In short, I want to build my confidence. I truly believe people are capable of so much more than what they currently believe, yet their confidence leads them to stay silent, unchallenged, and unmotivated. I have many plans for not only my future, but the future of diverse, multicultural individuals in need of mental healthcare. As a current undergraduate student majoring in Psychology & Sociology at the University of North Carolina, it is my goal t become a science-practitioner that uses my own empirical findings and data to further therapy sessions, mental health treatments, and overall attitudes about getting support. That said, growing up I had a lot of tmes where being confident wasn't appreciated. In fact, during post-COVID years, I ended up with severe agoraphobia, causing me to isolate and lose a lot of confidence in both myself and the world. But I knew that with a career path like mine, I could not hide in the shadows forever, as that would be promoting the one thing that I want my clients to do the opposite of. So, in order to build a solid model for my clinical research and applications, I had to build up myself to be the model for others. I believe that everyone starts somewhere, and sometimes people don't even realize that their pain has faded from the main view. I want to impact others in a way that they will be able to fully function and almost forget the pain that their mental health has caused. But I cannot do this until I find my own confidence to begin healing and improve myself. I also don't want mental health issues reoccurring just for a profit, rather I want clients to be able to go back out into the world with a new perspective, fresh eyes, and a confident mindset. This is what I want to build and this is where I want it to spread to.

1). My name is Lily and I am a current Psychology & Sociology senior undergraduate student at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. It is my goal as a future science-practitioner under the clinical psychology category, to focus on cross-cultural treatments, therapy, and diagnosis that will further help underserved communities gain support for the mental and emotional health. I plan on completing a dual pathway in both research/academia and clinical therapy, allowing me to bring my own empirical data and findings into the therapy space for a more enhanced session with my clients. It is truly my goal as a future clinician and researcher to make sure the people in need get the support tailored specifically to them, and not straight out of the standard diagnostic manual. If I cold do anything with my life, I would start my own business with different psychologists in different psychological perspectives, who can also work alongside other members of mental health services, tailoring the perfect experience for clients. Many businesses look to profit off of their clients, keeping them in for decades and never truly giving them the full access to the tools they need, which has further strengthened my goal of doing the very opposite. It s extremely important to me that clients can walk away feeling like they can become independent and not rely on prescriptions, therapy sessions, hypnosis, etc. for the rest of their lives as the only way to feel like a functioning human being. I would make sure financial burdens are kept as low as possible, sessions are full with guides, tools, and the space that the client needs, as well as tools and resources extending outside of my business. 2). What excites me about STEM in the psychology field is the idea of using empirical data and scientific findings and translating it over to real-world settings. It is expected that every client's experience is different than the exact symptoms and facts found in lab-created data, but having fully enriched evidence of common themes and treatments is a huge win for incorporating science into theories and perspectives in psychology. Building on that, I believe it would be my job, not just in the future, but as a current undergraduate student, to understand the boundaires and complexities that the real world may offer. Including different cultural standards to treatments, medications, therapy, etc. The United States has become such as melting pot for diversity and inclusion in medical fields is still very limited. That is where my research and efforts to become more competent and knowledgable in as many cultures as I can. This is also where having different psychological perspectives and a diverse staff would come in, to further that inclusivity and understanding of different subjects, values, and norms. Using the proper technology would enhance this goal even more, as tools and resources using advanced systems creates an efficient, easy, and quick atmosphere for everyone included. This includes security of PHI information of the clients, proper running systems for the clinicians, and a connected system for all fields involved. 3). The biggest challenge for me has been my most recent study abroad experience. I have planned to study in Seoul, South Korea at Yonsei University in the fall of 2026. This will help me get that cross-cultural and multidimensional perspective to less Westernized populations. Treatments, healthcare, medicines, and even advertisements for mental health support is displayed in a much different way in Eastern cultures than Western societies, focusing on more collective experiences and hidden support. Understanding this will promote my motivation to incorporate healthcare for a diverse group with different norms and values, but also respect the culture they have without throwing Westernized standards on them. With that being said, as a young undergraduate who has never traveled via planeride nor visited any country outside of the U.S., this experience has ben a lot to handle outside of the academic benefits. I have struggled with anxiety in the past, especially a form of anxiety called "agoraphobia", which is the fear of being trapped in a public space. This has led me to isolate myself, especially during the years of COVID where isolation was highly promoted. It took me a while to build up my own confidence and step back into the real world for my early college year, and now to step into a whole new continent by myself. I have greatly struggled with putting my goals and dreams over the current feelings of anxiousness and wonder, however, it will not stop me from completing my trip and gain the experience I need, in both academia and personal skills. I will go to South Korea and fail like every other young adult, and I will pick myself back up and start again with a new understanding. This kind of mindset will improve my skills and confidence in later years as a researcher and clinician, as not everything will go smoothly the first few times. I will continue to improve and learn in every way.

My mother never had the luxury of dreaming out loud. She worked, she sacrificed, and she kept our family moving forward through circumstances that would have stopped most people cold. Watching her taught me something I carry into every room I enter: that resilience is not the absence of hardship, it is the decision to keep building anyway. She is the reason I chose psychology. She is the reason I refuse to stop. I am pursuing a Ph.D. in clinical psychology because I have seen what happens when communities go without adequate mental health care. Growing up, I watched people around me struggle in silence, not because help did not exist somewhere, but because it did not exist for them. Culturally competent care, providers who reflect the communities they serve, resources offered in ways that feel accessible rather than foreign, these things were luxuries where I came from. I want to spend my career making them standard. Right now, I am an undergraduate researcher studying cognition, psychopathology, and emotion, and I work as a psychology clinic intern gaining hands-on experience with real patients navigating real difficulties. My focus is on schizophrenia and psychosis disorders, conditions that are frequently misunderstood, under-researched in minority populations, and met with stigma rather than support. I want to change that, through direct clinical work, through research that centers underserved communities, and through training future clinicians to lead with cultural humility. The people who inspire me most are not famous. They are my mother, who showed me what perseverance looks like when no one is watching. They are the patients I have sat with who came in guarded and left a little more hopeful. They are the community members who showed up to a public park on a Saturday to glue paper to a canvas and tell their stories through art, events I organize to create free, accessible creative space in Greensboro. Giving back is not something I plan to do once I have a degree. It is something I am already doing, because I learned early that you do not wait until conditions are perfect to show up for people. Sloane Stephens built her foundation at twenty years old, in the middle of a demanding career, because she understood that access changes lives. Her grandparents believed in the power of education not as a personal achievement but as something that ripples outward, into families, neighborhoods, and generations not yet born. That belief resonates with me completely. My education is not mine alone. It belongs to every person in my community who never had the chance, and every future patient who deserves a clinician who truly sees them. This scholarship would ease the financial weight of graduate school and allow me to focus fully on the work that matters, the research, the clinical training, the community presence, the slow and necessary work of building systems that actually serve people. I am not just preparing for a career. I am preparing to create change that outlasts me, the kind that gets passed down the way Sloane's grandparents passed their values down to her. I intend to earn that.

When I was a child, I watched my mother piece together a life for our family from almost nothing. She worked long hours, stretched every dollar, and never stopped moving, not because things were easy, but because giving up was never an option. That image of quiet, relentless determination is the same energy I bring to my pursuit of a degree in psychology, a STEAM field that sits at the intersection of science and human connection. I chose this path not in spite of where I come from, but because of it. Psychology is not just a subject I study, it is a lens through which I understand people who have been overlooked. I am a first-generation college student from an underserved community, and the gaps I have witnessed in mental healthcare for people who look like me and grew up like me are not abstract. They are personal. The disparities in access to culturally competent care for minority communities are well-documented, yet the pipeline of clinicians who reflect and understand those communities remains thin. I want to be part of changing that. Right now, I am an undergraduate researcher in a lab studying cognition, psychopathology, and emotion, and I work as a psychology clinic intern where I see firsthand the complexity of delivering care to people navigating real-world hardships. I am building toward a Ph.D. in clinical psychology because I know that lasting change requires both direct practice and the research to back it up. I want to treat patients, yes, but I also want to generate knowledge that shifts how care is delivered to communities that have historically been underserved by both science and medicine. What connects my goals to Kayla Nicole Monk's legacy is something I think she understood deeply: the vision to do something meaningful requires more than talent. It requires drive, follow-through, and the willingness to set goals that seem ambitious and pursue them anyway. Kayla faced obstacles that most people will never encounter, and yet she dreamed of building something lasting. I carry that same spirit in my own work, as someone who transferred to a four-year university after simultaneously completing high school and an associate's degree, who has maintained a 4.0 GPA while working multiple positions and volunteering in my community, and who has never stopped moving toward the future I know is possible. Outside the classroom, I run free community art events through Greensboro Downtown Parks, including a public collage installation where residents contribute pieces of their own stories to a shared work. Art and science are not opposites for me, they are both ways of seeing people more fully and giving them space to be seen. Community is not something I serve from a distance. I show up, I stay, and I build alongside the people I care about. This scholarship would allow me to continue doing exactly that. Graduate school is a significant financial undertaking, and every resource that reduces that burden means more bandwidth to focus on the work that matters, the research, the clinical hours, the community engagement, the preparation for a career that will, I hope, outlast me in its impact. Kayla wanted her legacy to live on through people who had a vision and the will to see it through. I intend to honor that.

How do I embody selflessness? Showing up for others. Selflessness, as I have come to understand it, is less about grand gestures and more about consistent presence, showing up for people and communities in ways that cost you something, whether that is time, energy, or comfort. It is a practice more than a trait, and one I have tried to build into the different roles I occupy as a student, a community member, and someone training to work in mental health. One of the clearest expressions of that practice has been my work organizing community art events through Greensboro Downtown Parks. Art, in my experience, has a way of lowering barriers between people who might not otherwise share space or conversation. I have spent considerable time coordinating these events, assembling a community collage from public submissions, managing logistics, and doing the unglamorous work of follow-through that makes something feel welcoming rather than just scheduled. The goal was never to produce impressive art. It was to create a moment where people in Greensboro could contribute something of themselves and see it become part of something larger. That kind of belonging is not guaranteed by putting chairs in a room. It has to be deliberately built, and I found that work genuinely meaningful. A different kind of selflessness shows up in my internship at the UNCG Psychology Clinic, where I work in receptionist and clinician support roles. People who walk into a mental health clinic are often already carrying more than they can easily hold. My role is not clinical, I am not the one providing therapy, but I have learned that how someone is received before they ever sit down with a clinician matters. Taking an extra moment to make sure someone feels oriented, unhurried, and not like a number is a small thing that costs me very little and can meaningfully change the texture of someone's experience. I try not to treat that as incidental to the work. There is also a less visible form of service I think about: persisting in a path that is genuinely hard because I believe it will eventually let me help people more substantially. Pursuing a Ph.D. in clinical psychology under the scientist-practitioner model is a long commitment, and most of it will not feel altruistic in any immediate sense. But my reason for doing it is not personal achievement, it is to become someone equipped to contribute meaningfully to how mental health care is understood and delivered. Staying on that path when it is exhausting is its own form of perseverance for something larger than myself. Michael Rudometkin's legacy, as described here, resonates with something I genuinely believe: that a life oriented toward others is not a sacrifice of personal fulfillment but an expression of it. The community art events, the clinic work, the long training ahead, none of it feels like giving something up. It feels like the point.

As of June, 2026, I am currently enrolled in two summer courses toward my Sociology degree at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro while working as an undergraduate intern at the UNCG Psychology Clinic, where I handle receptionist duties and provide clinician support. This July I will also return as intern co-manager at the Teacher Supply Warehouse, a position I held previously and am stepping back into with expanded managerial responsibilities. That combination makes this summer the most compressed version of work-school balance I have navigated, and I am approaching it with the kind of structure I have had to build over time. The clinic internship is a natural extension of my psychology coursework and my research involvement in the CoPE Lab, where I assist with work on cognition, psychopathology, and emotion. Supporting clinicians directly, even in an administrative and support capacity, has given me a ground-level view of how a clinical environment actually operates, which no classroom experience fully replicates. I maintain a 4.0 GPA and Chancellor's List standing alongside these commitments, which requires that most weeks be structured down to the hour. I have learned to treat that structure not as a burden but as a too; knowing exactly what I have to work with makes it easier to protect what matters. The most difficult stretch I have faced came during a semester when several major demands converged at once, a research deadline in the lab, a demanding course load, and a period at the clinic when things were particularly stretched. Each was manageable on its own. Together, they created several weeks where I could not find a moment of feeling fully caught up. I was treating everything as equally urgent at all times, which made the whole situation feel like it was constantly on fire. What shifted things was forcing myself to actually rank what needed to happen that day, that week, and eventually, rather than holding all of it at the same level of pressure simultaneously. Essentially, setting boundaries, I also had to become more willing to communicate; telling my supervisor when I was stretched thin, being direct with a professor about a deadline concern rather than absorbing it silently, asking a colleague to cover something minor. None of those conversations came naturally at first, but all of them helped. I came out of that semester with my GPA intact and a clearer sense of what I need to function well under sustained pressure. That experience is part of why I feel ready for this summer rather than apprehensive about it. Returning to the warehouse in a role with more responsibility is something I earned through prior work, and the clinic internship continues to sharpen skills I will carry into graduate training. The two summer courses run alongside both, not against them. I have learned that a full schedule is not itself the problem, what matters is knowing how to move through it without losing track of what each commitment actually requires.

"Imagine human beings living in an underground, cavelike dwelling, with an entrance a long way up, which is both open to the light and as wide as the cave itself. They've been there since childhood, fixed in the same place, with their necks and legs fettered, able to see only in front of them, because their bonds prevent them from turning their heads around. Light is provided by a fire burning far above and behind them. Also behind them, but on higher ground, there is a path stretching between them and the fire. Imagine that along this path a low wall has been built, like the screen in front of puppeteers above which they show their puppets." — Plato, Republic, Book VII (514a–514b), trans. G.M.A. Grube Plato's opening description of the cave is not merely a setup for the allegory that follows, rather it is itself the argument. The specific physical arrangement of the prisoners encodes Plato's entire epistemological claim; that ordinary human perception is not a partial or imperfect access to reality, but a structurally enforced misidentification of images for the things themselves. The first detail that demands attention is the direction of the fetters. The prisoners cannot turn their heads. They are not blind, not intellectually deficient, not lazy, they are physically prevented from orienting toward the source of light. This is deliberate and precise. Plato is not describing people who have failed to think hard enough. He is describing people whose very posture has been fixed since childhood in a direction that makes genuine knowledge structurally impossible. The constraint is not individual but architectural; it is built into the situation they were born into. The second detail is the puppeteers and the low wall. These figures are easy to overlook, but they are essential. The shadows the prisoners watch are not cast by real objects, they are cast by representations of real objects, carried by people who are themselves hidden behind a screen. This introduces a layer of mediation that goes beyond simple illusion. The prisoners are not watching the world incorrectly; they are watching a curated performance of a world, staged by agents whose presence and intentions are entirely invisible to them. Plato offers no explanation for who the puppeteers are or why they carry their objects. Their anonymity is the point. The machinery of false perception operates without anyone needing to understand or consent to it. This is where the passage diverges most sharply from a naive reading of the allegory as simple ignorance-versus-knowledge. Plato is not describing people who merely lack information. He is describing a system in which the very mechanism of perception has been arranged so that what feels most immediate and vivid, the shadows flickering in front of you, is precisely what is furthest from the real. Sensation, in this account, is the problem, not the solution. The prisoners' experience is internally consistent, apparently complete, and deeply wrong. The fire deserves separate attention. It is far above and behind the prisoners, present, real, the proximate cause of everything they see, and completely outside their field of vision. Plato places it there not as a symbol of some distant unattainable truth but as an intermediate light source: it illuminates the puppet-show, not the sun outside. When commentators identify the fire with the Form of the Good or with ultimate reality, they are getting ahead of the text. At this stage of the allegory, the fire represents something more modest and more troubling, a real cause that is systematically occluded by the very experience it produces. You can see the effects of the fire on every surface of the cave wall. You cannot see the fire. This is an account of how mediated systems work, not how ignorance works in the simple sense. The phrase "since childhood" does particular work in the passage. It rules out the possibility of a fall from prior knowledge, or of a correctable mistake made at some identifiable moment. The prisoners have never known anything different. Their conception of what a world looks like, what counts as real, what it means for something to be present to the senses, all of it was formed entirely within the cave. This is not a claim about individual psychology but about the formation of what we might now call a paradigm; the background of unquestioned assumptions within which all other experience gets interpreted. To break from it requires not merely new information but a reorientation so complete it initially feels like disorientation. The opening of the allegory, then, is doing something quietly radical. Before Plato asks what the freed prisoner sees when he emerges into sunlight, he establishes that the problem of knowledge is not primarily a problem of access to facts but a problem of position, of where you are placed, what direction you face, and what you have been given to look at since the beginning. Understanding something better, in this framework, first requires recognizing that your current orientation toward the world was never neutral to begin with.

There is a particular kind of strength that does not announce itself. It does not ask for recognition or pause long enough to be celebrated. It simply shows up, every morning, every shift, every impossible moment, and holds everything together by sheer force of love and will. My mother has that kind of strength. Growing up watching her exercise it every single day is the most formative education I have ever received. She raised us alone; and when I say us, I mean all of us, my siblings, my cousin's family, whoever needed holding. She worked two jobs and still made time to be present in the way that mattered, the way that children remember decades later not as a schedule but as a feeling. Of knowing that no matter how unstable the ground beneath us was, she was standing on it and it was not going to give way while she was there. The ground was genuinely unstable. My sister was battling schizophrenia, a long, exhausting, heartbreaking fight that required my mother to become a caregiver, an advocate, and a crisis manager all at once, often without adequate support. My brother had ADHD. My other brother and I moved back and forth between two households, carrying the particular kind of uncertainty that comes from never being fully rooted in one place. Our home was full of love and full of difficulty in equal measure, and my mother refused to let the difficulty win. Then we lost my sister and I watched my mother do something I am not sure I could have done, she kept going. Not by pretending the grief was not devastating, not by rushing past it, but by refusing to let it become the end of our family's story. She pushed us forward. She held us together in the aftermath of a loss that had every reason to break us apart, and she did it while carrying her own grief alongside ours. I do not have adequate words for what that took. I only know that watching her do it taught me more about resilience than anything I have ever read or studied. What she gave me in that environment was not a perfect childhood. It was something more durable: the understanding that strength is not the absence of struggle but the decision to keep going through it. I saw her tired. I saw her stretched beyond what seemed humanly possible. But I never saw her give up on any of us, not on my sister when the illness made her someone we barely recognized, not on my brothers, not on me, not on the cousins she folded into her care as naturally as if they had always been hers. Not even after the worst thing happened. She also strengthened my faith, showing me that belief is not something you hold onto in the easy moments. It is something you return to in the hard ones until it becomes the foundation everything else is built on. Growing up with her shaped me in ways I am still discovering. It gave me my sense of purpose, the refusal to look away from suffering that drives my pursuit of a career in clinical psychology. It gave me my commitment to community, because I grew up in a home that defined family broadly and gave generously even when there was not much to give. My mother did that for us. I intend to spend my life doing it for the people who need someone to show up for them the way she showed up for me.

A Roadmap to Purpose- My goal is to earn a Ph.D. in clinical psychology as a scientist-practitioner, build a culturally competent mental health organization serving underserved communities, and contribute research that pushes the field toward more inclusive, equitable standards of care. That goal is clear. The path to it is deliberate, staged, and grounded in the practical reality of what it takes to get there. Where I Am Now- I am a rising senior at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, maintaining a 4.0 GPA and Chancellor's List recognition every semester, on track to graduate with a bachelor's degree in psychology. My undergraduate years have been spent building not only academic credentials but the hands-on experience doctoral programs look for, community organizing, direct clinical support work as a behavior technician, and research exposure that has sharpened my understanding of the field. This year I am studying abroad in Seoul, South Korea, an investment in the cultural competence that will define my clinical and research identity. Scholarship support at this stage matters enormously. Every dollar not spent on tuition goes toward the experiences that make me a stronger candidate and a more prepared clinician. Short Term: Doctoral Application (Years 1-2)- One of the most important lessons I have learned preparing for this process is that you do not choose a doctoral program by choosing a school, you choose it by choosing a mentor. In clinical psychology, the relationship between a student and their faculty advisor is the single most determinative factor in the quality and direction of a Ph.D. A prestigious school with the wrong mentor produces a misaligned research agenda. The right mentor at any institution produces a focused, supported, prepared clinician and researcher. My doctoral search is therefore faculty-first. I am identifying researchers whose work sits at the intersection of cultural competence, psychosis disorders, and underserved populations, and targeting programs where those faculty are actively taking students and have strong track records of graduating and placing their advisees. Competitive clinical psychology Ph.D. programs are fully funded, covering tuition and providing a stipend in exchange for research and teaching assistantship work. The primary resource required now is time, building a competitive application, research experience, and personalized faculty outreach that demonstrates genuine familiarity with each mentor's work. Medium Term: Doctoral Training (Years 3-8)- Clinical psychology Ph.D. programs run five to seven years, combining coursework, research, and supervised clinical hours. My dissertation will focus on the intersection of cultural competence and psychosis disorders, directly informed by my sister's experience with schizophrenia and the gaps in culturally responsive care my family encountered. I will pursue publication, conference presentations, and a predoctoral internship at a site serving diverse and underserved populations. Long Term: Building the Organization (Years 8 and Beyond)- Following licensure, I will establish an integrated mental health organization combining a culturally competent clinical practice with an embedded research institute. Startup funding will be pursued through NIMH early career grant mechanisms, nonprofit funding streams, and community health center partnerships. Startup costs for a small clinical practice range from $50,000 to $150,000, with grant funding and sliding scale revenue forming the financial foundation in early years. The Through Line- Every stage of this plan is connected by the same resource that has carried me this far, the clarity of knowing exactly why I am doing this. My sister's life, my family's struggles, and my own recovery have given me a direction that does not waver. Scholarships like this one are not just financial support. They are the practical bridge between the plan and the path.

If you have ever been around someone who laughs so hard they make absolutely no sound, you already know the specific kind of panic that crosses the face of everyone nearby. First comes the joke. Then comes my reaction, mouth open, shoulders shaking, face doing everything a laughing face does, and then nothing. No sound. Just me, holding my breath for what witnesses have described as a concerning amount of time, completely fine, having the time of my life. People do not know what to do with it the first time. They look around. They look back at me. Someone usually asks if I am okay. I cannot answer because I am still not breathing. Eventually the exhale comes, sometimes accompanied by a wheeze, sometimes by a sound that arrives several seconds too late to match the joke that caused it. By that point whoever I am with has either joined in laughing or is genuinely considering calling someone. I am always fine. I just laugh like I forgot how. It is a strange thing to lead with about yourself, but I think there is something honest about it. I am a person who researches schizophrenia and psychosis disorders, who has spent years sitting with some of the heaviest experiences a life can hold, family trauma, loss, mental illness, agoraphobia, grief. People who know my story sometimes expect a certain gravity to come with it. And it does, genuinely, I take the work I am called to do as seriously as anything I have ever done. But I am also the person in the room laughing so hard at something nobody else found that funny, completely silently, turning an unfortunate shade of red while everyone around me reconsiders their life choices. I think that is actually important. Not the specific mechanics of my laugh, though they are genuinely something, but the capacity for joy that lives alongside everything else. The heaviness of what I have lived through and what I am working to change did not take that from me. If anything, it made me more committed to finding the moments worth laughing about, even if my laugh looks, from the outside, like a medical event. My sister used to be one of the few people who immediately recognized what was happening and joined in rather than panicking. She knew it was fine. She thought it was hilarious. Honestly, she was right. I have been told I should warn people. I usually forget. So consider this your notice: if you are ever around me and something genuinely funny happens, do not be alarmed by the silence. I am laughing. I am just doing it in my own particular way, which, I have come to accept, is more or less how I do everything.

If I could start a business with my sister, it would be a hair salon, and I say that as someone who had absolutely no plans to ever work in cosmetology. But that was always the thing about her. She had a way of pulling you into her world so warmly that you found yourself genuinely wanting to be there. She loved cosmetology with the kind of enthusiasm that was impossible not to catch. She knew hair the way some people know music, intuitively, passionately, with an opinion about everything. Her signature move, the one that became a running joke in our family, was straightening her hair with what could only be described as an alarming amount of grease. Every single time. Unrepentant. Gleaming. Perfectly her. I imagine the salon would have been hers in vision and mine in color. She would have handled the styling, the cuts, the curls, the transformations that made clients walk out feeling like entirely new versions of themselves. I would have handled the creative side, the hair dye, the art of it, because even in a salon I would have found a way to make it about color and expression. We would have argued about the aesthetic, compromised on the name, and probably disagreed about exactly how much product was too much. I would have lost that argument. She always would have. What I love most about this imagined business is what it would have really been, not just a salon, but a community space. A place where people came in carrying the weight of their week and left feeling seen. There is something deeply therapeutic about having someone tend to you, care for you, make you feel beautiful when the world has been making you feel small. My sister understood that instinctively. Her gentleness was the kind that made people feel safe, and a salon run by her would have been a place where clients felt that the moment they walked through the door. I did not get enough time with her, not enough time with the version of her that existed before schizophrenia made her harder to reach, and not nearly enough after. The accident took whatever time we had left. But when I imagine this salon, I imagine her on the other side of all of it, healthy, laughing, straightening someone's hair with entirely too much grease while I argue with her about it from across the room. I would give anything for that argument. I would let her win every single time. Starting a business with her would not have been about the revenue or the growth strategy. It would have been about getting to build something alongside the gentlest soul I have ever known. That, more than anything, is what I lost, the future we never got to make together.

My sister was the gentlest soul I have ever known. That is the first thing I want anyone who reads this to understand, before the diagnosis, before the loss, before everything that came after. She was gentle in the way that certain people are gentle: quietly, completely, in a way that made the world feel safer simply because she was in it. She was also the one in our family diagnosed with schizophrenia and I want to be honest about what that meant, not in clinical terms, but in the lived, daily, exhausting reality of watching someone you love fight a battle that the world largely does not understand and the healthcare system was not adequately equipped to support. My mother sacrificed enormously trying to get her the help she deserved. Our family reorganized itself around her needs, her crises, her moments of clarity and her moments of darkness. There were stretches of time when the sister I knew, the gentle one, the real one, felt very far away, replaced by something the disease had put in her place. I grieved her in pieces, long before I lost her entirely. When she was fatally struck by a distracted driver, the grief that arrived was unlike anything I had words for. It did not feel like a natural ending to a long struggle. It felt senseless, the kind of loss that makes you search the sky for an explanation and find only silence. I found myself thinking that God had taken her, that perhaps her suffering had finally been allowed to end, and then immediately feeling the guilt of that thought. Because what I had also lost was the time I never got, the time with her before the disease took hold, the conversations we never had, the version of her that schizophrenia slowly made harder and harder to reach. I did not just lose my sister the day that driver was not paying attention. I had been losing her for years and I had never fully allowed myself to grieve that until she was gone. That guilt, that grief, and that love are the reason I am pursuing a Ph.D. in clinical psychology with a specific focus on schizophrenia and psychosis disorders. She is the reason. Not abstractly, not as a vague inspiration, but as the most concrete and personal motivation I have. Every research paper I will write, every client I will sit across from who carries a diagnosis like hers, every system I will work to change so that the next family does not face what mine faced, all of it is for her. I want to understand the disease that took so much of her before the accident took the rest. I want to contribute to treatments that actually reach people like her, in communities like mine, before it is too late. My sister deserved better care. She deserved a system that saw her gentleness before it catalogued her symptoms. She deserved clinicians trained to honor her humanity alongside her diagnosis. She deserved more time, with my mother, with me, with herself on the other side of what she was fighting. I cannot give her more time. But I can spend mine making sure the next person like her finds the care she never did. That is the promise I have made to her. It is the promise I intend to keep for the rest of my life.

I am building a bridge. Not a physical one, though the work will be just as structural, just as load-bearing, and just as necessary for the people who need to cross it. I am building the bridge between the communities that have been most consistently failed by the mental health system and the care that was always supposed to reach them. That is the project of my life and every decision I have made, academically, professionally, and personally, has been a beam placed in its foundation. I grew up on the wrong side of that gap. My family, people of color navigating schizophrenia, depression, and anxiety after devastating loss, reached for a system that was not built with them in mind and found mostly closed doors. I battled severe anxiety and agoraphobia in my own teenage years and could not access the therapy I needed. I watched my community carry weight that should have been shared and find no one equipped to share it. That experience did not just motivate me. It gave me a blueprint for exactly what needs to be built and exactly why it has not been built yet. What I am building, concretely, is an integrated mental health organization that combines a culturally competent clinical practice with an embedded research institute. The clinic will serve the communities most underrepresented in mental health care, people of color, immigrant populations, low-income families, and anyone the existing system has turned away. The research institute will study what works for those communities specifically, producing the empirical evidence needed to push the broader field toward more inclusive, culturally humble standards of care. Each side will strengthen the other, practice informing research, research improving practice, in a living system built on the scientist-practitioner model I am training to embody. I am building this future one carefully placed step at a time. A 4.0 GPA and Chancellor's List recognition every semester at UNCG. A study abroad experience in Seoul, South Korea to deepen my understanding of collectivist cultures and mental health stigma outside Western frameworks. A Ph.D. in clinical psychology that will give me the credentials, the training, and the platform to challenge the systems that failed my family from inside the field rather than from its margins. The impact I am working toward is not abstract. It is the family that finally finds a clinician who sees them fully. It is the child whose strengths are recognized before his limitations are catalogued. It is the community that stops associating mental health care with shame and starts associating it with hope. It is the research that changes how the next generation of clinicians is trained. I started building things at eleven years old, resin art on a table at a children's business fair, learning that you could create something from nothing and offer it to the world. The scale has changed; the instinct is exactly the same.

There is an irony at the heart of the modern world that I have felt personally; we have never been more connected by technology, and many of us have never felt more alone. Notifications arrive constantly. Feeds refresh endlessly and yet something essential, the kind of connection that makes a person feel genuinely seen, genuinely held, genuinely part of something, has become increasingly rare. I know what that absence feels like. I also know, firsthand, what it takes to find your way back to it. In my teenage years, I lived with severe anxiety and agoraphobia rooted in family trauma. The world outside my front door felt genuinely dangerous, not in a way I could explain rationally, but in the consuming, physical way that anxiety makes its home in the body. Technology, ironically, made it easier to stay inside. I could exist online, maintain the appearance of connection, and never once have to test whether the ground outside would hold me. The digital world offered a version of presence that required nothing from me, no vulnerability, no risk, no actual contact with another human being. It was connection without the terrifying parts and for a while, it felt like enough. Yet, It was not enough. What pulled me back into the world was not a breakthrough or a resolution of fear. It was an invitation, someone asking if I would help organize free community art events. It was a small ask that required an enormous answer. It meant going outside. It meant being around people. It meant choosing real, physical, unpredictable human presence over the safety of a screen. I said yes anyway and what I found on the other side of that fear was something no algorithm has ever been able to replicate; the experience of making something alongside other people and feeling, in that making, that I belonged to something real. Those art events taught me what authentic human connection actually requires, and it is not a platform or a feature or a faster internet connection. It is presence and the willingness to show up in a shared physical space and be changed by the people you find there. Strangers who arrived not knowing each other left as collaborators. People who had nothing obvious in common found common ground through the shared language of creativity. The connection that formed in those spaces was not curated or filtered or optimized. It was messy and warm and entirely human, and it healed something in me that no amount of digital interaction ever had. As technology continues to reshape how we relate to one another, I do not believe the answer is to reject it. Technology can lower barriers, extend reach, and connect people across distances that would otherwise be insurmountable. But it cannot replace the irreducible power of physical co-presence, of two people sitting in the same room, making something together, and recognizing each other's humanity in real time. Preserving authentic human connection in a technological world means being intentional about creating those spaces. It means building communities around shared creative experience, shared purpose, and shared physical presence. It means recognizing that convenience and connection are not the same thing, and that the most meaningful relationships in our lives have always required us to show up, take a risk, and trust that the ground will hold. It did hold; it holds still and I have spent every day since that first art event trying to help other people find that out for themselves.

Service is not something I do alongside my life, rather it is the organizing principle of it. Every meaningful experience I have accumulated, every academic milestone I have reached, and every professional goal I am working toward has been shaped by a single conviction; that the measure of a life well lived is not what you accumulate but what you give, and that education is only as valuable as the people it ultimately reaches. I did not arrive at this conviction cleanly or easily. I grew up in a household that was not always safe or stable, in a family navigating serious mental illness and grief without adequate support. I lost my sister. I battled anxiety and agoraphobia so severe that leaving my own home felt impossible. I watched the people I loved most fall through the gaps of systems that should have caught them, healthcare, legal, social, and come out the other side with less than they went in with. Those experiences did not break me, instead, they gave me direction. They showed me exactly where the gaps were and made clear that I was going to spend my life working to close them. Embodying a life of service has never been abstract for me. It has looked like setting up a folding table at a children's business fair at eleven years old, learning early that building something with your own hands and offering it to others is one of the most honest forms of connection there is. It has looked like organizing free community art events as a teenager, stepping outside my own fear again and again to create spaces where strangers could become a community. It has looked like collaborating with Greensboro Downtown Parks to install a community-made collage in a public space, a project that belonged not to me but to every person who contributed to it. It has looked like sitting with a nonverbal child with level three autism whom others had given up on, following his lead, believing in him stubbornly and consistently until his voice began to emerge. Service, in every one of these moments, has meant showing up fully for another person and trusting that the showing up itself is enough. My education is the tool I am sharpening to make that service more effective, more far-reaching, and more durable. A 4.0 GPA and Chancellor's List recognition every semester are not ends in themselves, they are evidence of the seriousness with which I am preparing for a career that demands excellence because the people it serves deserve nothing less. My pursuit of a Ph.D. in clinical psychology as a scientist-practitioner will give me the research skills to challenge the cultural frameworks that consistently fail communities of color and marginalized populations, and the clinical training to offer those communities care that actually meets them where they are. My upcoming study abroad experience in Seoul, South Korea will deepen my understanding of how culture shapes mental health and help me build the kind of globally informed, culturally humble perspective that my future clients deserve. The Peace Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi has guided me throughout this journey, its call to console rather than be consoled, to understand rather than be understood, to give rather than receive. That prayer is not just a spiritual touchstone. It is a job description and my education is how I make sure I am qualified to fulfill it. My life of service is my answer to that, a daily commitment to ensuring that the next person who needs someone finds one.

The first community art event I organized, I was a teenager earning dual college credits while privately battling anxiety so severe I could barely leave my house. Nobody knew that part. What they saw was a young woman setting up a space for people to create together, free of charge, open to anyone who wanted to show up. What I knew was that saying yes to organizing that event was one of the hardest and most important decisions I had ever made, not because of what it would give the community, though it gave plenty, but because of what showing up for others forced me to do for myself. Throughout my high school and early college years, I organized a series of free community art events designed to bring people together through creative expression. These events required no experience, no materials, and no admission. They asked only that people show up, and they did. Strangers became collaborators; people who had never met found common ground through the shared language of creativity. I coordinated logistics, gathered supplies, promoted events within the community, and facilitated spaces where participants felt welcomed and valued. What struck me most was how quickly walls came down when people were given permission to simply make something together. Art created an entry point for connection that conversation alone rarely does. That work grew into a collaboration with Greensboro Downtown Parks, where I helped organize and install a community-made collage in one of the city's most beloved public spaces. This project required coordinating with city stakeholders, community contributors, and park administrators, navigating multiple priorities, timelines, and visions to produce something that belonged to everyone who contributed to it. The finished installation was not mine. It was the community's and that distinction matters enormously to me, because genuine service is never about the person providing it. It is about what gets built in the space between people when someone creates the conditions for it. Leadership through service is a concept I understand not as a philosophy but as a lived practice. The most effective leaders I have encountered, and the leader I am working to become, do not stand above the people they serve. They stand alongside them and listen before they direct. They ask what is needed rather than assuming they already know. My experience organizing community events taught me that the most important leadership skill is not vision or charisma, it is the humility to recognize that the people you are serving hold wisdom and strength that no outside organizer can manufacture or replace. My role was never to bring art to the community. It was to create a space where the community could bring art to itself. That lesson has shaped everything about how I approach my future career in clinical psychology. The clients I will serve are not passive recipients of my expertise. They are the experts on their own lives, their own pain, and their own resilience, and my job is to create the conditions where that resilience can emerge. Service taught me that and leadership through service confirmed it. I began this work as a teenager trying to find a reason to step outside. I stayed because I discovered that showing up for a community has a way of showing you who you are, and who you are capable of becoming. That is what service does when it is done with genuine care. It builds something in the giver that outlasts every event, every installation, and every moment of connection it creates.

I did not grow up in a safe or stable household. That is not a detail I share for sympathy, rather it is the foundational truth that explains everything else about who I am and why I care so deeply about the work I intend to spend my life doing. Growing up amid instability, family trauma, serious mental illness, and the kind of grief that follows losing a loved one too soon taught me things no classroom ever could. It taught me that the systems meant to catch people in crisis often fail the people who need them most and that survival, when paired with purpose, can be extraordinary. Those experiences led me to organize free community art events as a teenager while quietly battling severe anxiety and agoraphobia that made leaving my home feel nearly impossible. They led me to work as a behavior technician with a nonverbal child with level three autism and discover that believing in someone, stubbornly and consistently, can unlock something in them that limitation-focused thinking never could. They led me to Greensboro Downtown Parks, where I installed a community-made collage in a public space and watched strangers become one through creativity. Every one of those experiences confirmed that healing happens in connection, and that the people most often denied that connection are the ones who need it most. My community work has never felt separate from my academic/career goals. Through organizing art events and community installations, I discovered the power of creativity before I had clinical language for it. I plan to carry that forward by building programs that bring mental health care and creative intervention directly into the communities they serve, not waiting for people to find their way to a clinic, but meeting them in the spaces where they already live, gather, and belong. As I move toward my Ph.D. in clinical psychology, I intend to remain embedded in community work, because the research I want to conduct and the care I want to provide must stay rooted in the real lives of real people. Outside of school, I am drawn most to art and creative expression and to advocacy work that sits at the intersection of mental health, cultural competence, and community building. Art has been a constant companion throughout my life, from the resin pieces I sold at children's business fairs at eleven years old to the community installations I helped organize in Greensboro. Creativity is not a hobby for me. It is a language I return to when other languages fall short, and a tool I believe belongs at the center of how we help people heal. My mother is the person who motivates me more than anyone else in this world. She raised me in circumstances that were far from easy, in a household that was not always safe or stable, and she never once stopped pushing me forward. She strengthened my faith, modeled a resilience, and I idolize her in the truest sense with the clear-eyed admiration of someone who has watched another person carry an enormous weight with grace and keep going anyway. But my love for her is also a driving force in a more tender and personal way. I want to achieve everything I am working toward so that she knows, without any doubt, that I am going to be okay. Every Chancellor's List recognition, every step toward my doctorate, every client I will one day sit across from and offer genuine care, all of it is for her too. I intend to spend my life making sure that faith was worth it.

I have never pursued education for its own sake. Rather, I have pursued it because the problems I care most about solving require it, and because the communities I am committed to serving deserve someone who has done the work to show up fully prepared. I am a rising senior at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, maintaining a 4.0 GPA and earning the Chancellor's List every semester since transferring from a dual enrollment program where I simultaneously graduated high school and earned my associate's degree with highest honors. That academic record is not a collection of achievements I am proud of in isolation. It is evidence of a commitment, to the field I am entering, to the people I intend to serve, and to the belief that excellence in education is one of the most powerful tools available to someone who wants to change something that is deeply, systemically broken. I am pursuing a Ph.D. in clinical psychology as a scientist-practitioner because the mental health crisis in this country cannot be solved by passion alone. It requires rigorous research, evidence-based clinical practice, and the kind of institutional credibility that allows you to challenge existing frameworks from inside the field rather than from its margins. Higher education is how I build that credibility. It is how I develop the research skills to contribute meaningfully to the literature on culturally competent care. It is how I obtain the clinical training to sit across from the most vulnerable patients and offer them something that actually works. And it is how I earn the platform to advocate for systemic change at the level where policy is made and professional standards are set. The gap I intend to spend my career closing is one I have lived inside. I grew up in a family of people of color navigating schizophrenia, depression, and anxiety without adequate mental health care. I lost my sister. I battled severe anxiety and agoraphobia in my own teenage years and could not access therapy, not because it did not exist, but because the system was not built for someone like me. The mental health frameworks that dominate our field were constructed around very narrow, Western, white-idealized standards that consistently fail communities of color, immigrant populations, and anyone whose lived experience falls outside that mold. Doctoral training will give me the tools to challenge those frameworks directly, through research that centers the populations most consistently excluded, and through clinical models designed from the ground up to serve them. My plans to study abroad in Seoul, South Korea before beginning my doctoral program are an extension of that same commitment. Immersing myself in a collectivist culture where mental health stigma is deeply entrenched and access to care is severely limited will expand my understanding of how cultural context shapes psychological experience in ways no classroom alone can provide. I want to bring that perspective back into my research and practice, and ultimately into the integrated mental health organization I plan to build, combining a culturally competent clinical practice with an embedded research institute so that empirical evidence and direct care continuously strengthen each other. The positive impact I plan to create is not abstract. It is the family that finds a clinician who finally sees them fully. It is the child whose behavior was being pathologized finally receiving care that honors his strengths. It is the immigrant community that finds a mental health program built around their values rather than against them. It is the research that shifts how the next generation of clinicians is trained. It is the policy that changes because someone with the right credentials and the right lived experience was in the room to advocate for it. Higher education is not the destination, it is the preparation. Every course, every research opportunity, every clinical hour, and every mentorship relationship I build on the way to my doctorate is sharpening the instrument I intend to use in service of people who have waited long enough for the system to work for them. I did not come this far, through loss, through fear, through a family that carried more than it should have had to, to arrive at the door of this field and offer anything less than everything I have. The communities I come from deserve that and higher education is how I make sure I am ready to deliver it.

I did not come to art therapy through a textbook. I came to it through a folding table, a tent I set up myself, and the slow realization that making something with your hands can reach places that words simply cannot. I started creating and selling resin art at eleven years old, attending children's business fairs and vendor events, building something tangible out of color and light and patience. What I did not understand then was that the act of creating was also doing something to me, organizing something internally that had no other outlet, giving shape to feelings I did not yet have language for. Years later, when I was a teenager battling severe anxiety and agoraphobia so consuming that leaving my own home felt impossible, it was not therapy that reached me first. It was art. It was the invitation to organize free community art events that pulled me, slowly and imperfectly, back into the world. Each event was a step outside. Each creative gathering was a reminder that I was capable of building something, contributing something, being present for something larger than my fear. I never once called it therapy, but that is exactly what it was. That experience, of being healed by something I was doing rather than something being done to me, is the foundation of why I believe so deeply in art as a clinical tool. There is a particular population of people who cannot access healing through traditional talk therapy alone; children who do not yet have the vocabulary for their pain, trauma survivors for whom language feels unsafe or insufficient, individuals from cultural backgrounds where verbalizing psychological struggle carries enormous stigma, and people like the young nonverbal child with level three autism I worked with as a behavior technician, who communicated most freely not through words but through music, movement, and the joy of creating alongside someone who believed in him. For all of these people, art is not a supplement to healing. It is sometimes the only door in. As a future clinical psychologist, I plan to integrate art as a therapeutic tool throughout my practice, not as a replacement for evidence-based clinical intervention, but as a complement to it. Drawing, painting, collage, and other expressive modalities can externalize internal experiences that resist verbalization, create a sense of safety and control for clients who feel overwhelmed by direct emotional inquiry, and build the therapeutic alliance through shared creative engagement. The research supporting art-based interventions for trauma, anxiety, depression, and neurodevelopmental conditions is robust and growing, and my own lived experience gives me an intuitive understanding of why those findings hold. I also believe art therapy carries particular power for the communities I am most committed to serving, communities of color, immigrant populations, and others whose cultural frameworks do not always align with Western, language-dependent models of psychological care. Creativity is a universal human language. It does not require fluency in clinical vocabulary or comfort with emotional disclosure in a formal setting. It asks only that you show up and make something, and in that making, something in you begins to move. I did not know at eleven, arranging resin pieces on a table at a children's business fair, that I was learning how to help people heal. I know it now and I intend to spend my career honoring everything that table taught me.

I didn't find the prayer that changed my life in a church. I found it in a television series, Anne with an E, a moment that somehow cut straight through everything else and landed in a place I did not know was waiting. The Peace Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi. I have carried it with me every day since. Lord, make me an instrument of your peace: where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. Grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive. I am a Christian, and my faith has not always been loud or visible. It has been quiet and steady, a presence beneath everything, holding things together when they had every reason to fall apart. I grew up in a family navigating serious mental illness, grief, and loss without adequate support. I lost my sister. I battled anxiety and agoraphobia so severe that leaving my own home felt impossible. There were seasons of my life where the darkness felt total, where I could not see a way forward and could not articulate what I was even asking God for. But I kept praying. And I kept being held, even when I could not feel it, even when the evidence was thin. Faith, for me, has never been the absence of doubt. It has been the decision to keep moving anyway, to trust that something is meant to be when God wants it to be, and that the path He places before us is rarely the one we would have chosen for ourselves but always the one that leads somewhere worth going. The Peace Prayer did not just comfort me. Its central invitation, to seek not to be consoled but to console, not to be understood but to understand, is the most precise articulation of what I believe my life is called to be. It describes a posture of radical, self-emptying service that places the other person's need above your own comfort. It describes, I realized, the kind of clinician I was always meant to become. Every time I have sat with someone in pain, whether as a behavior technician working with a nonverbal child with autism, as a community organizer watching strangers find each other through shared creativity, or as a daughter watching her family carry more than any family should have to, that prayer has been underneath it. Reminding me that my role is not to fix or to be seen. It is to show up, to give, and to trust that in the giving something larger is at work. My faith will shape my career as a clinical psychologist in ways that are both practical and deeply spiritual. It will keep me humble in rooms where humility is hard, where credentials can become a shield and clinical distance can become indifference. It will remind me that every person sitting across from me carries a dignity that precedes any diagnosis, any file, any presenting problem. It will push me toward the patients and communities that the system has most neglected, because my faith has never allowed me to look away from suffering and call that neutrality. Where there is despair, I am called to bring hope. Where there is darkness, light. I don't just recite this. It is the job I have accepted.

There is a particular kind of heartbreak that comes from watching a system give up on a child. I witnessed it firsthand working as a Registered Behavior Technician with a young boy with level three, nonverbal autism, a child who had been written off by people who were supposed to help him, whose mother carried the weight of those failures in every interaction she had with the next person who walked through her door. Fortunately, I was that next person and I made a decision early on that I was not going to be another name on the list of people who gave up on her son. The beginning was very difficult. The narrative surrounding him was heavy with limitations, focused on what he could not do, what he would never do, what was not worth trying. But I kept watching him, kept listening in the way you listen when words are not available, and I noticed something nobody had leaned into enough; he responded well to music. Songs loosened something in him that direct instruction never could. Dancing with his mother lit him up in a way that a clinical setting alone simply did not. So I followed and used that. I used songs to create entry points into communication, built on the joy he already had, and met him in the world he was actually living in rather than the one the intervention model assumed he should be in. And he began to communicate. Not perfectly, not immediately, but genuinely, in ways that stunned people who had decided his ways were already fixed. That experience taught me something that has since become central to my understanding of human psychology; the people we label as unreachable are often simply waiting for someone willing to look past the label. Equally important to me was supporting his mother. She had been let down by RBTs who treated her son as a case to manage rather than a child to know, and who left her feeling more isolated than supported. Rebuilding that trust required consistency, honesty, and a genuine respect for her expertise about her own child. She knew him better than any clinical framework did, and my job was to work alongside her, not above her. That relationship taught me that serving the special needs community is never just about the individual receiving services. It is about the entire ecosystem of people holding that individual up. I am pursuing a Ph.D. in clinical psychology because I believe the special needs community deserves clinicians and researchers who approach disability with curiosity and respect rather than assumption and limitation. The deficit-focused language that dominated that little boy's file, the long list of things he supposedly could not do, reflected a failure of imagination as much as a clinical assessment. I want to contribute to a field that measures people by their potential rather than their deficits, that designs interventions around individual strengths rather than standardized expectations, and that treats families as partners rather than bystanders. Every child deserves someone who refuses to give up on them. Every parent deserves someone who sees their fight and stands beside them. That is the kind of clinician I am training to become, and it is the standard I will carry into every room I ever enter professionally.

I did not come to mental healthcare through a textbook or a classroom. I came through lived experience, watching family members struggle with mental illness in a culture that had no language for it, no framework that felt like ours, and no clear path toward help. I also came through my own battles with mental health, learning early that suffering in silence is not strength, and that the systems meant to help people like me were not always built with people like me in mind. That reality is what led me to pursue degrees in Clinical Psychology and Sociology. Together, these fields have given me what I need to do for the work I care about most: understand how culture, society, and systemic structures shape the way mental illness is experienced, expressed, and treated, and then translate that understanding into real, effective care for real people. Healthcare needs both thinkers and doers and I intend to be both. My goal is to work as a clinical psychologist while also conducting research on cross-cultural mental health, specifically how diagnostic frameworks developed largely within Western, white, middle-class populations often fail to account for the full diversity of human experience. This gap is especially acute for mixed-race individuals, a population that is frequently overlooked in both clinical practice and research. As someone who is mixed-race myself, I know what it feels like to not fit neatly into a single cultural box, essentially to have parts of your identity that different providers understand in isolation but rarely together. Mental health care that cannot hold that complexity is care that falls short. A symptom that looks like detachment in one cultural context may be a deeply practiced form of emotional regulation in another. A family dynamic labeled as enmeshment might be a community's definition of love and survival. For mixed-race patients navigating multiple cultural identities at once, these misreadings compound. When clinicians lack the cultural literacy to make these distinctions, patients are misdiagnosed, undertreated, or simply stop coming back. As a woman pursuing this path, I am also aware that I enter a field with its own gaps. Women, and especially women of color and mixed-race women, remain underrepresented in research leadership and in the populations that shape how disorders are defined. I have felt the weight of cultural expectations that quietly suggested a different kind of ambition, and I have experienced what it means to have your perspective treated as less than authoritative. But the absence of our voices is precisely why the field needs us there. I was once reminded that the systems that we use everyday, for example, the DSM 5-TR, wasn't extinguished and re-made, changing the out-dated racist, sexist, ableist ideals, but rather revised from such values. This is where underrepresented groups are still being pushed to the side, as systems are continuing to recycle old beliefs, while trying to shove in modern values. My presence in healthcare is itself a form of advocacy. When a patient from a marginalized or multiracial background sees a provider who understands something of their world, their layered identity, their family pressures, the stigma they carry, trust becomes possible. Honesty and healing become more possible. I am entering this field because I have seen what happens when people cannot access care that truly sees them. Research will help me understand the problem at scale. Clinical work will let me address it one person at a time. I want to do both, because the problem deserves both.

Mental health has never been an abstract or distant concept for me. During one of the most difficult periods of my life, I experienced severe anxiety and agoraphobia; a fear so consuming that leaving my own home felt impossible. The cruel irony was that the very condition I needed help for made it nearly impossible to access that help. I felt as though I wasn't able to make it to the clinic and recieve proper care. I was trapped in a cycle of isolation, and avoidance, as I would later learn, is one of the most damaging things for mental health. Without access to professional care, I had to figure out how to help myself. I researched methods, skills, and meanings, and taught myself cognitive techniques, breathing exercises, and self-care practices. I pushed myself, slowly, uncomfortably, consistently until I began to reclaim my own life. It wasn't a clean recovery story, but it helped me get to where I am today, both as an individual and a future clinical psychologist. This truly changed everything about how I see the world. This experience taught me something the textbooks later confirmed: mental health care in this country is deeply unequal. Access is often determined not by need, but by geography, income, language, and cultural background. Patients from diverse communities frequently encounter providers who don't understand their cultural context, their family dynamics, or the stigma they navigate at home. Overall, therapy that doesn't account for culture isn't fully effective therapy. This is why I am pursuing a career as a clinical psychologist with a focus on cross-cultural mental health. I want to be prepared to treat the full range of human experience, not just the experiences that look like what Western psychology has historically studied. I want diverse patients to walk into a room and feel genuinely seen, not just assessed and diagnosed. My advocacy begins with intention as I talk openly about mental health in my community because silence is what kept me stuck. I've had honest conversations with peers about anxiety, about the "shame" of struggling, and about the gap between needing help and being able to get it. I share what I've learned, not just as a substitute for professional care, but as a bridge toward it. Being a student means I'm still building my platform. But I've learned firsthand that advocacy doesn't require a degree or a title. Instead, it starts with refusing to pretend you're fine, and inviting others to do the same. Mental health matters to me because it nearly defined the limits of my life, and because I believe no one should face that alone, or feel that their background makes them harder to help. I've heard the quote, "The fears we don't face become our limits." and I intend to spend my career proving so.

There is a particular kind of invisibility that comes with doing meaningful work in service of others, where the recognition flows elsewhere, but the impact remains yours. As a Registered Behavior Technician (RBT), I lived that invisibility often. Over time, I came to understand that it was one of the most clarifying experiences of my life. My role was to work directly with children on the autism spectrum and their families, translating complex behavioral intervention strategies into daily, lived practice. I was in the homes, on the floor, building rapport, tracking progress, adjusting approaches in real time. Part of that work involved identifying behavioral goals: specific, measurable targets tailored to each child's needs. I spent hours observing, documenting, and designing what I believed were the right goals for the children in my care. I was thorough and invested in the outcomes of my clients. As I was the most direct provider in the system, I was even told before taking on the job, that I was going to be the one who understood what needed to be done next with goals, intervention plans, etc. However, without the direct supervision of my BCBA, this was not possible. Before we saw any real, big changes, I had to sit with what my supervisor gave me to do, knowing that it would not work anytime soon. That was until I took I stepped up and advocated for the needs of my client, suggesting better, more personal solutions and methods that were tailored to my client. Yet repeatedly, the goals I helped develop, and in some cases, had already begun implementing, were presented by supervising BCBAs as their own work. In meetings with families, in progress reports, in clinical documentation, my contributions were folded into someone else's authorship. My name was absent and my process was invisible. My initial response was frustration, and I will not pretend otherwise. There is something quietly corrosive about having your intellectual and professional labor absorbed without acknowledgment. I found myself wrestling with questions of fairness, of whether to speak up, of what it meant to advocate for myself in a field built entirely around advocating for others. But I made a deliberate choice: I did not escalate, and I did not withdraw. What I did instead was return my focus to the only audience whose recognition actually changed anything, the children and families I served. I served one child in particular, a boy who had been labeled nonverbal for most of his young life. Over weeks of patient, structured work, something shifted. He began using words, not recited, not prompted, but in context. Spontaneous, intentional, and on his own accord. The first time his mother heard it, she wept. She thanked me over and over again and in that moment, whatever name appeared on the clinical documentation felt completely irrelevant. The credit the system gave to someone else could not touch what had just happened in that room. The child had found his voice, which is what I was there for. Was my response right? I am still not entirely certain. There is an argument, a strong one, that silence in the face of repeated professional misattribution enables a culture where the people closest to the work are perpetually undervalued. RBTs, and others in direct care roles, often lack the institutional standing to push back without risk, and my silence may have made it easier for that pattern to continue. I acknowledge that. What I know is that the experience fundamentally reshaped how I define success. I entered that role seeking mastery, wanting to be recognized as someone who understood behavior science deeply enough to help real families in real crisis. I left it understanding that mastery is not the same as recognition, and that integrity does not require an audience. The clarity I developed about my own values, about why I do what I do, and for whom, is something no supervisory signature could have given me. If faced with a similar situation today, I would respond differently in one key way: I would document more deliberately and advocate more directly for transparent attribution, not out of ego, but out of respect for the field and for the colleagues who come after me. Visibility for direct care professionals matters. It shapes who enters the field, who stays, and what families ultimately receive. But I would not abandon the core of what guided me then: the conviction that good work, done honestly and with genuine care, has its own integrity regardless of whether the world assigns your name to it. Marian Sturtz operated in environments where her contributions were consistently attributed to others, minimized, or obscured entirely, and yet she continued to pursue knowledge, to push into unknown territory, to serve something larger than personal recognition. That resonance is part of why her story speaks to me. I understand, in a small but real way, what it means to do the work anyway.

For much of my childhood, the world felt like something to fear rather than something to explore and enjoy. My experiences with mental health have deeply shaped my goals, relationships, and the way I understand both people and the world around me. Growing up, I struggled with severe anxiety that intensified after my parents separated. During the course of my life, I also lost several family members to mental health-related deaths. These experiences made the world feel unpredictable and unsafe, and over time my anxiety developed into patterns similar to agoraphobia. Leaving spaces where I felt safe became increasingly difficult, as I often responded by isolating myself and avoiding situations that triggered uncertainty or fear. This avoidance felt like protection; if there was nothing new to fear, there was nothing to fear. However, I gradually realized that isolating myself was allowing these fears to grow stronger. So, instead of waiting to feel completely “healed,” I began slowly challenging myself to step outside of my comfort zone. By exposing myself to new environments, people, and experiences, I slowly rebuilt my confidence and trust in my ability to navigate the world physically, mentally, and emotionally. At the time, I did not know the psychological language for what I was doing, but when I began studying psychology, I discovered that many of the strategies I had relied on were closely related to exposure therapy: a research-based approach used to reduce anxiety by gradually confronting feared situations. Learning the science behind these methods completely transformed my perspective. It helped me understand that mental health challenges are not personal failures but experiences that can be understood, studied, and treated to where individuals can feel in control again. As a psychology major, my goal is to use both my personal insight and academic training to support these individuals who feel trapped by anxiety, fear, and isolation. I hope to work in the mental health field helping people gain access to the tools, education, and support they need to better understand their minds and build healthier relationships with the world around them. As a future researcher in psychology, not only will my personal challenges fuel the fight for my own life, but I hope to find ways, methods, tools, terms, and more accessible aids for people like me who do not need a second chance at life, but a new perspective of the one they are already living.

I have always been curious about people. Not in a surface level way, but in the deeper sense, why people think the way they do, how they make sense of hard experiences, and what it actually takes to feel understood by another person. That curiosity is what drew me to psychology, but it is the human side of mental health that has kept me here. Mental health touches every part of a person’s life, how they see themselves, how they show up in relationships, and how they find their footing when the ground shifts beneath them. I chose this field because I believe that being truly seen and supported can change the entire trajectory of someone’s life. My understanding of mental health deepened significantly when I began working in a psychology research laboratory. Being part of a research team has given me a scientific lens through which to explore cognitive processes and human behavior, one that has challenged me to ask harder questions and look more carefully at the evidence behind what we think we know about the human mind. One of the most important things research has taught me is that mental health is never just about identifying what is wrong with someone. It is about understanding the full context of their experience and finding better, more meaningful ways to support their wellbeing. That shift in perspective has shaped everything about how I approach this field. Outside of the lab and the classroom, I have found another kind of education through community involvement. I volunteer with initiatives in downtown Greensboro that organize free art events in local parks, spaces where families and kids can show up without any barriers and just create something together. What I have witnessed in those spaces has stayed with me. When people feel safe, welcomed, and given the chance to express themselves, something shifts in them. Even a small community program can make someone feel like they matter. That is not a small thing. That is everything. Those experiences have reinforced my belief that mental health support does not always look like a therapy session, sometimes it looks like a park, a paintbrush, and a community that shows up for itself. I think making a real difference in mental health requires two things that do not always get talked about together, rigorous knowledge and genuine compassion. My goal is to bring both. I want to contribute to research that actually moves the needle on how we understand and treat mental health conditions, while also working toward a world where accessing that support is not a privilege but a given. Too many people are suffering quietly right now because they are afraid of being judged or simply cannot find the help they need. I want to be part of changing that, not someday, but starting now with every experience I pursue and every skill I build. Looking ahead I hope to work in ways that let me contribute on multiple levels, supporting individuals directly, contributing to meaningful research, and engaging with communities in ways that make mental health resources more accessible and less stigmatized. I am not interested in doing just one of those things. I want to do all of them, because I believe that is where the most lasting change happens. Pursuing this degree is not just about building a career for myself. It is about building toward a future where people feel heard, respected, and genuinely empowered to take care of their own mental wellbeing, and where the systems around them actually make that possible

Most people learn how to survive, not everyone learns how to dream. For a long time, survival was enough for me, staying focused, working hard, and making the most of whatever opportunities I could find or create. Those experiences made me resilient, but they also taught me something important: building a life that actually means something takes more than just pushing through. It takes curiosity, imagination, and the willingness to chase experiences that change how you see the world. I got my first real lesson in resourcefulness when I was eleven years old, competing in business fair events. At that age I had to figure out how to organize ideas, talk to people I didn’t know, and present something I had built from scratch, all without much guidance or resources to lean on. What those experiences gave me wasn’t just confidence. They showed me that initiative can open doors that didn’t seem to exist before. I learned early that when you don’t have everything you need, creativity and determination can fill in the gaps. That mindset has followed me ever since. It followed me into college, where as a psychology student I joined a research laboratory that studies cognitive processes and human behavior. Research has pushed me to think more critically than I ever had before, to analyze evidence carefully, ask harder questions, and sit with uncertainty long enough to find real answers. It has also reminded me that understanding people isn’t just an intellectual exercise. It requires genuine curiosity and empathy in equal measure. Being in that lab has shown me what it looks like to take the study of human behavior seriously, and it has only deepened my commitment to this field. Outside of academics I have also looked for ways to give something back to the community that raised me. I volunteer with initiatives in downtown Greensboro that organize free art events in local parks, spaces where families and kids can show up, create something, and feel like they belong. There is something really powerful about watching people come together through art. It reminds me that creativity isn’t just a personal outlet. It’s a way of building connection and strengthening the fabric of a community. As meaningful as all of these experiences have been, I know that most of my perspective has been shaped by environments that are familiar to me. That familiarity is comfortable, but comfort has its limits. Studying abroad is my opportunity to step beyond those limits, to immerse myself in a culture that operates differently, thinks differently, and approaches human experience from a different starting point. As someone studying psychology, being exposed to new cultural perspectives on behavior, education, and social support isn’t just personally enriching. It’s academically essential in ways that no classroom can fully replicate. I am currently finalizing the details of my study abroad program and preparing for the experience ahead. My goals are straightforward but meaningful, to expand my academic perspective, develop real cross-cultural communication skills, and come back with a deeper understanding of how where we come from shapes who we become. Survival taught me how to persevere. I am ready for the next lesson, the one that teaches me how to dream, how to explore, and how to build a future that feels genuinely and completely my own.