success would look like. This opportunity would help me achieve this first success because of the stress it takes off of me. While going to college, I must work because my family can’t send me fully paid. If I have a scholarship, then two stresses are gone. I would no longer stress about being in debt after college and have more time to focus on my studies to learn about aerospace. From here, all my future successes would build off this scholarship helping me achieve my first success. A bigger goal I have in mind is to use the knowledge I gain to completely reinvent some parts of aerospace for the better. I want to enter this industry and change it, so success in my job would look like me achieving this goal, leaving a lasting and impactful trace on the aerospace industry. The assumption is I would have accrued some amount of wealth by revolutionizing the industry, and if I do succeed, I could carry out my biggest goal. I want to help the children and adults caught in trafficking of all kinds around the world. All humans deserve a chance at life, and these people who were denied I want to assist. The ultimate success in my life would be achieving this dream, with enough money I know it will be possible to end slavery for real. My goal in life is to help people, and I can achieve this right now at a decent enough scale. I have worked on projects to create new infrastructure for the community through Eagle Scout projects led by myself and others, which have helped people. But to make the largest impact in this world, I need money. I am passionate about space crafts and flight, and I can help a lot of people by revolutionizing that, but I need to gain knowledge from a university to achieve this. Success in my life will be achieving my goal of helping people on a large scale in industry and community alike, and then I will continue to succeed by continuing to help people till I pass. But these dreams of mine rely on me having the time to achieve them, and with how expensive college is, debt is certain to dissolve my plans. This is why I write, to ask for a scholarship to help me get through college and make a larger impact on this world than I can right now.