On my first day of class in the highest level math course that my school offers, I looked around the room at my peers and noticed that there were twice as many men in the room as women. While I found this upsetting, it doesn’t even compare to the inequality that exists in the number of men and women in STEM fields, where men outnumber women by nearly three to one. I have had the opportunity to participate in countless STEM activities, such as coding sessions, engineering camps, robotics classes, and science and math competitions. One such program, one that I believe has great potential to influence positive progress, is Femineers. Created to get young girls involved in engineering, the community of smart, ambitious, incredible women in Femineers makes the future for women in STEM look a whole lot more promising. At the same, Femineers has provided a setting where STEM and art can harmoniously coincide. At a Femineer’s Summit, I was one of the hundreds of women who gathered to demonstrate projects related to our interests. The broad theme to be followed was “wearable technology”. Watching others display what they had created was like watching a fashion show that combined visual appeal with practically. There were handbags designed for the blind that audibly notified the user of its location, earrings that had color changing LEDs to match any holiday and eliminate the waste of having multiple pairs, and my design, a harness for a dog that had LEDs to increase visibility at night and promote safety. Each of these designs was an example of what is possible when art and STEM are combined: practical expression. The individuality of each project highlighted the creator’s interests. Because of this, they were inspired to make something that was an extension of their most creative thinking. At the conference, a panel of female CEOs spoke about their experiences as women in STEM fields. Each had faced their own struggles such as gender pay inequities, lack of mentorship, and harmful stereotypes. Their overall message was that we need to strive for change. Empowered by their words of encouragement and advice, I realized that it is this community, women in STEM, that I feel most connected to. I am interested in furthering my academic career with the hopes of becoming successful, like them, and being able to influence other young women to do the same. When looking to my future, I envision myself in a laboratory, deeply immersed in biomedical research. I hope to conduct research as an undergraduate, and have my heart set on a number of prestigious Universities with strong research programs and facilities. This early exposure to the realities of working in my field is exactly what I hope to gain in my college experience. Countless television shows have presented impossible medical cases that have forced doctors to think outside the box to save their patients. Despite frequent discrepancies between how doctors are presented in these shows and real life, what remains true is that there is a bridge between the practicality of medicine and the creativity of engineering. My initial interest in these areas sparked due to their fictional uses, but my true desire to pursue a career somewhere within this field came from learning of actual advancements made in regenerative medicine, such as the use of stem cell therapies, the 3D printing of organs, and the creation of CRISPR technology to edit DNA. Each of these developments would have been impossible if it wasn’t for creative thinking. The exposure to the endless possibilities resulting from the combination of art and STEM is why I want to become an engineer.

My greatest quality? Saying the alphabet backward. ZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA. Is this skill useful? Nope, not really. But, I can do it really fast. Sitting in rows on my Kindergarten class’ rug, we sang the alphabet song. It bored me, so instead, I challenged myself to memorize the alphabet backward. As an added bonus, I wanted to be able to recite this less-boring version as quickly as possible. When I got home from school that day, I borrowed my mom’s stopwatch and began timing myself. At first, I would mess up the order and need to correct myself before finishing my recitation. Eventually, I could get through the entire inverse alphabet, without messing up, in under five seconds. A week later, I could do it in three. This instance is an example of me setting a challenge for myself, simply for the sake of being competitive, even from a very young age. Another of my useless memorization tasks was the recitation of 100 digits of pi. Any mathematician can tell you that memorizing pi doesn’t exactly help you to solve math problems. Still, it entitled a challenge that I wanted to take part in. 3.141592… I won’t bore you. Slightly more practical, and every bit a challenge was learning Morse code. Will I ever need to use it? No idea. However, it is a skill in my arsenal if the opportunity arises, and it presented me with the opportunity to challenge myself with something new. Thankfully, my extracurricular activities -club soccer, beach soccer, Varsity tennis, Science Olympiad, math club, etc.- have allowed me to express my competitive nature. The simple truth is that I enjoy tackling challenges, even if they are as outdated as Morse code, as impractical as retaining the start of an irrational number, or as insignificant as memorizing a different order of 26 letters. Every small accomplishment is an inspiration to take on something more strenuous. My hope is that my quality of competitiveness and determination will be a driving force as I continue my academic career. As an aspiring biomedical engineer, determination could be the factor that allows me to discover a cure for a disease, or design a tool that makes a medical procedure more efficient. As a student, it is this same quality that keeps me motivated to learn, due to the desire to become the best possible version of myself. And, for the record, I can now recite the alphabet backward in under two seconds, so take that 5-year-old me.

The elderly are among the highest risk for contracting COVID-19. Beyond doing my part to keep the elderly in my life safe by staying healthy, getting vaccinated, wearing masks, and staying home whenever possible, I wanted to do something for elderly community members to feel loved and cared about despite being isolated for their own safety. As Vice President of my schools chapter of National Honor Society, I led a group of students to create community service projects in support of Atria Senior Living Center, a local organization that houses memory care and elderly patients. My club and I created a project that collected over 1,000 handmade, unique, bracelets from members of our school. These bracelets were accompanied with cards addressed to the elderly patients within Atria, with reminders that we care about them and hope that they stay healthy. Delivering these donations was an unforgettable experience. After showing proof of vaccination and a negative COVID test, I was allowed to go to the senior center and give our collected donations to the healthcare workers, who then distributed them to the patients. A week later, I received an email with dozens of photos of the patients of Atria wearing the bracelets and reading the cards that my group collected. Seeing the smiling faces of the elderly was the best possible way for me to know that my work had made a difference. Even though the gesture was small, the senior center was very grateful that we thought about them during the difficult time that the pandemic presented.

I am inspired by Cézanne’s artwork “Mont Sainte Victoire”, because it captures the importance of seeing beauty in what we see everyday. This work was part of a collection, all highlighting the same subject of a mountain that Cézanne saw daily from his bedroom window. His distinct patches of paint and thick brushstrokes make this work appear abstracted, breaking away from traditional Impressionism, and heavily influencing the beginning of cubism. Cubism is an art form that involves abstracting the appearance of the subject, by displaying it from multiple angles. While cubism was not widespread until after Cézanne’s death in 1906, we can see his contributions to its development in works such as this. Artists like Picasso, Dali, and Kahlo furthered the popularity of this style. While heavily influential for future artists, it is Cézanne’s personal connection to this work that makes it my favorite. For him, it was a reminder of home, represented from his unique perspective.