At seven years old, I was living in Austin, Texas. I went to an elementary school with an awning that had a net stretched across the bottom of the roof. My little second-grade brain never could figure out why that net was there. As I looked up at it each day, pondering its existence, I began to notice that dead birds would collect underneath. The birds would be distorted, strangled by the cords, their tiny bones snapped in their futile struggle to escape the net’s grasp. As a seven-year-old, this was horrifying, to say the least. I decided that I would not stand for it - I wrote a letter to my principal, explaining the situation and asking if there was any way to take the net down and spare the coming children from the terror I had endured. I was only partially successful - the principal had not been aware of the issue before that point and consulted the school board. She was turned down but told me that she was proud of my initiative. In retrospect, I would like to believe that this was a turning point in my life. I had gone after my goal, regardless of how daunting it was, and I had gotten results. In my sophomore year of high school, I began a project that would once again mark a time of growth and empowerment in my life. I was meant to spend two months studying the adolescent brain’s reaction to sleep or lack thereof. This project made me realize that my high school’s start time of 7:37 am was far too early to properly sustain fourteen hundred teenage brains. I decided that this needed to change, so I found out how to get on the school board’s presentation schedule and shared my findings in an attempt to convince them to consider a later school start time. The board president had informed me that school start times were far down on the list of priorities, but I was welcome to present my research. The board was impressed and requested further information, so I banded together four more sophomore girls, and together we did more research, planned a series of school board presentations, and campaigned at board meetings for two months. Eventually, the school board was convinced - the new start time is currently being decided, and a start time of 8:30 am or later is going into effect in the 2023-24 school year. My approach to problems I see in the world around me is a huge part of who I am: an advocate, both for myself and for the greater good of the population. This quality inspired my aspirations of becoming a psychiatrist. This career path would allow me to advocate for each teen that comes to see me and allow me to make a difference in the world by easing each of their struggles. Not only do I hope to become a practitioner, but I also wish to conduct research of my own to better understand the brain chemistry that causes mental illnesses, and what can be done to prevent or treat them at the source. To achieve my dream of becoming a psychiatrist, I will attend a 4-year university and medical school, undoubtedly throwing me into substantial student debt. Any amount of money could help ease that stress and allow me to focus on my studies so that I can help as many people as possible. This scholarship seems perfect for me, as I have been someone in my community to rally my peers for greater change that benefits us all.