Resilience is defined as the ability to recover from hardship. This trait does not assume an absence of difficulty in one's life, nor does it depend on the presence of ease or comfort; this trait only refers to the state of recovering from hardship when it is faced. When I originally I went to school to be a scientist and professor I thought that I was pretty resilient then: I was 22-28, the first person to attend graduate school in my family, did a PhD in 6 years while also being the oldest daughter in a family of six that was a role model for my younger siblings and also caring for my parents as they transitioned to retirement. I then married, completed two postdocs, and during that time, also helped my husband apply for, and graduate from, his own PhD program. I was successful in my field, publishing several papers and being offered several permanent faculty positions in my field. Our dual career search, however, proved to be a career hurdle for me; for my ex-husband to get a job, I had to turn down all my faculty offers to move with him and take off time for family. When we eventually divorced, I had to get back into my career after 6 years away, so I returned to the bench, went back to school, and decided that I want to learn how to make solutions for climate resilient agriculture and artificial tissues for universal transplants. It has been a long road, but I am now completing my new MS in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, worked for 2+ years in the pharma industry with a regenerative medicine company that makes artificial blood vessels, and will start my graduate certificate in systems engineering to design biological growing systems for plants and tissues. I have chosen the professional goal of engineering and to combine with my biology knowledge so that I create a company making the technical systems needed for resource efficient and climate resilient agriculture by vertical farming and artificial tissue growth systems at scale for universal artificial organ transplants. My purpose in choosing these goals is rooted in my faith: to feed the starving and heal the sick, with science and technology. I have chosen these goals because, as a child, my own family did not always have enough to eat and had to rely, for six months, on US government food subsidies, and as an adult, my father-in-law passed away from liver cancer because a liver transplant was not possible. To achieve these goals, I have chosen degrees in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, so that I can design tissues and incubators for artificial organs and plants, and Systems Engineering, so I can design the large complex mechanical systems that will control, with AI, the growth parameters of the agricultural and artificial tissue products. The technical work that will be needed will be balanced by keeping the people we help the first priority, i.e. people without food and patients in need of transplants. In addition, we will continue to ask the community for help, by fundraising and advocacy, so that we can grow our company as part of a community, ensuring our business resiliency. Last, I would make a commitment of equitable beneficence to communities that need the product, that the systems and products we made be able to be donated at cost or for free to communities and patients who need it most, so that communities who need it most will not be left behind or out competed by others seeking profit.

Resilience is defined as the ability to recover from hardship. This trait does not assume an absence of difficulty in one's life, nor does it depend on the presence of ease or comfort; this trait only refers to the state of recovering from hardship when it is faced. When I examine the trends of positive and negative emotion among the world's countries, three things that stand out to me are that the wealthiest countries are not at the top of the positive emotions list, and that at least one country with positive emotions, Sierra Leone, is also on the top 10 list of the negative emotions list. While I would have thought that ease and comfort afforded by wealth would coincide with positive emotions, and that the lack of those would coincide with negative emotions, the data in this table, instead, point to places of resiliency instead, i.e. they are places where both positive and negative emotions coexist side by side. Interestingly, the places that have both high positive and negative emotions also have high scores for helping a stranger, implying a correlation of resiliency with community. If I were going to learn from these trends, my chosen educational path would not matter so much as what I choose to do with my education; because of my upbringing in a Filipino family, and our value of Kababayan, I have chosen professional goals of engineering and biology so that I create companies that make systems that achieve the goals of resource efficient and resilient agriculture by vertical farming and artificial tissue growth systems at scale for universal artificial organ transplants. My purpose in choosing these goals is to make systems that grow plants and human tissues for the purpose of feeding the starving and ensuring that no one dies from lack of transplantable organs. I have chosen these goals because, as a child, my own family did not always have enough to eat and had to rely, for six months, on US government food subsidies, and as an adult, my father-in-law passed away from liver cancer because a liver transplant was not possible. I want to use my career to help others, because can empathize with others currently facing the same challenges. To achieve these goals, I have chosen degrees in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, so that I can design tissues and incubators for artificial organs and plants, and Systems Engineering, so I can design the large complex mechanical systems that will control, with AI, the growth parameters of the agricultural and artificial tissue products. The technical work that will be needed will be balanced by keeping the people we help the first priority, i.e. people without food and patients in need of transplants. In addition, we will continue to ask the community for help, by fundraising and advocacy, so that we can grow our company that does this as part of a community and not in a vacuum, ensuring our business resiliency. Last, I would make a commitment that the systems and products we made be able to be donated at cost or for free to communities and patients who need it most, with those costs being offset by more wealthy customers using those systems for profit instead of survival. By centering the people we help, by including the community from the ground up, and by making a commitment to equitable beneficence to communities that need the product, I hope that I will achieve not only professional and academic goals, but also the community and resilience that leads to happiness.