I broke three teeth in my sleep. Not from grinding — from clenching. My jaw locked so tightly through the night that I fractured the lower right side of my face while my body was supposed to be resting. I did not know anxiety could reach you where you have no defenses, where you cannot power through or pretend you are fine. My body told me what my mind refused to admit: I was falling apart. The anxiety was not about one thing. It was about everything — money, the future, the fact that I could not seem to finish anything I started. I would sit down to work on something I knew I was capable of completing and feel a paralysis so total that I would just stop. Not because I did not care, but because the distance between what I expected of myself and what I could deliver felt like proof of a fundamental flaw. If I could not do it at 100%, I called it failure. Failure repeated enough in your own head becomes depression. For years, the person I was hardest on was myself. I am the first in my family to go to college, the first to open a business, the first to leave home at eighteen and build a life with no blueprint. Every room I entered, I entered alone, moving as if I belonged because I had learned that if you walk like you belong, people believe you. But inside, the belief did not hold. I called my ambitions real in the daylight and questioned every one of them in the dark. The shift came slowly, during lockdown. My son was under two. The world stopped, and for the first time in my adult life, I could not outrun my own thoughts. In the silence, I began to notice patterns — how I punished myself for things that might not be character flaws at all but symptoms of a brain wired differently than what I had been measuring myself against. At thirty-nine, I was diagnosed with ADHD. That diagnosis gave me permission to stop treating myself as broken and start building systems that fit the mind I actually have. I stopped requiring perfection and started calling 80% a success. I stopped interpreting my limitations as moral failings and began to see them as design specifications. That reframe changed my beliefs, my relationship with the voice inside my own head, and the career I am building. NorthStar exists because I know what it looks like when a capable woman cannot see herself clearly. I have been the woman so consumed by survival that her ambition sits on a shelf, right next to the confidence she forgot she owned. NorthStar is not just financial consulting. It is about helping women rebuild the image they hold of themselves when anxiety and depression have made that image small. Financial pressure was the first thing on the list of anxieties that broke my teeth, and it remains the most persistent. I am a single mother of two completing my degree at Harvard Extension School while managing a chronic illness. Every scholarship I receive is not just a tuition payment — it is one less weight on my jaw at night. A financial investment in my education is an investment in a woman who has learned to turn what nearly broke her into systems that will reach other women carrying the same weight. It is one less reason to clench. I broke three teeth learning this. I would rather build something that keeps another woman from breaking hers.

There is a math problem I solve every night that has nothing to do with my coursework. One pot on the stove, one four-month-old against my chest, one six-year-old at the table with a reading worksheet, and somewhere between the third stir and the second burp, I reach for the Python flashcards I made during my daughter's last nap. This is the arithmetic of single parenthood in a university — not the romantic version where a determined woman burns the midnight oil after her children fall asleep, but the real one, where midnight belongs to a feeding schedule and the oil has been burning since five in the morning. Before Adeline was born, I carried a 3.96 GPA at Harvard Extension School. Then my daughter arrived three weeks early — a medically necessary delivery that landed in the dead center of finals. I was working full-time as a restaurant manager, recovering from a C-section, and breastfeeding a newborn every two hours through the night while submitting papers I could barely keep my eyes open long enough to proofread. My GPA fell to a 3.3 in a single semester. Not because I stopped being capable. Because no institution has figured out how to grade a woman for what she accomplishes while simultaneously keeping two small humans alive. The most challenging part of being both a student and a single mother is not the workload. It is the fracture. The quiet splitting of yourself into two people who cannot both exist fully at the same time. When I am studying, I am not the mother I want to be for Sidian and Adeline. When I am parenting, I am not the student I know I am capable of being. There is a guilt that lives in the space between those two identities — one that whispers you are selfish for wanting a degree when your children need you present, and settling if you abandon the education that will change all three of your lives. I have not found a way to silence it. I have only found a way to keep moving while it speaks. I am a first-generation college student. My father refinanced his house twice — once for my prep school tuition, once for my first year at Columbia — and after that, I was on my own. I withdrew from Columbia because I could not afford to eat — I attended seminars for the free sandwiches and walked an hour each way because subway fare was a luxury. Years later, at CUNY, a physics professor demanded written documentation of my miscarriage before he would excuse my absence. The cruelty of that demand — prove the death of your child to justify missing class — sent me into a spiral I did not recover from for years. I have grieved pregnancies I could not carry. My body dropped from one hundred and sixty pounds to ninety in three months before anyone could diagnose what was wrong. Every one of those seasons taught me the same lesson: the systems were not built for women like me, and if I wanted to finish, I would have to build my own. That is what I am doing now. I returned to Harvard Extension School with eighty-four credits, two children, and the kind of clarity that only comes from having lost everything soft enough to break. I am pursuing Data Science with a concentration in Mathematics because I intend to go further — toward a medical degree in anesthesiology and the launch of NorthStar Women's Wealth & Consulting, a firm designed to hand single mothers the tools I had to piece together alone. I named my daughter Adeline Prime, after prime numbers, because I wanted her name to carry the precision and beauty I find in the subject that first taught me order exists. My son Sidian is named after obsidian — a rock forged in fire. Their names are declarations of what I believe about them and about the life I am constructing around them with deliberate, sometimes desperate, care. This scholarship would change the financial equation I solve every month alongside the one I solve every night. I have six thousand dollars in a 529 plan for myself. That is enough to pay for two classes at Harvard. Since I take one class at a time — because that is all a single mother working and raising two children under seven can sustain — that six thousand dollars is my entire academic year. I have no retirement savings. I have no inheritance. I do not have parents writing tuition checks. I am paying for this degree out of pocket, dollar by dollar, while also funding 529 plans for both of my children because I refuse to let them inherit the same financial cliff I have been climbing since I was eighteen. Two thousand dollars is not an abstraction to me. It is a class. It is a semester I do not have to choose between buying diapers and buying textbooks. It is three months where I can study without the low hum of financial panic drowning out the material I am trying to learn. Every dollar I do not have to divert from my children's stability toward my tuition is a dollar that stays where it belongs — invested in the two people whose futures depend on the choices I make right now, today, while they are watching. I am telling you what it costs because the cost is the point. I am building a life where my children grow up knowing that their mother chose the harder path — not to prove something, but because she understood that safety, health, and stability are not things you wait to receive. They are things you construct, deliberately, with whatever materials you have. I am constructing mine at a kitchen table between a pot of rice and a stack of flashcards, and I will finish what I started.

I built my first financial literacy curriculum by hand. No code, no platform — just a whiteboard, a stack of QuickBooks tutorials, and a room full of artists who had never filed a tax return. The program was called Flap Flap Soar, and my partner and I built it inside our Brooklyn bar, Basquiat's Bottle, to teach our employees how to turn talent into income. We walked them through LLC formation, business credit, and year-end tax filing. Five of those women became full-time artists. Two earned gallery contracts in New York. One toured internationally. The systems worked, but they lived and died with me in the room. That is why I am studying mathematics with a concentration in computer science at Harvard Extension School. I am not learning to code in the abstract. I am learning to code because I have already spent a decade doing the work by hand, and I know exactly what needs to be built. My computer science goals are rooted in application. I am currently completing Udemy's 100 Days of Code in Python, and my first independent project will be a personal finance dashboard — a tool that consolidates budgeting, expense tracking, and savings goals into a single interface accessible to people who have never used financial software. At Harvard, my CS concentration feeds directly into a planned master's degree in data science, where I will study machine learning and AI. I am not interested in the theory alone. I am interested in what happens when you put a well-built tool into the hands of a woman who has been told her whole life that wealth is not for her. Outside of computer science, I am building NorthStar Women's Wealth and Consulting — a platform designed for women and single mothers who are constructing financial independence without a roadmap. The services will span business formation, tax strategy, investing fundamentals, and long-term wealth planning. This is not an idea I had in a classroom. It is the answer to every mistake I made as a business owner who had no one to teach her the paperwork side of ownership, and every barrier I watched other women hit when they had the talent but not the infrastructure. I currently mentor over twenty young entrepreneurs, meeting with them monthly to work through the same foundational steps I once taught at Basquiat's Bottle — only now, I am doing it across state lines, over text messages, one person at a time. One person at a time is not enough. The future I am building sits at the intersection of these goals. I intend to use my computer science training to develop a data-driven financial planning platform that matches women with the specific resources they need — whether that is an LLC filing guide, a tax strategy based on their income bracket, or an investment education track calibrated to their starting point. The same curriculum I taught on a whiteboard in Brooklyn will become a coded, scalable system that reaches women I will never meet in person. My CS skills will be the architecture. My lived experience will be the blueprint. I am a biracial, first-generation college student, a single mother of two, and a woman who has rebuilt her academic path three times to get here. I did not come to computer science because it was expected of me. I came to it because I have already done the work, and I refuse to let that work die in a room I am no longer standing in.

One evening last semester, while working through a statistics problem set at the kitchen table, my six-year-old son Sidian looked up from his own homework and asked me a question I was not prepared for: "Mommy, why do we always do homework together?" I stopped writing. I looked at him — his pencil in his hand, his worksheet next to my textbook — and I understood something I had not fully named before. My education was not just mine. Every late night, every exam, every semester I fought to stay enrolled — he had been watching all of it. My four-month-old daughter Adeline was in the next room, too young to ask questions yet, already absorbing the answer. I was not simply finishing a degree. I was setting a standard for my children, showing them by example what is possible for them to complete. That completion has been a long time coming. I entered Columbia University as a first-generation student carrying both ambition and financial pressure that most of my classmates never had to think about. I worked two jobs. I lived independently. Eventually the cost became unsustainable, and I withdrew. I tried again through CUNY — twice. The first attempt was interrupted by the same financial strain. The second was ended by a series of pregnancy losses that triggered a mental health crisis I could not outwork or outrun. I also manage ulcerative colitis, a chronic illness that adds a layer of physical unpredictability to an already demanding schedule. For a long stretch after the losses, I stopped believing I could finish school and earn my degree. The ambition was still there, but it had gone quiet, the way something you love goes quiet when you set it down and forget to pick it back up. What brought me back was not a single moment of clarity. It arrived in pieces. Therapy. An ADHD diagnosis at thirty-nine that reframed a lifetime of perceived failure — the inability to follow through, the starts without finishes, the clenched jaw and broken teeth from stress I could not name — as an untreated neurological pattern with real, learnable solutions. I stopped demanding perfection and started measuring progress differently. Eighty percent completion became one hundred percent success. I began building systems where I had once relied on willpower alone, and the systems held. When I found Harvard Extension School, I found a program that matched the life I was already living — rigorous enough to earn, flexible enough to hold a woman raising two children, managing a chronic illness, and returning to academics after years away. I am eighty-four credits in, carrying a 3.3 GPA, studying Mathematics with a concentration in Computer Science. I named my daughter Adeline Prime — after prime numbers — because I wanted her name to carry the same precision and beauty I find in the subject that has pulled me forward every time. Mathematics has always offered me something the world rarely does: an answer that holds. A proof that does not shift depending on who is reading it. In a life defined by uncertainty, that clarity became the thing I built from. My education has not simply given me direction. It has given me vocabulary for what I have been doing by instinct since I was twenty-three. For ten years I owned Basquiat's Bottle in Brooklyn — a bar, art gallery, and community space — where I mentored artists who could stop a room with their work but could not file a tax return. We met weekly. We built business plans, formed LLCs, tracked expenses, and filed returns together. Five of those women became full-time artists. Two earned gallery contracts in New York City. One toured internationally. I did not have a degree then. I had a kitchen table and a willingness to sit down. What I lacked was the analytical framework to scale what I had built past the walls of one business. That is what my degree is for. After graduation I am founding NorthStar Women's Wealth & Consulting — a financial firm for women and single mothers who have the discipline and the drive but have never been handed the tools. Business creation, tax strategy, investing, long-term wealth planning — delivered as structure, not lecture, for women building independence on variable income without a roadmap. I already have fifteen names in a notebook, women I have been quietly collecting for three years, each one earning a living, each one ready. Data science and mathematics will give me the precision to build the financial models and planning tools these women deserve. My lived experience will give me the credibility to sit across the table from them and mean it when I say I understand what they are carrying. I am not finishing this degree despite everything I have been through. I am finishing it because of it. Every loss, every restart, every semester I clawed my way back into a classroom taught me something that no textbook could — that who I am becoming matters as much as where I end up. My children are watching. The women I intend to serve are waiting. And I am building a life where my kids are safe and I am still fully me.

I broke my teeth in my sleep. For years, I ground my jaw so tightly at night that the enamel cracked — the body keeping a ledger my mind refused to admit. I was a person capable of starting anything and finishing almost nothing, and the distance between what I was supposed to be doing and what I could bring myself to actually do had become a physical thing, carried in the joints of my face. I was thirty-nine when I was diagnosed with ADHD. The diagnosis did not rescue me. What it did was force me to renegotiate the terms of my own accountability. For most of my adult life, I had measured myself against the working assumption that a reasonably intelligent person should be able to finish what she starts through ordinary effort. When I fell short, I concluded that I was lazy. I punished myself for it. The pattern fed itself: the more I believed I was lazy, the less I trusted my own plans, and the less I trusted my plans, the more often they collapsed. Growth, for me, has been the slow unlearning of that math. The single change that moved me forward was permission to aim for eighty percent. I used to set a day's goals and count it as a loss if I missed any of them — a framework built for someone whose brain does not work the way mine does. Now I write the list, break each item into individual action steps, and call the day a success if I complete eighty percent of it. Counterintuitively, I complete more. What I lost was not ambition. What I lost was the all-or-nothing trap that kept my ambition decorative. Around that rule, I built the infrastructure that neurotypical students are handed quietly and early: external lists instead of internal memory, written plans instead of assumed follow-through, routines that do the work discipline alone could not. These are not crutches. They are the architecture that makes the rest of me functional. The proof is academic, because that is where I chose to test it. I am a first-generation college student finishing a bachelor's in Data Science with a concentration in Mathematics at Harvard Extension School. I hold a 3.3 GPA and have completed eighty-four credits. I did this as the mother of a young daughter, while running a business, without family money and without a template. None of it happened because I suddenly found focus. It happened because I stopped pretending I did not need systems and started building the ones I did. A learning difference is not an obstacle that can be willed out of the way. It is a specification. The growth I have found is in building for that specification on purpose, instead of breaking my teeth on the pretense that it isn't there. What my daughter will see, when she looks back, is not a mother who outran her diagnosis. She will see a mother who learned to name it, to design around it, and to finish things anyway — one eighty-percent day at a time. That is the work, and it is ongoing. Ambition, in my experience, is not a feeling. It is a structure you can still operate inside on the days you cannot feel it at all.

The firm I am building does not exist yet. It exists in spreadsheets, in curriculum drafts, in the names of fifteen women I have been quietly collecting in a notebook for three years — women who will be among NorthStar Women's Wealth & Consulting's first clients when it opens. Every one is a single mother. Every one earns a living. Every one has been told, explicitly or by omission, that wealth planning is not a room she is invited into. The social issue I am working to address is the financial exclusion of the women the industry has decided are too small to serve. Single mothers. First-generation earners. Artists, service workers, and small business owners whose incomes are irregular enough that traditional advisors cannot bill them predictably. It is not that these women do not want financial literacy. It is that the structures built to deliver it were not built for them. I learned this at a kitchen table in Brooklyn. For ten years I ran Basquiat's Bottle — part bar, part art gallery, part community space — and the artists who worked for me were extraordinary in every way except the one the IRS cared about. They could stop a room with color. They could not file a return. So we met weekly. We built business plans. We formed LLCs. We opened lines of business credit, tracked expenses through QuickBooks, and at year's end I walked each woman through her taxes, line by line, because compliance should not be the thing that kills a dream. Five became full-time artists. Two signed gallery contracts in New York. One toured internationally. None had been served by the existing system. All of them were served by a woman with a notebook and a willingness to sit down. In the two years since, I have mentored more than twenty young entrepreneurs in my community on the same mechanics — the unsexy part of a first year nobody teaches. The pattern has held: the knowledge is not complicated. The access is. NorthStar is my answer to access. Business formation, tax strategy, investing, long-term wealth planning — delivered as clear, usable structure for women building financial independence without a roadmap. I am currently a Data Science student at Harvard Extension School, concentrating in Mathematics, because the precision data science demands is the same precision required to build financial tools that work for women living on variable income. My community service taught me what needs to exist. My education is teaching me how to build it at a scale that outlasts me. Some will argue that financial literacy alone cannot close a gap this wide — that without policy reform, equal pay, and capital access, teaching women spreadsheets is a patch on a structural wound. They are right. Literacy is not sufficient. But it is a prerequisite. A woman who cannot read her own profit-and-loss statement cannot negotiate her worth, cannot demand the capital she has earned, cannot pass the map to her daughter. Systemic change and individual capacity build each other. I am a first-generation college student, a single mother of two, a woman who has rebuilt from real losses more than once. The women NorthStar is for are not hypothetical. They are me, three versions ago. They are the artists who learned from me. They are the twenty entrepreneurs learning now. They are the fifteen names in the notebook. I am not waiting for permission to solve this. I am building the system, and I am using every tool I earn to make sure it works when I hand it over.

I am a first-generation biracial woman who has spent her life building in the space between. I am a single mother of two, a Data Science student at Harvard Extension School, the former owner of a ten-year Brooklyn business, and the future founder of NorthStar Women's Wealth & Consulting. I turn visions into systems, and systems into outcomes. Adversity is not a chapter of my life. It is the material I build from. The hardest season came when I lost multiple pregnancies. Grief alone would have been enough to flatten most people. What complicated mine was the layered fear that shadows every Black woman walking into an American hospital — the maternal mortality statistics, the research documenting how routinely our pain is minimized, dismissed, or missed entirely until it is too late. Every appointment was a negotiation between hope and vigilance. Every loss arrived wrapped in the question of whether the outcome might have been different if I had been a different kind of patient in a different kind of body. The cumulative weight triggered a mental health crisis that pulled me out of CUNY entirely. For a long stretch, I stopped believing I could finish anything. I did not overcome it through willpower. Willpower had already failed me for years. I overcame it by dismantling the life I thought I was supposed to want and building a smaller, more honest one in its place. I went to therapy. I received an ADHD diagnosis at thirty-nine that reframed a lifetime of perceived failure as an untreated neurological pattern. I learned that eighty percent completion is one hundred percent success. I stopped confusing the absence of a mentor with the absence of possibility. When I found Harvard Extension School — rigorous enough to be worth my time, flexible enough to hold the life I was already living — I returned to school with eighty-four credits, a 3.3 GPA, and a clarity I never had at eighteen. What the loss shaped in me was a refusal to let the next generation of women inherit the same silence. I named my daughter Adeline Prime, after prime numbers, because I wanted her name to carry the precision and beauty I find in mathematics. I mentor more than twenty young entrepreneurs in my community. I am designing NorthStar as the financial infrastructure single mothers are rarely handed — business creation, tax strategy, investing, long-term planning — because time is the most valuable asset a woman has, and financial independence is what returns it to her. To anyone walking the same road — a BIPOC woman who has lost a pregnancy, or a mother who has lost the version of herself she thought she was building — my advice is the one Simon M. Humphrey lived by and left behind: control what you can control. You cannot control the statistics, the systems, or the chemistry of grief. You can control whether you get up today and do one small, deliberate thing that moves you forward. Build the structure. Trust the structure. Structure is where possibility lives.

I have always been passionate about mathematics. I find the subject truly beautiful because there is so much grace and mystery in it while simultaneously being full of structure, order and logic. Math has made me feel like life can be full of possibility and discovery. My formal education has been stop and start again but returning to school at this point in my life, pursuing a B.A in Mathematics from Harvard University and then a Masters of Finance, I feel like achieving this dream is actually possible. I expect to graduate in 2029. I have a detailed, well-paced plan and the support of my academic advisors, my family and my friends. Most of all I have a belief in myself, a determination to see my vision to the finish line. I feel a deep sense of purpose when I think of the consulting firm I want to open. Northern Star Women’s Wealth gets its name from concept that the North Star is a steadfast marker that can always guide you home. I want to be the guide for other women as they gain control over their financial lives. This is a purpose, a personal mission statement that I can be proud of. Many women have the creativity, drive and passion needed to win in this world, but without the tools, skills and mentorship they cannot take their ideas from concept to reality. I can help bridge the gap. I know I can because of my experience leading teams. With limited resources and no formal education in financial studies, I helped the majority of my staff launch their own businesses. Some were creatives that needed help monetizing their art, a few launched clothing brands, one is now a professional writer for a prestigious magazine, another a professional photographer. All got their start under the umbrella of my mentorship. I know that as I grow my own knowledge, network and certifications I can reach more women. Managing that business taught me to adapt constantly because being flexible as life changes will present me with the greatest opportunities. I learned to have faith in myself. I am more than capable because I am determined to be consistent, always willing to pivot, always wanting to share space with others. Teamwork makes the dream work is literally one of my management philosophies to the point that it has become a call and response catch phrase with my teams. My academic journey has not been easy. I have survived losing multiple pregnancies, financial strain, chronic illness, and housing instability. My son was born in 2020. His birth reignited my academic goals, reinforcing the values I want to model for my children: ambitious drive, determination, resilience, compassion. My daughter will be born in December of this year. I want my children to see their mother as someone who does not abandon her aspirations even when faced with potentially overwhelming challenges. Who I am, who I push myself to become will set the standard for what they believe they can achieve in this life. I will not allow them to believe they deserve anything less than their dreams. My role is to show them through my actions that dreams thrive through hard work, consistency and determination. To be fully engaged in a meaningful work while crafting a life in which I can be fully present for my children, this is my dream. I will found a company that opens doors for women. I will provide empowerment, guidance and trust. Creating generational wealth means giving women back their time and their choices, the true meaning of financial independence.

To me, resilience is the personal choice to push forward even when life’s challenges make the world feel overwhelming and unrecognizable. It is a quiet decision that is based in determination and personal fortitude. Resilience means adaptability, being able to constantly pivot through changing life circumstances. It means not giving into self pity, despite facing hardships and choices you never asked for. Resilience is finding humor in moments when it seems easier to give into despair. It means rebuilding yourself over and over. Ultimately, the daily practice of choosing to be resilient is a practice of choosing to be at peace with your life, choosing faith, hope and discipline. My experience with chronic illness began during the second wave of COVID-19 in New York City. I had just had my first child when I began to feel unwell rapidly descending into violent illness. I lost so much weight so quickly, dropping from 155 pounds to 90 pounds in two months. At the time medical care was restricted as all resources were directed to fighting the pandemic. I went months without being able to see a doctor. Eating was difficult. I could not keep food in me. Walking became painful. I developed large ulcers on my legs. When the city finally reopened medical services, I was diagnosed with severe ulcerative colitis. Navigating motherhood during this time was the greatest challenge of my life. Quarantine meant that I had no support for either myself or my son. There were days when I could not stand and did not want to get out of bed. But being a mother does not stop. My son needed me to care for his basic needs, to put on a false face of happiness and excitement and shelter him from the reality of my painful experiences. We survived those months together and I learned that not only is resilience a form of endurance, but love in action. Since then, I have experienced two to three flares per year. The flares start slowly and can escalate quickly, often accompanied by erythema nodosum—the softball-sized ulcers on my legs that make walking nearly impossible. Resilience is humor and over the years I have collected beautiful canes to help me walk as I heal providing an interesting spin on my wardrobe and fashion choices. Resilience has meant restarting my education repeatedly and adapting a new perspective. Flares of chronic illness affect my concentration, attendance, and energy. But I am nothing if not determined, always returning to school. Earning my bachelors and masters degrees is a life goal. A while back I had a shift in perspective that allowed me to see a blessing in my illness. Living with chromic illness has cultivated empathy in me. I know how much it takes to simply show up when your body is fighting you. I hope those living with chronic illness who read my story can learn that resilience is not perfection—it is perspective. Happiness is always one shift in perspective away.