A piece of art that inspires me is Can't Help Myself, a robot art exhibit, by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu. The robot is held within a box and has a deep red liquid that resemble blood around it, set on a slight incline the liquid slowly spreads farther away, but once it reaches a certain point the robot reaches out and scoops the liquid back to the center. Seeing the piece in 2016 when it was first installed compared to 2019 when the piece died invokes a feeling of sadness. With its rusted parts and barely functioning mechanics the idea that it can't help itself makes you wish that it wouldn't suffer. And that sentiment is why it inspires me so much. This robot has moved people so much that it doesn't matter that it's not living, people feel pity for it, they mourn the robot's death. Two words that shouldn't go together because robots aren't alive, but this truly proves that art is alive. That's the kind of feeling I wish to invoke with my own art and that is why Can't Help Myself has inspired me so much.

The most inspiring book I've read would be the Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan. There were a lot of books I could have chosen, but the book that has had the most long lasting impact would be this series. The first time I read the series was when I was eleven and they were the reason that I started writing. The idea of a group of twelve year olds going on these amazing adventures made me feel like I could do the same, plus the underlying message of friendship and protecting the environment inspired me to get into community service and help protect my communities local parks.

At this moment, I would put $1,000 towards my college tuition. My parents are still paying off their own student loans so I'm hoping to avoid going into too much debt. Getting a college degree would help me get a job that could help me not only pay off the debts I will have from college, but also hopefully allow me to help my parents. My mom was in a car accident a few years ago and is still recovering from the brain injury, that combined with Covid, she doesn't have a job right now and making rent has become almost impossible. My goal is to one day be able to help her not live in fear of getting kicked out of her home.

I have always been fascinated by people, I love talking to them and I love observing the way that they talk to one another. When I was younger my favorite pastime was “people watching.” Now that I’m older I still have a fascination with the way people interact which is why I found myself drawn to the field of anthropology. My father is a scientist, a plant scientist, but he still instilled in me a wonder for the sciences. He was the one who always encouraged me to join STEM-oriented classes, the one who pushed me to join Running Start so that I could get a head start on higher education, but it was my mother that solidified for me that I wanted to actually go into a STEM field. She has had a few different jobs in my lifetime, but they were all centered around people, specifically helping people and the community. Thanks to her influence I joined the Interact club at my school and spent my after-school time volunteering for the community. And thanks to her I realized my passion for anthropology specifically. I want to be able to study the way people interact, the different micro-cultures that develop between people in different groups. It is hard for people to understand others. We see different cultures and all we see is something different. Anthropologists make sense of the “different” and share it with the rest of the world in such a way that these cultural differences are small. They make it so that understanding and therefore working towards a more universally accepting world is possible. I recently read an article by an anthropologist who was observing prostitutes in the Bronx and in doing so she was humanizing these women, making it so that way the reader understands why these women were doing what they were doing and sharing their stories. That’s what I want for my future. I want to observe and make sense of cultures in such a way that people can understand these differences, humanize people so that even if they have a different culture, people can still see that they are human. If I want to do this for a living and make my passion my life I need a higher education, at least a bachelor’s degree but more than likely I will have to get a masters or higher, which is why this scholarship is so important to me.

I wasn’t old enough to have an understanding of death when my grandmother died. I was seven years old, so young that I don’t really remember her now. What I do remember, what is ingrained in my mind, is the way that my dad reacted to her passing. I had never seen my dad cry before; it hadn’t really registered to me that my dad had feelings up until that point. In the mind of seven-year-old me my dad was not a person; he was my dad. He was the person who comforted me when I cried and who I ran to when I was scared. He was like a superhero. And then I saw the look on his face, the way that he was still trying to keep it together in front of me, and I realized that my dad was a person too. Up until that point if something went wrong, I would hide behind my dad because he could make monsters go away, but after that, there was a part of me that didn’t want him to have to. There was a sudden need for independence inside me, I wanted to be someone my dad could depend on. Which was ridiculous because I was seven, but now that I’m older and I can look back on it I think that was the moment I really started to be a self-sufficient person. I wanted to be able to do things, wanted to be someone that could be relied on. My dad doesn’t come to me when he’s crying or scared, but I have grown to be someone who he can depend on. He doesn’t have to hide every problem from me, because now I’m old enough and capable enough to help fix them.