As a child, my first violin was gifted to me by my local Boys and Girls Club. I had discounted violin lessons at the prestigious Cleveland Institute of Music as a reward from my community’s arts initiative, I participated in a music program called El Sistema for low-income inner-city youth, and I attended summer arts programs on scholarship. I am an artist by passion, fueled by the service of those who understand the vitality of civic engagement. I am among the many inner-city youth who, without the donations and service of others, may not have been afforded access to the arts. Music truly made me the leader and civic servant I am today. Before I was blessed with the gift of music education, I was a shy, soft-spoken girl who could barely look others in the eye. I lacked confidence and I did not believe that my voice held power. However, playing the violin at different music programs taught me that I could lead even from the sidelines, my chamber music classes taught me that I could help someone with just a simple acknowledgment and a smile, and my first solos taught me that my voice and talents had power. My music education taught me the art of speaking up, being confident, leading others, and most importantly, how to accept myself as a masterpiece in progress. Despite all of the things I loved about my art programs, I saw issues within the programs as well. I recall many times sitting in music programs being one of the few students of minority descent or low-income background. After reflecting on the impact music has made in my life and realizing that funding for arts programming has been cut for thousands of youth in my city, I wanted to do my part to ensure that all youth had access to the benefits of arts. I created a nonprofit called I Art Cleveland whose mission is to provide access to arts education, programming, and funding sources to underserved youth. With funding help awarded to me by the owner of Essence Communication Ventures, I Art Cleveland has been able to serve families by providing monthly art date nights and cover student’s cost of attending arts programming. Because of our services, students and families have attended the ballet and visited the Cleveland Playhouse Square for the first time, taken their first dance lessons, attended their first arts program, created their first portfolio, found the courage to follow lost dreams, and received funding to continue their passions when their parents couldn’t afford it. I Art Cleveland’s most recent endeavor is a program called “Creative Justice”, a four-week virtual youth program providing masterclasses facilitated by local artists from different genres. It culminates in a virtual art show highlighting the artwork created in the young artist’s view on the current state of racial injustices in our communities. We are hoping to use this workshop to introduce youth to different art forms and share their work with the community to inspire others to pursue the arts as well. While I am in college, I will continue to promote I Art Cleveland with my connections in the city, create partnerships with some of the larger arts organizations in my area, and reach a larger audience. I Art Cleveland will continue to raise money to give arts scholarships to students, and use our partnerships to expose more people to the benefits of the arts. In the future and beyond college, my dream is to expand I Art Cleveland on a national level, hosted in different cities, so that underrepresented youth and their families all over the country can have access to the arts and arts education. I believe art is a privilege that all youth should have access to, and through I Art Cleveland, I am able to give back and help cultivate a legacy of young artists and leaders.

When I was younger, I loved creating contraptions under the name, The Inventress. I made things like vibrating back scratches that reached multiple spots at once and a pulley system that simplified rinsing dishes. Once I got my first taste of gaming through my Pink Nintendo DSI, I quickly became interested in learning how to be a digital inventress through code. After learning how to create a text-based adventure game in the language C# at summer camp, I became obsessed with coding. I participated in computer science camps and research each year after that, and I began creating new “inventions” in the form of creative online tools, games, and websites. I fell in love with computer science because coding is like doing magic with a keyboard. With the correct lines of code, I can create anything I want, from a new game or website to alternate realities and intelligent technologies. Computer science is thrilling because it gives me the ability to literally be a magician, to create something from nothing, and use this ability to better the lives of others. This summer, while reading up on news about the field, I stumbled across an article about a company that conducted the world’s first successful total knee replacement surgery using smart glasses enhanced with augmented reality and artificial intelligence. I was completely awestruck by how this technology enhanced the surgical process, so I decided to write a science article about how artificial intelligence (AI) and augmented reality (AR) can revolutionize the healthcare sector. I spent hours researching ways these two technologies can be combined to create an augmented human intelligence in healthcare workers, and I even secured interviews with experts from Google Healthcare and the Medical Virtual Reality department at the University of Southern California to broaden my understanding. I gave my all to this project, losing track of time researching potential applications and barriers to integrating this technology into everyday life, and I was very happy to get my article published in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Office of Engineering Outreach Program e-publication at the end of this summer. After studying how AI and AR can be integrated into the healthcare sector, I have become increasingly interested in how this technology can be used to help my community, especially in the midst of the re-emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement this summer. Between the tragic murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless others who look like me, I began thinking of ways this technology can be used to create change during this tense time. I would love to explore the opportunity of a safety integration in AR/AI glasses that could read a person’s constitutional rights to them when they are stopped by the police and display the officer’s badge number and title. I also envision AR/AI glasses made for the police officers to wear that could recognize the person’s face and tell the officer the person’s criminal record, their occupation, if they have a family, etc. Although facial recognition raises some ethical concerns, I believe these issues can be solved with proper regulations in place that ensure the security and diversity of the data collected. The integration of this technology in these situations could bring humanity back into civilian-police interactions, make people feel safer, and even save lives. By pursuing computer science in college, I hope to continue studying this technology and go on to achieve my Ph.D. in the field with a concentration in human-computer interaction and artificial intelligence. In light of the systemic injustices that myself and other minority communities face in our society, I want to become an expert in this field to create a software company that produces technology that accents and improves the minority experience. Through virtual experiences and programs that augment human intelligence, I want to use the magic of computer science to expose people to new perspectives, and better the lives of minority communities.