This scholarship honors a powerful woman, and I'm working everyday to become one too. My name is Markahlisha Brown, I think my name stands out alone. I'm a first generation student who comes from a single parent household. I'm the youngest out of 6 kids. For years I dreamed about the day of graduating High School and finally leaving the nest. Nobody in my family ever went to college. I grew up with examples of everything I shouldn't be. I watch people who I looked up to and loved so dearly go down the wrong path. I would be lying if I said that didn't hurt me. I promise myself to never be like that. My own dedication and promise to myself became my drive. To become something I never got to see. How do you be something you never got to see? Your drive to be it. My own ambition make me go harder. The idea of what I want to and will be is my ambition. My short term goal is to become a registered nurse. That's the first promise I made to myself. But if everything goes how I believe it can, I plan to go ever further and become a doctor. Being the first doctor in the family? That's huge and would mean everything to me. I think about being the first doctor in the family it makes me emotional. Nobody in my family ever made it this far or even tried to. The title itself would mean the world to me. It will represent that I everything I ever went through and life paid off. All the times where I felt like I couldn't make it, the times where I almost gave up. It's been nights where I cried myself to sleep wondering if I'll ever make it to the next day. It's a personal victory for the version that I almost gave up on. It also just wouldn't be a win for me and my own dreams. For my family also. Specifically my mother, this would not only mean the world to me but to my mother. She's one of the biggest reason I keep pushing. To make her proud. To make her feel like she's a good mom. To make her feel like she didn't fail. I know she wonder sometimes did she do a good enough job at being a mother. So I want to show her with my actions that she did. I want her to never question her motherhood and have me to prove for it. I dream of buying her a home and filling it with the love she never got as a child. I just want to make her proud enough to forget every moment she felt like she failed. I just don't want to be an ordinary doctor either I want to be the change to the black community. I want to get my people in the doors nobody thought we can. I want to create a safe space, open programs, and build resources for people who grew up like me. I want to be the blueprint. I want to be the help I never got. Because I come from a place where it isn't fair and when all odds are against you. You can still win. So when I walk across that stage I'm just not making it for me. I'm making it for generations I'm doing it for babies who never have to wonder if they're good enough or they don't know if they can do it because I already paved the way.