I didn’t need a clock to know when it was morning. My body woke me up before the sun—tight chest, shallow breath, the soft wheeze of a battle already in progress. While other kids hit snooze, I learned how to count the seconds between emergency medications and how to fake strength with every breath. Growing up, I wasn’t chasing trophies or medals. I was chasing air. PE days filled me with dread. Running laps felt like punishment. My classmates sprinted, played tag, and joined teams. I learned early how to become invisible, to hang back, to mask discomfort with a forced smile. But what no one saw was the deep ache not just in my lungs, but in my confidence. I wasn’t lazy. I wasn’t weak. I was navigating life with a body that didn’t always cooperate. This invisible battle shaped everything. It taught me to prepare not just for emergencies, but for life. I became hyper-aware of my environment. I had to think ahead. Where’s the nearest exit? Did I pack my emergency meds? Will this activity push me too far? That vigilance, though born from necessity, became one of my greatest strengths. It made me strategic, focused, and deeply empathetic. I couldn’t control the limitations, but I could control how I responded to them. What inspired me to keep pushing wasn’t a single moment. It was the accumulation of small wins. The first time I ran a full mile without stopping. The time I played a piece on flute in front of my class without worrying whether anxiety would trigger an episode. The day I stopped asking, “Why me?” and started asking, “What now?” I channeled that energy into academics. While others joined sports teams, I built my mental stamina. I earned scholarships, completed multiple degrees while working full-time, and never stopped learning. My career began in libraries, but over time, my curiosity pulled me toward something more urgent, the world of cybersecurity. I saw how vulnerable communities like the ones I had served as a youth services librarian were becoming targets in a digital war they didn’t even know they were part of. I knew I could help. Today, I’m pursuing a master’s degree in cybersecurity and information assurance. My goal is to protect schools, libraries, and public agencies from cyber threats not just with firewalls and passwords, but with people-centered strategies. I want to build systems that don’t just defend but are inclusive. Systems that serve the vulnerable, the overlooked, and the digitally unprepared. Having lived with physical limitations, I bring something rare to this field, relentless preparation, quiet endurance, and empathy. I understand risk differently. I see the gaps others miss. And I’ve learned how to keep moving forward, even when the air feels thin. More importantly, I want others, especially young people with invisible struggles, to know they’re not defined by what slows them down. Your breath, your body, your setbacks don’t disqualify you. They qualify you to lead with compassion, to rise with resilience, and to show others what true strength looks like. This scholarship wouldn’t just fund my education. It would help me finish building the life I once thought was out of reach. A life where I don’t just survive but help others breathe easier too. Thank you for your consideration.

My brand new challenge would be called Truth Pong: Splash or Smash. It would be a combination of truth or dare and beer pong. Location: it would be by the pool. It would be at night, with neon lights and music. What you would need: 1. Beer pong table floating over the pool. 2. Ping pong balls 2. Oversized cups of two colors-blue and red preferred 3. Truth prompts hidden in each cup. 4. Floating chairs Gameplay: 1. Each couple is a team 2. Each team has a mix of two color cups, in this case blue and red. 2. One player tosses the ball into the other team’s cup. 3. If it lands in blue (splash), they have to do answer the truth or get a bucket ice cold pool water dumped on them. 4. If it’s red (smash) they have to act on a truth like it was a dare (ex. Kiss for 20 secs the man who you think has the best abs). If they don’t, they have to belly flop into the pool. 5. Final Round: Each team picks a cup and they must answer the question or do what it says. Rules: 1. Teams take turns 2. Blue cups are worth 1, red cups are worth 2. 3. Choose a belly flop or ice water bucket and the team gets no points. 3. If a team refuses to answer two in a row, then the other islanders choose a dare they must perform. They then must take -3 point deduction. 4. If the ball doesn’t land in a cup, they have to do an action the opposite team chooses and take -1. 5. Team with most points wins. 6. If there is a tie-breaker, other island couples vote on the winning team. Example Prompts: 1. What is one thing you’ve been dying to do with another islander outside your pairing? 2. Who do you trust the least in this villa and why? 3. Whisper your most flirtatious line to another partner outside your pairing. 4. Reveal one thing your partner doesn’t know about your dating past Why this is a good challenge for the couples: 1. It creates honesty between couples 2. It’s fun and competitive 3. It’s a twist on a well-known party game 4. It sparks flirty interactions between couples as well as outside the pairings I also think couples on Love Island would like this game, because it raises the stakes a bit, creates a little drama, and helps them to get to know each other. This would be a challenge I would love to see. Thank you for your consideration.

As I went through my bachelor's degree, Calculus and I used to have a love-hate relationship in college. As a dyslexic student, I cried many tears as I struggled to wrap my head around numbers and letters and sums. Often failing to see how the math would pertain to my career later in life. Now as I re-enter college for the 4th time as a non-traditional student, I've learned that Calculus is more than just a math you study. It shapes how you learn, changing and molding you into a critical thinker. Through calculus, I learned pattern recognition, fostering creativity, and using systems thinking. Without the skills I developed through Calculus, I wouldn't be the successful project manager I am today. The first critical skill Calculus taught me was how to recognize patterns. By learning how to recognize underlying structures, Calculus problems became easier to solve. This is also the case with project management. Not only do I need to recognize the patterns, but I have to be able to explain those patterns to the people working on my team. This becomes necessary, because you have to see patterns in bugs, vendor behavior, and business analysis. Without the practice I got from studying Calculus, I wouldn't be able to execute this critical skill. Another critical skill Calculus taught me was to foster my creativity. To understand Calculus you have to think outside the box. Learning creative solutions, different ways to solve a problem, and apply the concepts to other areas of study is critical for success. Calculus enables this by encouraging learners to solve problems creatively. As a project manager, I'm the one they come to when everything breaks. By the time it reaches my hands, all the easy solutions have already been explored. It's up to me to look at the creative solutions and facilitate the resolution. I wouldn't have learned this skill without the benefit of Calculus. The last critical skill I l developed from learning Calculus was seeing things as a system and looking at things from different angles. How it does this is by helping the student to see that each problem could be broken down into manageable parts and was in somehow related to another part of the math problem. This has been the most critical skill I've learned that applies to my job in computer science. Understanding how each part can be broken down helps to develop the requirements that the customer needs. Understanding how each requirement add to the bigger solution allows me to facilitate bugs, direct staff where to look for issues, and know when it's time to bring in a different expert to solve the issue. Without developing this type of thinking through Calculus, my projects would not be successful. As I reenter the college world to get a master's in cybersecurity, I know that the skills I developed learning Calculus will directly apply to what I'm learning. Just like in my job, pattern recognition, fostering creativity, and systems thinking will greatly enhance my ability to understand new concepts and apply them to my life and career. This scholarship will help to alleviate the financial pressures associated with learning this new STEM field. Thank you for your consideration.

I love using online platforms, tools, and resources for any subject I’m studying, but particularly for cybersecurity. Western Governors University will likely have a selection of tools that I’ll use, but I’ve found other platforms over time that will prove useful for this degree as well. The first tool is tryhackme. This teaches cybersecurity concepts in an iterative and interactive style of learning. I like this because it’s free and informative. I also love Udemy, Coursera, and EdX. These platforms take various technology, business, and cybersecurity concepts and turn them into affordable classes. This helped me to get my MBA and pass 17 certification exams. As cybersecurity is heavy certification wise, these have proven instrumental in democratizing education and making my lifelong learning habit affordable. Another useful platform is redmondmag.com webinars. They offer free webinars on all things cybersecurity. They’re interactive, informative, and you get a gift card each time you do one. These gift cards alleviate the financial burden. Other tools I use are AI chat platforms like CoPilot to help check my work, check for errors, and get ideas on what concepts I need to learn next. These will be used in my degree purely for certification exam but prep. Another crucial platform will be the local library’s website. As a former librarian, this site proved useful in my career and will continue to do so for researching topics. Another tool the library provides is access to LinkedIn Learning. This platform is free, has great classes and practice quizzes on many different topics. This will help me to better understand cybersecurity principles. One I’ll likely use again is Grammarly. It’s incredibly helpful for proof reading my homework assignments. Its freemium model allows me to use its free features to improve my writing skills. Some other training sources I will tap include Khan Academy, proofpoint, Hack the Box, and CISA learning resources to expand my cybersecurity knowledge on current events, ethical hacking, and securing myself, the public, and my agencies through project. The last resource I’ll use are website that specialize in cybersecurity like knowbe4, cybrary, CISA, and Black Hills Information Security to learn from industry-leading experts what is currently going on with cybersecurity, hackers, and threats. In conclusion, there are numerous online platforms, tools, and resources that will help me further my degree of study in Cybersecurity. These are a combination of online classes, webinars, practice quizzes, simulations, and industry leading websites. Thank you for your consideration.

Receiving this scholarship will help my dream to come true of bringing cybersecurity principles to parents and educators at a level they understand. It will also help me to take on cybersecurity project at my government job, so that I can help the departments as a whole to account for security early on in projects to protect our constituents’ information. Starting with learning cybersecurity, I learn incredibly fast. The program I selected works great with this learning style, but it requires almost $5,000 upfront. This can be challenging to pay for all at once, so this scholarship will help to alleviate that stress. Bringing cybersecurity principles to parents and teaching them how to protect their kids online is very needed in this day and age, but most resources cost a lot of money. I want to provide my community and other parents free tips and resources, so they feel empowered to keep their families’ information safe. This will be more of a hobby, but will fuel a passion I’ve had since being a librarian. I’ll accomplish this by setting up social media accounts and blogs to gain visibility. By doing so, I’ll need to make sure those outlets are secure for me, so my identity is safe. I also plan to volunteer my time for library programs to help parents and children be safe. Another area this education will help me is in my current job. I’m a project manager who works with agencies who don’t understand cybersecurity, don’t think of it foremost when creating softwares, and, as a result, rely heavily on vendors they pick. From personal experience, vendors aren’t great at protecting government’s data and it creates supply chain vulnerabilities. I’ve also seen this with consultants they’ve hired. As I do more projects and move more towards being a cybersecurity project manager, I can incorporate these principles into my project plans, ensure cybersecurity is top notch for our agencies, and help our department to become more visible to our government counterparts. The visibility will be critical, because it will help us to get better funding. In conclusion, this scholarship will not only empower me and my education, but will help me to empower my community and government. I plan to use my education to improve my current and future projects, raise security awareness internally and in the community, and improve my own security in my life. Thank you for your consideration.

One technology that has inspired me to make the world a better place are online learning platforms that are inexpensive like Udemy, Khan Academy, Duolingo, and YouTube. These low-cost options are making learning accessible, engaging, and personalized. Starting with accessibility, these platforms are easy to use, offer adaptive features in their technology like voices, closed captions, and playing speed. These features make it so anyone can get something from their videos. These features inspire me to make my software development projects that level of accessibility or more. Serving a diverse population of different financial backgrounds, these features inspire me, because I know that technology that fits the individual opens doors and improves lives. These platforms are all engaging. They use videos or prompts to engage the user. They use various techniques to ensure people are learning and enjoying learning. This is critical for working with the community, because people have to enjoy what they’re doing. When I was a librarian, technology like this that made sure they were engaging and easy to use, helped people start to see themselves in what they were and expand their world so they could get better jobs, learn new skills, and invest in themselves at a price they can afford. Affordable technology like these platforms give me something to aspire to. Lastly, personalization is key to making a difference in technology and the world. Everyone is different, has different learning needs, and engages with technology different. A child can easily master a program, because they’re grown up with a computer, but an older adult will struggle. Being able to have personalized learning experiences and technology meets people where they’re at to improved their lives where there at. The world is made a better place one person at a time, so that why these platforms’ personalization capabilities are so inspiring. In conclusion, inexpensive learning technologies are part of the now and future needed to make the world a better place. I hope to continue this kind of legacy through my work in cybersecurity. Thank you for your consideration.

My name is Kira and I’m an aspiring Cybersecurity Project Manager with a passion for helping my community to safe on and offline. About 10 years ago, I fell in love with golf. The mindset it took to learn to golf when no one else in my family did fueled my game and my work. The strategy I take on the green is to take the terrain, weather conditions, and my skill into account to achieve my best results. This has served me well on and off the green. I developed a fascination with helping people when I became a librarian. As I delved into helping people to learn and empower themselves, I saw ways that technology could help or hinder people, depending on how well they knew technology. I saw 3 recessions where people navigated the world of online jobs with little clue on what sites were safe and secure. When I became a project manager, I was amazed, but not entirely surprise to find that most of the departments didn’t think about security first. This often leads to patched accessibility and cybersecurity measures that have vulnerabilities. This is when my love for cybersecurity started to emerge. What started as necessity became a passion. I knew I was making a difference in our community by ensuring people using our applications was doing it safely. My career aspiration is to move to being a cybersecurity project manager, so that I can start to transform how our agencies view cybersecurity and to help our community learn about it as well. Additionally, I want to start a blog that covers cybersecurity and free resources for parents and educators so they can keep themselves and their children safe. I feel I am a good candidate for the Samuel J. Hartley scholarship, because not only do I love golf, my approach to golf fuels my approach to work and life. I am a lifelong learner who has an unwavering dedication to investing in myself and my community. I do this by applying and sharing my knowledge and skills to help others learn what they need to be more secure on and offline. Like Samuel J. Hartley, I am an avid golfer and committed to helping my community. I want to bridge the gaps between my department, agencies that serve the public, and the community, so that I can inspire others to keep learning. I believe this scholarship can help me do that. Thank you for your consideration.

For me, Golf is a lifeline. Golf is the first sport I’ve actually been good at, but I do it mostly for me. It provides me the perfect outlet for stress, lets me relax and enjoy myself, and it provides mental stimulation. The interconnected feeling I get when my club is in my hand is indescribable. The reading of the greens and the strategy behind getting the ball on the green excite me. I love seeing me beat my personal records, getting a hole on par or under. I’ve even got a hole in one that made it so I won a month of free golf lessons at a course. But, what I love most is that every time I golf is a first for me, because no one in my family has done it yet. I didn’t start golfing until 10 years ago despite living off a golf course my whole life. I’m left-handed, short, and female so finding clubs that worked for me was a challenge. Also, my schedule didn’t lend itself to group classes and I was the only golfer in my family. The first challenge proved easier. I happened to walk into a sporting goods store and they had clubs on clearance. It seemed like fate. I bought them without a second thought. The second and third challenge proved more difficult. With an ever changing schedule and lack of coordination, group classes were out of the question. I also needed someone who could teach a lefty. This proved challenging, because most instructors I inquired with couldn’t adapt their teaching style to me. If they could, they were incredibly expensive or didn’t offer lessons when I was available. I finally found a golf pro near me who really made a difference. He was patient, helpful, and gave great guidance. Another challenge I’ve had to overcome with golf is being my own worst enemy. I’ll do really good on several shots then miss an easy one when I get tired. I’ll be hard on myself about it. I’ve worked on this by building endurance, giving myself grace, and going with the flow. One challenge I face often is I’m asthmatic. The weather can be beautiful, perfect weather, but then the pollen count or the air quality will be awful that day. I’ve had to overcome learning to pace myself, when to take my inhalers, and doing breathing exercises, but it’s all worth it. In conclusion, golf was a challenge for me to get into and master, but I’ve never regretted it. Every time I pick up my clubs and head to the course, I know I’ll come back happier and more fulfilled. That’s why I’ll keep golfing as I do my graduate degree. It’s my outlet for creativity, stress, and fun and I wouldn’t change it for the world.