I use a color code method! Not only do different colors keep me focused, it has also been proven to help students remember and retain information more effectively. Once I am done with a lesson, I get out my grid paper notebooks and the notes I took in class and get to work. Red stars go next to information the teacher said was important for up and coming tests and assignments. Vocabulary words are wrote in blue. Equations are wrote in orange because they are very important for specific problems. Then side notes and anything extra get wrote in pink/purple. I also use transparent sticky notes to trace diagrams in a textbook and then transfer them into my notes with a green star. The sticky notes are really useful for classes like anatomy, chemistry and biology because not only are you looking at the diagrams, but you are also remembering how you draw and label it as you trace over it!

My goal after I have my chemical engineering degree is to secure a stable job to start saving up for my dream. Ever since I was little I have wanted to build my own house, and so building my own house has been my dream ever since! A medium sized house with the brick and wood style design, a large yard (10+ acres), and a large and efficient greenhouse. The green house is mostly because I am the only one in my immediate family with a green thumb and it brings me joy to see all my hard work produce something so amazing. I also want to be a foster mom! I feel as though I could do more good in my life by providing more education and homes to them and that thought alone makes me work even harder toward these goals. I also wish to adopt some of the kids I foster should they so wish it!

I have just recently lost several people who were very important to me. However, my grandfather death is the one that hit me the hardest. He had been there with me though everything. Everyone in the family knew that if they needed someone to talk to or someone to give them a straight forward and blunt answer, he was the one they could go to. I feel like I have also gained that mindset from him of if you wish for a blunt answer, I'll be the one to give it to you. I had got to see him in the hospital before his passing, and the state he was in was devastating. Being only 19, I feel as though I have my entire life ahead of me, but seeing him in that state and seeing the devastation it brought my family when he passed truly made me realize how short life actually is. This realization helped me focus on some things as well. My mother and I have a very tough relationship, however I do not want that to be how we remember each other. Since the funeral of my grandfather, my mother an I have had several conversations on our relationship and have agreed that it is unhealthy. So, we have been working to communicate more because shutting each other out will not help. So to fight to get our relationship to a healthy and happy standing we are and will continue to have daily calls and conversations, as well as time set aside for us to just have fun with one another. In short, I am fighting for a better relationship with my mom now that I realize that in this short life we live there is no time for hatred among us.

Equality is what keeps a community and country together. Everytime that something happens that results in the treatment of someone ending up being unequal to a different person, it creates tension and animosity between them. Whether it is a category of people or just a couple individuals, that tension and animosity furthers the rift that already is between different people. This causes a lot of verbal fights and arguments. Take racism for example, should we had just treated everyone equally from the start we would not have to have so much distrust between the people and their neighbors. Alongside equality, I believe is one of the most important factors to have in a community/nation. Let's consider everyone has the same likes and dislikes, the same culture, hairstyles (etc...). Eventually, everyone would be so similar because there is no difference between them. This would make everything and everyone extraordinarily boring. Today it is those different cultures and diversity that give us all these wonderful foods and holidays that bring people joy. If you take all of that away because everyone is so similar, it would almost be as if someone zapped the joy out of life.

I am a 19 year old female that has been told by several people that I am too girly/feminine and dumb to pursue a career in chemical engineering. I have been pursuing a career in chemical engineering since I was in 8th grade. There was a speaker that was talking about engineering, and how everything that is in the room an engineer had a part in. That is when I had begun looking into engineering as my possible career path. I had always been good at math and loved science, so I thought there would be no harm in looking into the STEM career pathways. Through my research, I learned just how much of a part engineers have in our day to day lives and all of the items in and out of the household. That is when I can across chemical engineering. My uncle is a chemical engineer, so I thought that I should look a little closer into that one. That was the best decision that I could have ever made. Chemical engineering checked all the boxes I was looking for in a career. Reading about it I saw that I would be financially secure, the field is vast and ever expanding, and it included a field that I loved (science). Not only that, but they were and still are looking for more women in the field. From then on, all of the classes that I had selected in my highschool was geared towards chemical engineering. I took all the science classes that I could. I was in the advanced math a year ahead of my class, and I even took some of the engineering courses that my highschool provided. My freshman year I took Intro to Engineering Design and I was the only female in my class. My class had 26 students in it and I thought that it was silly that more girls are not going into STEM. Though, that is probably due to all the scrutiny they get, like I did. As a young woman going into STEM, my goal is to influence other women into going into these careers. I want to show them that it does not matter what other people say about your career choice or if it is a field dominated my men. All that matters is if it is the career that YOU want to go into. I also want to prove to the men that all their efforts to discourage me from pursuing chemical engineering were all in vain, and that they just made me stronger for it!

Anyone who believes that Marie Curie is not an inspiring female leader, must not know of her work, her achievements, or just aren't in the science field. Marie Curie has been the one to inspire me the most. Through all the criticism she had gotten, she still pushed through and showed everyone her potential and capabilities. That is the type of person that I aspire to be, however long I have to go to become that person I will work my way there. I am a female going into the stem field of chemical engineering. This field, like most stem fields, is highly dominated by men. I have been consistently told that I am too girly and too dumb to ever be a good engineer, and let alone a good chemical engineer. This is when I always look back to Marie Curie. She probably had way more people tell her that she could not achieve anything in the science field, yet in her life she was the first woman to when the Nobel prize in the first woman to win it twice. She was a female and she was also in the stem field of her time. So why do others think that they can put another woman down for pursuing the stem field like she once did. When I finally become a chemical engineer, after my schooling, I may not be recognized as a leader in my specific field. At least not at the start. I want to be the type of leader that people know that they can count on without actually knowing that I'm doing anything for them. Marie Curie didn't know that she was a leader to me, and yet here I am following a similar line as she did. I want to be a symbol for any women that are going into the same career as I. A symbol that no matter what people are throwing at you you can push through and you will be able to. Marie Curie did it, several other women did it, and soon I will also have done it. So, the type of leader that I want to be is not the one that necessarily sticks out in the spotlight for everyone to recognize as a leader. I want to be the leader that a group of people know of because they went through the same struggles that I did. So that I can be that symbol for them like Marie Curie was for me.

A stubborn red head, is a nickname that I have acquired from my friends and family. I have been known by them to argue a point whether I know I'm right or wrong. Since this is my most front forth characteristic of myself, I tend to put a lot of value in it. I have seen several people talk about how stubbornness is most the time a bad quality in a person, but I digress. Sure, it can be a bad quality if you let your ego get involved with what you're being stubborn about. However, if you can learn to keep it out, and keep an open mind it can actually be a really rewarding quality. I once had an argument, however small it was, with a friend of mine over a couple answers on a test study guide. We ended up discussing the answers further and I realized that my answers were the ones that were wrong. This is a time I'm glad I didn't let my ego get in the way. When the test came up the next day the questions that I had gotten wrong in the study guide were on the test. So, since I had agreed with my friends that the answers that I put my study guide were wrong I fixed them for the test and ended up passing it. I have had several times where the situation was reversed, and I ended up assisting someone else that thought they knew the material but had one of the steps wrong. Besos just One of the ways that being stubborn is one of my most valued qualities in myself. My stubbornness, has also gotten me out of a couple different situations. One of which was at my place of work. I am a volleyball coach right now, and there are several times where the athletes or the parents wish to argue with me about one thing or another. One time I had a parent end up cussing me out because she had misread the email on where the volleyball tournament was. All of the other parent and athletes showed up to the correct place and on time. I ended up having a meeting with the club director and this parent about that interaction. I had brought up the email with all the information on it and showed that she was on the email, and was able to let them know that everybody else had arrived on time at the correct place. Instead of me getting a scolding from my boss and this parent again, my stubbornness actually pushed me to show them the evidence rather then just rolling over and letting them lead the conversation in a way that would be worse off for me. I wholeheartedly believe, that it is my own persistence and stubbornness that have gotten me where I am today. I have had people tell me I'm too young, that I am too girly to be pursuing a degree in the stem field. From that I have decided to prove them wrong and that is how my stubbornness is helping me in my life's journey. By pushing me through all of the demeaning comments from others, and I encourage others to do the same.

I support all religions and practices, so when I see people disrespect someone for their religious practice it really gets to me. There was a time that I went to the grocery store, and there was a woman in the makeup aisle wearing a hijab. If you don't know a job is a head covering scarf meant to cover the hair of a woman that is a part of the Muslim religion and culture. Later on, I had seen that same woman in another aisle with two other women (they were not wearing hijabs or niqabs). They were loudly talking about how the woman was wearing a hijab, and making fun of it. They said things like "Did she just want to be lazy and not do her hair" and "does she know how weird she looks". I may not be muslim, but I could not let this continue. It is absolutely appalling to me when people are so ignorant not to know how other religions practice, and how people harass another person just because of their practices or how they look. This is when I had walked down the aisle, and kindly asked the two women to stop making comments about her. The two women looked a bit shocked, I don't know if it was because they were caught or because someone finally stood up against them but that didn't matter and they eventually left. I didn't say too much to the woman in the hijab, because I did not feel like there was anything I needed to say. All I did was stop the harassment from continuing further. However, she did thank me for doing that and told me how often that happened to her and that she was basically used to it. Wondering why people do this to other people. Does it bring them joy? Do they take some sort of gratification from it? No matter what someone's reason is, it should never happen to anyone. Thankfully in recent months I haven't witnessed any more atrocities like this one. However, that event made me realize just how cruel people can be for the smallest reasons. Also, how we need to stick up for each other and ourselves, or else this behavior will continue. While I do not have a video of this interaction, below I have pasted another video of a woman in Austria getting harassed for wearing a hijab/headscarf. That will just go to show you that it's not just in one area of the world it's everywhere. I believe that we just need to learn to support and respect each other so that way no person has to go through this sort of treatment.

Bad day will always happen but you cannot let the weigh you down! This is exactly why the song that inspires me the most is is 100 Bad Days by AJR. It is a song about how no matter how badly events in your life had played out so far, or if you are just having a miserable day, later on in your life you will be able to look back on that time and see how it has made you a stronger person and maybe even laugh at it or tell it as a story. I had found this song when I had been having a really tough day at work with one of the customers. I was being berated and yelled at, and after listening to this song I knew that later on I would be able to look back on that event and laugh because it was not my fault and just a misunderstanding of the policy. Thanks to that song, I no longer let bad moments in my life weigh me down. I always get back up and move to the next day knowing that it'll probably make me laugh later on.

I have never really been a confident person. Up until recently I have always thought you had you have popularity to be confident, but thanks to my new friends I realized that confidence means something different to everyone. To me it means to be brave enough to stand up for myself, what I believe in, and stand up for others even when I know that I will be met with adversity. Ever since I have found my confidence, I have been wearing clothes that make me feel happy and not just because others like them. In order to keep and improve my confidence, I have started playing dungeons and dragons. This tabletop role play game has really pushed me out of my shell. I also started coaching, and though coaching I have to show others that I am confident in my decisions and that whatever they say or do will not affect how I am coaching my athletes!