Unlike most 5th grade girls, I was interested in watching my dad's construction projects quite literally build our community. Even as a child I have loved learning about how nature and humans have interacted to create the world we live in today. I am now studying Construction Management with a minor in Sustainable Policy at Arizona State University. My career goals are to specialize in Hempcrete infrastructure and to work with community leaders to advocate for sustainable urban planning. I am also planning on creating a mentorship program that will support underrepresented minorities like myself in engineering. The current reliance on concrete for infrastructure across the globe is a critical danger to public health and safety. The material is too heavy, too weak, and its production produces too much carbon dioxide which leads to air and water pollution that harms the public. That's where Hempcrete comes in: Hempcrete is an alternative to concrete made of the stalks of industrial hemp plants mixed with a Biolime "glue". This new material is less heavy while being stronger, more carbon-negative, saves money on insulation and ventilation, and promotes the growth of industrial Hemp. I plan to specialize in building with this material in order to promote its use in future infrastructural projects. Scientists and engineers need all the help we can get to make solutions like this happen, but we lack diversity in contributors and thus in ideas. Inclusion is important in order to ensure equal access to the same opportunities for all and to help create a wider variety of perspectives and solutions. I plan to use this scholarship money to further my education and create a space to start mentoring minority engineering students. My experience with Student Technology Leadership Program gave me the opportunity to learn how to be an effective Project Manager and advocate in order to succeed in my career goals. This leadership role taught me skills such as project management, networking with clients, creating visual presentations, and public speaking as well as technical skills such as Arduino coding and wiring, recycling old robotics sensors, and data organization with Excel. As a result, my team not only provided new classroom technology to our school district but also gave a group of freshmen girls their first opportunity to learn technical skills and spark their interest in engineering. As a young woman in engineering myself, I was able to mentor them and provide an inclusive environment to learn. Overall, this experience sparked my interest in becoming a Project Manager, advocate, and mentor as a career. Given the financial opportunity, I plan to continue working with community leaders in order to make the construction field more sustainable and inclusive. I will do this by specializing in Hempcrete and infrastructure in my studies and by creating a space for underrepresented groups to be welcomed and supported in their goals in engineering. Thank you for your time and consideration and I sincerely hope to win this scholarship in order to achieve my goals to help my community be more diverse and sustainable.

Being openly bisexual and gender-fluid in Owensboro, Kentucky was a recipe for disaster and opportunity. This experience pushed me to grow out of that toxic environment so that I could move to Arizona State University and apply my technical skills to advocate for future LGBTQ+ youth like myself. As the Social Media officer for the Rainbow Coalition at my university, I get to apply my talents in graphic design towards educating and supporting my community.

Many know him for his PBS show "Bill Nye the Science Guy", but the reason that Bill Nye is my favorite scientist is because of his ability to combine his entertainment skills and technical background to make the world more educated. His career as a mechanical engineer for Boeing included patenting many designs such as the hydraulic resonance suppressor tubes used on many of the 747 planes you may have flown on! Soon after he switched to entertainment by writing stand-up comedy and appearing on shows before starting Bill Nye the Science Guy on PBS to educate and entertain generations past its airing time. Today he continues to apply both humour and science to educate the public about the dangers of climate change. Thanks to his television career, Bill Nye has been able to change the lives of students like me and pursue our dreams in art or science!

This picture at the time was just a cute way to get likes from friends. Meeka, my best friend and therapist, is seen comforting my 93-year-old great grammy on the 20-hour road trip from her home in Cambridge, Maryland to stay with my family in Kentucky the summer before I went off to college. Meeka is skilled at reading people and knowing if they need her emotional support. About 2 months after that picture was taken, 1 month after I moved into my dorm in Tempe, Grammy passed away. Of course, Meeka was there to help her.

Mary Jackson: Perseverance and Paving the Way for Us All. It's no secret that there aren't many role models specifically for women and minorities in science and engineering. It wasn't until my freshman year of high school that I learned about Mary Jackson, the first African-American woman to become an engineer, through watching Hidden Figures in my majority-male and majority-white engineering class. As one of only two girls in that class, Mary Jackson stood out to me because she was persistent and paved the way for other women and minorities to pursue a technical career. These qualities and accomplishments inspire me to push myself to succeed as an engineer too someday. Perseverance comes naturally to most engineers. In Mary Jackson's case, however, she had to push through segregation laws and gender roles in order to take the classes necessary to be an engineer. This inspired me by showing me a role model to look up to who's persevered through being the minority in a classroom and yet rose above many of her peers who said she couldn't become an engineer. Thanks to Mary Jackson paving the way, I pushed through being the only girl in some of my engineering classes to now being one of the few left to finish the engineering program in my class. Not only did Mary Jackson become the first black female engineer, but she used her success to help other women and minorities succeed in a technical career. She first did so by becoming Langley's Federal Women's Program Manager to help hire and promote the next generation of NASA's women in math, science, and engineering. She was also a Girls Scout leader for thirty years and helped black children in her community create a miniature wind tunnel to test airplanes. Overall, her work and her legacy paved the way for more women and minorities to pursue a technical career. I hope to also use my success in engineering someday to promote more women and minorities to be included in their technical pursuits by creating a Makerspace geared towards marginalized groups interested in science and technology. This Makerspace would not only provide the technology and resources to create and learn technical skills but the inclusive and diverse environment necessary to make more minorities and women feel confident in pursuing a technical career such as engineering. Mary Jackson truly paved the way not only for space exploration but for inclusion in engineering for women and minorities. I'm inspired by her perseverance and her work to help others realize that anyone can become a scientist or engineer. Sources: Loff, Sarah. “Mary Jackson Biography.” NASA, NASA, 22 Nov. 2016, www.nasa.gov/content/mary-jackson-biography.

Technology Helping the Community When most people think of school clubs, community service and technology seem to be completely separated. As a member of the Kentucky Student Technology Leadership Program (STLP), however, technology is used to solve community problems through a year-long project. These projects also factor in teamwork and business aspects of leadership to teach students how to problem-solve in the real world. My senior year of high school I was presented a challenge to help our principal decide which classroom projectors need to be replaced. The administrative budget only allowed for a few to be replaced, so our principal couldn't afford to hire a technician to test each classroom projector. By solving this problem, our school saves money while providing better educational technology. This also became a perfect way for my STLP team to use technology to solve a problem in our community. We started working on this project by factoring in the technical and practical aspects such as the usefulness of a projector to each teacher, if that classroom will be gone after renovations this summer, and the interference of windows to the projection quality. Next, my teammates worked on finding the visual quality of each projector by using what technology we had available at school without spending more money. These factors were weighed alongside the visual quality and amount of background noise to determine which projectors needed to be replaced the most. My role in this project was to develop an audio reading system to find out how distracting the background noise of each classroom projector. As such, I programmed an Arduino Uno board to read the volume of each projector from the closest desk. Due to my previous experience in the Student Technology Leadership Program, I also took on the role of Project Manager by organizing team meetings, forming a Decision Matrix and setting milestones, and working alongside our principal to ensure our project meets their needs. As a result, I've developed leadership skills such as communication and organization. This particular project has equipped me with leadership skills such as time management and communication alongside technical skills such as programming and using the Design Process. As an engineering student, both of these qualities are important in working with a team to problem-solve. The Student Technology Leadership Program has impacted my life by giving me the opportunity to use my technical and leadership skills to solve real-world problems. Unlike other school groups, I get to help my community and learn how to think like a real engineer. This organization has also impacted our community in various ways over the years by providing educational opportunities with technology. This year's project helped provide our school with up-to-date technology while saving money. Overall, my experience with the Student Technology Leadership Program has prepared me to succeed in engineering and in life.

Engineering requires grit. For most students, this just means extra time studying truss calculations or thermodynamic equations. For women studying engineering, however, this also means seeing few peers similar to us and unfair assumptions from peers. As a female student pursuing engineering, my peers are often surprised by my interest in STEM as opposed to a more stereotypical field and even underestimate my capabilities in math and technology. On top of that, there are so few female students in these engineering classes that many girls drop out due to peer pressure and lack of encouragement. This is even true in my own high school's Engineering Academy, where I experienced being the only female student in a class of nearly 30 students for the first time. This particular class was Principles of Engineering, where we learned math and physics concepts used by real engineers and then put them to use through various hands-on projects. Walking into class on the first day was already intimidating since the only other girl in my engineering class from the year before had dropped out. Throughout the year I struggled with assumptions from peers that I didn't know what I was doing with tools and comments about "inherent inferiority" in math skills. As a result, I struggled even more in the class and feared that if I raised my hand and asked a "stupid question" I'd prove them right. By the end of the semester I faced two choices: drop out and prove them right, or persist and do whatever it takes to succeed and prove them wrong. I overcame this challenge through what my Principals of Engineering teacher called "productive struggle". He defines this as independently persevering through failures in order to learn. I took his words to heart and applied this by ignoring peer pressure to quit, focusing on studying at my own pace, and passing! I was motivated by my ambitions to become an engineer as well as the pressure to prove my peers wrong and to encourage more young women to pursue technology. This motivation and persistence have helped me succeed as a student and a leader. I won the Design Award in VEX Robotics Competitions for 2 years in a row, qualified my Student Technology Leadership Program project for state this year, taught elementary school students technical and entrepreneurial skills as a Leadership Intern for Camp Invention, and was Secretary of the Gay-Straight Alliance. These opportunities and accomplishments continue to motivate me to continue studying engineering and support diversity in technology. This experience still affects me as I continue pursuing engineering and seeing a lack of female peers. The early exposure to sexism in STEM prepared me for studying engineering by teaching me perseverance through difficult concepts as well as peer pressure, and study skills such as how to teach myself and learn from mistakes. By experiencing sexism, I was also inspired to make things better for others who are underrepresented in their technical fields. This experience made me realize that there is a need for more diversity and inclusion in STEM. Throughout my years in high school I worked to make this happen by encouraging my female peers to join the robotics team or teaching my little sisters what I've learned in my engineering classes as well as being involved with school organizations geared towards equality such as Gay-Straight Alliance, Feminist Club, and Green Dot. These seemingly small interactions and acts of encouragement make a significant difference in making women feel more included while pursuing STEM. My ultimate goal is to create a Makerspace specifically for underrepresented groups to develop technical skills and create their own projects in a diverse and welcoming environment. This will help make engineering and other technical fields more inclusive for girls in the future so that no more young women will feel excluded from the world of science and technology. In conclusion, I have used my experience with sexism to gain the persistence and leadership necessary to become an even better engineer.