My main career goals are to become a lawyer and a novelist, and both come from my love of writing. Writing stories has been a passion of mine since I was in middle school. I started by writing fanfiction about the TV shows I watched and posting it on fanfiction websites. In university, I took a creative writing minor and joined my university’s creative writing club. Becoming a lawyer was something I developed while I was in university. I was initially interested in law because I was told that many English majors end up going to law school. The skills English majors learn apparently translate well into legal practice. Even though I am an economics major, that resonated with me because being an English major was my first major idea. I decided to explore law while I was in university. I searched for undergraduate legal experience and ended up working as a research assistant at the University of Ottawa’s Human Rights Legal Clinic (HRREC). Helping victims whose human rights were exploited made me realize I had a talent for legal practice. My love for reading became a great asset, and it was fun to read and learn from the articles and documents I had to analyze for reports. Chess has helped me move forward in both of my goals. I have played chess since I was a child, and I played on my school’s chess team from middle school to high school. I’d often play with my friends online, and even when we hung out together. The biggest lesson I’ve learned from chess is that it reveals, and can help you change, the way you move through life. My biggest problem in chess, as others have told me, is that I often take a long time to make a move. Often, I get so focused on not making the wrong move that I spend too much time looking over the board and overplanning instead of acting. It made my performance way worse. When I stopped second-guessing myself and started moving faster, I found my potential and beat players I couldn’t before. Likewise, in life, I struggled with decisions, particularly the decision about my major. I struggled with whether to choose English or something I thought was more practical, like Computer Science. Ultimately, I applied the lessons chess taught me by considering different majors and careers and choosing what I thought was best. I ended up with an Economics major, which I like, and a Creative Writing minor. Chess taught me lessons that I’ll take with me for life. It taught me that it’s better to make my decision, plan a bit, then go for it. Enemy players are most often caught off guard by confident, relentless opponents. Even if my major or career path isn’t what I ultimately like, God willing, I will find a better path for me and keep moving toward my goals with confidence.

God willing, I hope to make a positive impact in the world through the two career paths I am most invested in: being a lawyer and a novelist. I am a senior Economics major at the University of Colorado. Throughout my time in college, I was interested in getting experience with law practice before I graduated. I searched and ended up working for the University of Ottawa’s Human Rights Legal Clinic (HRREC), a university in Canada. The HRREC focuses on helping people in need, particularly vulnerable university students and professors who were wrongly fired, expelled, or otherwise victimized and have little legal support. One of the people we helped, for example, was a professor who her university fired for her feminist views. Working for the clinic as a research assistant helped me realize that I liked helping people with their legal problems. Even though the work was complex as a volunteering activity, my secret weapon is that I love reading! I loved knowing that I and others helped her win her case in the end. I found from the clinic that legal work may be a great fit for my skills. As a law student, I plan to either continue this by pursuing a human rights specialization or apply those principles to whatever I choose. Another volunteering activity I’ve done at university was volunteering for the Copper Nickel, my university’s literary journal. Literary journals are kind of like magazines full of stories and poems. I was interested in volunteering because I have loved writing stories since middle school, and I still do. My job as a student editor was to read all the submitted stories from writers around the world and analyze if their writing met the standards for the Copper Nickel. Then I review whether the editing team should add the story to the latest publication. I love my work as student editor because I feel like I’m contributing to the creative writing scene on my campus. Stories, especially from the awesome Copper Nickel editions we publish, are an excellent way to learn about our world, other worlds, and ourselves, and to be entertained. It’s a cool vibe to go around campus and see people reading a Copper Nickel book I helped make. As a novelist, I would love to write stories that fill people with a sense of realization, transformation, and wonder. I look to the Bible as inspiration because I want readers to learn something from my writing and be changed for the better. It’s not as directly impactful as legal work may be, but I feel like the effect stories have on people could lead to a lot of indirect positive change. So overall, this and legal work are how I want to leave a positive impact on the world.

I am an Economics major with minors in Creative Writing and Computer Science. I’m an avid reader and writer, a Christian, and I enjoy learning about world history and different cultures. I hope to make a positive impact by using my Economics major to fuel policy and legal changes. My goal is to graduate, attend law school, and use my degree to serve in policymaking. Economics has helped teach me how to research, analyze, and simplify my understanding of things so that I may know how to change or improve them. I use these skills in almost everything I work on, whether that be in my classes or other activities, and they support my goal of using my degree to serve policymaking. Two causes that I am actively involved in are volunteering at my local church and volunteering for a human rights clinic at a university where I once studied abroad. I have been volunteering at my local church in Colorado for several years. I oftentimes spend my Saturdays at the church helping with whatever they need, whether it’s chopping firewood for the building’s furnace, cleaning the church grounds, washing dishes, cleaning house for our fellowship get-togethers, or other activities. On Sundays, I help serve meals during our fellowship hours and clean the tables afterward. I also help with bible study during fellowship hours. I take good notes from the pastor’s sermons—probably because of all the note-taking I do at university—and I use them to help explain his sermon during Bible study. I see the church as a good cause because it aims to bring people together to express the truth, live in the truth, and live with love for one another. I love supporting my church because of this and how much it has done for me. It has helped bring me peace and contentment and has changed my mindset and goals for the better. I also help support my church because it’s a way for me to build stronger relationships with other church members, from those I serve to those who serve with me. Another cause that I actively support is the University of Ottawa’s Human Rights Research and Education Centre. I volunteered for them last year while studying abroad at the University of Ottawa in Canada. I was looking for law experience before I graduated. Since then, I have found the work that I do with them to be excellent, interesting, and impactful. The HRREC’s goal is to advance research on human rights, humanitarian law, and social justice issues. Since I’ve been working with them, they have actively supported human rights legal cases that have to do with universities across the Americas. I actively support the team’s work by providing research for these legal cases. One of the cases I was recently involved in concerned a professor in South America who was fired from a university for reasons that hid the fact that it was because of her support for feminism. I helped support her case by finding research that showed that firing her was against several gender workplace discrimination rules from the United Nations that Ecuador signed and agreed to uphold. My work was used as research support for the lawyers who worked on her case. In all, I strongly believe we should sacrifice our time and energy to make the world a better place by helping one another. Today, I do this through the causes I work and volunteer for, and I hope to do even more in the future once I graduate.

A core value I have is that human life is sacred and has immeasurable value, and that, because of that, no one deserves to be unnecessarily harmed. In the same way, I believe all human life deserves a chance to live, regardless of the circumstances surrounding their birth. I want to talk about how I became pro-life, how my pro-life beliefs affected my future goals, and how I now live out these beliefs in my daily life. I only became strongly pro-life when I entered my 20s. Before that, I was a cultural Christian throughout my teenage years. Even though I attended church regularly with my family at the time, I was hardly a believer. I saw being pro-abortion as both acceptable and a sign of an ‘advanced society’. A significant part of why I was pro-abortion was the idea of scarcity vs abundance. I thought that if someone didn’t seem like they could take care of their future child, or if there’s too much stigma attached, then one ought to have an abortion. What challenged and changed my beliefs when I became Catholic during COVID. Beforehand, I supported abortions that happened even to people I knew. But when I converted to Catholicism from non-denominational Christianity, I was exposed to the church’s very public stance on being pro-life. It made me realize how awful and sinful my old way of thinking was. I began to think, what if that child were me? Being exposed to the reasons why the church is pro-life, the ideas of the sacredness of human life and how we are created upon conception, eventually transformed me to become pro-life over the past five years. Becoming pro-life indirectly changed my future goals. It made me more conscious about social issues in general. I feel more willing now to make it a career or goal to help change society for the better. I am a senior economics major. After I graduate, I hope to take a pro-life stance in all my future careers, especially in a policy analyst role, where I feel my beliefs can make the most impact. Economics, in many ways, is like a philosophy, and because of that, I think that an economist’s economic philosophy can be positively influenced by being pro-life. By believing in the sanctity of life, I believe it leads to kinder economic policies, ones that support those who are vulnerable and/or in a difficult phase of their lives. Another way I want to help shape pro-life policies is through my daily life. I try not to be shy about my pro-life beliefs. I try to advocate for being pro-life whenever I can, with my friends, family, and even my classmates, should the topic ever come up, even if I may lose my friends or the good favor of others. I also try to be politically active about it. Last month, I attended my first-ever pro-life rally. It was the first rally or protest that I’ve ever been to. It was a great experience to see so many people invested enough in the cause to go out on a snowy day in Colorado and march down the downtown streets. In all, being pro-life is a core value for me. I believe in the immeasurable value of human life, and that because of that, I believe we shouldn’t cause each other any unnecessary suffering. I hope to use my education to advance pro-life policies, and in my daily life I choose to be a fearless advocate.

I strongly value Sergeant Albert Dono Ware’s commitment to service, sacrifice, and bravery, because I believe those are traits that we all need at times to get through the challenges of life. A particular journey of mine that challenged these characteristics in me was when I spent a few years studying remotely in Canada while still enrolled at the University of Colorado. I first started university in 2020. During the COVID lockdowns, my mom, who had separated from my dad when I was in high school, wanted me to study in Canada, where she had moved to. I agreed, because this was an opportunity for me to be closer to my mom while still working towards my degree. Thus, I spent a few years of my college experience studying online from Canada. Given Sergeant Ware's values, it took serious bravery and service on my part to make it through those years living in Canada. I was thousands of miles away from my fellow students and teachers, which made it hard at times to stay focused on studying because it felt so abstract while on a screen. Not only was it tough to stay on top of classes, but switching majors from Computer Science was particularly hard because I didn’t have anyone at school I could talk to in person. It took me a while to transfer to Economics; it required bravery on my part to pick something that I wasn’t sure I would be content with, but I’m glad it worked out well. Regarding the African diaspora in the U.S., I believe that a major sacrifice that should be made is to strengthen the community’s independence in educational reform. I believe that the educational experience in black-majority schools should be reformed to incorporate significantly more African history, culture, religion, and philosophy teaching, particularly (but not limited to) in the West-Central African region from which most of Black America’s ancestors came. My reasoning is simple: To best know where one should go, one should best know where they’ve been. As White Americans can look to the Roman Empire, we should also be able to look hundreds and thousands of years in the past to understand why and how we got here. I grew up in a majority-black education system in Chicago and spent almost my entire primary and secondary education there. In my schools, so little African history or culture was taught; I believe there were only one or two AP-level courses in African history. This meant that in a majority-black school, and likely many others, almost everything about Africa is taught either by the internet or the media, which could be biased. The key stakeholders involved in this change are parents, teachers, and even students. These are the most direct stakeholders as they are all interested in the quality of the students’ education. But from a bigger picture, everyone should be invested in such an educational reform. By learning more about one’s roots in school in a positive environment, it would lead to children growing with a greater sense of self-esteem. It would also motivate children to be more interested in school in general, both from the examples of ingenious ancestors and also because by learning about their ancestors, they can see more of themselves in school. In the same way that a typical American history class would teach a lot about European history, or a Chinese history class about Chinese history, seeing African history from a positive perspective could open the door for students to become interested in school in general.