In December of 2022, I attempted suicide. This was the worst period in my entire mental health history. After I failed, I grew and matured - I knew I needed something to help me get those emotions out. I turned to music composition. It took a long time for me to develop something which had some quality, in terms of how it sounds, and some substance, in terms of its ability to express how I feel. I had been playing guitar since 2019, yet never once had I tried to write something of my own. Over quarantine I developed my skills further, but I still wasn't actively passionate about my music. However, after my attempt, I began to rely on my guitar - it was the one thing I could do when I was feeling like I was going insane that would calm me down. Growing up, I was a passionate kid, with really huge dreams. Many kids dream of someday being an astronaut, or the president - but I knew what I wanted, I wanted to be a scientific researcher. I worked very hard to get there for a long time, but as my depression seeped in and my mental health crumbled, I lost any and all passion for the things that once defined me. The kid who would do research for fun had essentially died, and in their place was a shattered teen who couldn't even bother to wake up in the morning. Once I began to write my music and truly perform for myself, that same passionate kid came back into my life - that's who I was again. It took a long time, and many years of therapy, but I know for sure it was not the therapy which saved me - it was my guitar. I wrote about girls who stressed me out, I wrote about my struggles with self esteem, I wrote about feeling inadequate, and anything one could imagine a depressed teen writing about. When I was alone, and suffering, the only thing that saved me was writing my own music. As someone who struggles with interpersonal connections and conveying my emotions through words, being able to show others who I am through my music has possibly been the most important choice I have ever made. Without that ability to connect to others, I felt incredibly isolated - but now I feel okay.

Gavin Grimm vs. Gloucester County Public Schools. 2014. This Supreme Court case is what brought the "issue" of transgender people using the restroom they desire into the public eye. 2021. I, a transgender girl, attend Gloucester County High School. My freshman year, I was constantly harassed every morning by this group of guys - they would throw full plastic water bottles at my head, leaving bruises; the teacher just watched. I believed this school was not and would never be safe for anyone like me. Even now, Gloucester still does not feel safe - especially in the current political climate regarding transgender people, particularly trans teens and students. If I was able to attend a college in a safe state like California or Massachusetts, I would be able to feel both safe and comfortable for the first time in four years. As well, growing up homeless and in severe debt, my family struggled with nearly everything - food, clothing, and obviously a home. If I can attend a quality college, I will be able to someday allow for my future family to live comfortably; they will be able to have - and to keep - not whatever they want, but everything they need. I need to provide someone with everything I lacked - I need to raise someone to be everything I wanted to be. When my parents pass, they will only pass on debts, and not assets. I cannot leave my future children in the same spot. As well, being able to attend a college with other intellectuals and hopefully other members of the LGBTQ+ community will be greatly beneficial to my mental health and social life. I have lost many, many friends due to coming out as transgender. The few friends I had I had to leave behind in order to achieve my goals and dreams - I felt horrible about it but I simply did not have the time for them. Being able to live on campus with other intellectuals will definitely aid me in actually maintaining friendships. Another aspect I am excited for is to be able to continue my research. Currently I am working under a mentorship program at Jefferson Laboratories. I work in the Data analysis field of the Electron Ion Collider project. My job is to develop a new, better form of the ADWIN program to help identify when a significant change occurs in the incoming data. The current program struggles with highly fluctuating data and data which is similar when change occurs - my program will address these issues and resolve them, while still allowing for the classical ADWIN data analysis methods. If I go to a research university, not only will I be able to apply my program to the data we generate for other research, but we can also further my research into improving this program. All in all, heading to college would benefit me because it allows for me to find somewhere I can be myself without fear, it will help make sure I will be able to someday have a family, it will help me to make and maintain friendships, and it will allow me to continue and further my research.

Gavin Grimm vs. Gloucester County Public Schools. 2014. This Supreme Court case is what brought the "issue" of transgender people using the restroom they desire into the public eye. 2021. I, a transgender girl, attend Gloucester County High School. My freshman year, I was constantly harassed every morning by this group of guys - they would throw full plastic water bottles at my head, leaving bruises; the teacher just watched. I believed this school was not and would never be safe for anyone like me. Senior year. 2024. In my Leadership course, I have advocated for a safe space for students who feel unwell mentally - after school with no pressure to talk about any of your personal struggles, just a place to find connections. I'm the only transgender person in my course, and the only out transgender person in my grade. I know our community needs this group - we need somewhere we can find each other without revealing to the entire school. Activism needs to start small before it can snowball into large changes. That first step needs to be finding one another. As well, I have defended the usage of single-stall, individual restrooms to many other students. Most of the students at my school refer to those bathrooms by a slur. The "tr*nny" bathrooms, they call them. I have even heard a teacher refer to them this way. I started by simply providing the idea that they provide more privacy than a normal restroom, then into the idea of transgender people wanting to feel comfortable, and then into the idea of a nice comfortable place for transgender people to se the restroom. It would be dangerous for me to attempt to argue for transgender people to use the bathrooms they prefer, I would not be able to leave the school without being physically attacked if I were to advocate for such a measure. In the Gloucester County school system, you can request a gender change form - I have tried before, my parents shut it down. That gender change form is the only way that a student can use the restroom they feel comfortable in, the locker room they feel comfortable in, or for their gender marker to be changed on our systems. This form is not difficult to access, the difficult part is requiring parental approval. Many of the closeted transgender people I have met are not able to share who they are with their parents without fear of being either abused or abandoned, yet they also get terrible dysphoria every time they need to behave in ways the school has dignified each gender must behave. Some of the top students of each grade are invited to speak in front of the school board towards the end of the year. If I am invited, I will speak with the voices of all of the queer people at Gloucester High School whose voices are muffled by the closet doors. I will fight for easier access to appropriate bathrooms, and a guarantee of not relaying private information, such as gender identity or preferred names, to parents, if the student requests for the information not to be. This will save many of my peers from unnecessary harm from transphobic and homophobic parents. I truly hope I am invited to speak.

Gavin Grimm vs. Gloucester County Public Schools. 2014. This Supreme Court case is what brought the "issue" of transgender people using the restroom they desire into the public eye. 2021. I, a transgender girl, attend Gloucester County High School. My freshman year, I was constantly harassed every morning by this group of guys - they would throw full plastic water bottles at my head, leaving bruises; the teacher just watched. This school was not and would never be safe for anyone like me. Halfway through my freshman year, I attempted suicide. This had been a long time coming, the harassment and bullying, combined with how severe my dysphoria had become all came together to create the perfect storm of suicidal ideation and self harm. I remember being taken to the emergency room. My mom brought my favorite book for me - but she didn't bring it for Marie, the girl who tried to take her own life - she brought it for Martin, the kid that, in her eyes, Marie almost killed. I tried to persuade her and my stepdad to be okay with who I was, but they never would be. They still aren't. My senior year I am still a transgender girl, and still suffering the repercussions of my suicide attempt. My grades that year slipped horribly. I was always a Straight-A student. I got D's in some of my classes. Even to this day, I fell from almost top of my class to barely top 10%. My attempt failed to take my life in the present, but it certainly took my life in the future away. I now barely qualify for any of the colleges I would have easily slid right into. I used to attempt frequently. Freshman year was simply my first time. I once concocted a plan to take a knife from my kitchen, walk out into my backyard and stab myself in the chest so that even if I were to be found, I would have already been dead by the time I was found. My parents found my plan and punished me further for this. When I tried to explain where my suicidal thoughts had come from, my parents simply blamed my friends, the queer friends of mine who went through the same harassment and bullying, for me being suicidal. They refused to believe me when I explained we helped one another - they thought I was carrying the burden of all of my friend's struggles. They tried to send me to church to heal my suicidality and my queerness. I used to be singled out, in front of approximately 50 kids my age, plus/minus two years, and told how what I was was a mockery of God, a mockery of all things holy. I'm still not over the trauma of what I experienced at those church groups. When I was 15, I tried to fully and wholly come out to my parents, for the last time. By the end of the night, I had to walk out of my house and run down the street wearing nothing but pajama pants, a hoodie, and crocs, in winter, at night. I fully believed I was not physically safe at that location. Even now, still, as a trans girl, I can't think of either my mom or my stepdad with any real love - because I know their love isn't for me. It's for Him. A Him who never existed. All of this goes to show just how the effects of my poor mental health in freshman year still linger on me now.

Math is the fundamental basis for all things - the true universal language. Math is music and music is math; the very atoms in our bodies, and all around us, can only be represented as math. The only way to understand the world around us is through math. As of right now, I work in a laboratory on unpublished applied mathematics research. This research has been some of the most fun I have had working anywhere. Part of what makes math so appealing to me is that there is only one right answer, but as many ways to reach that point as you can think of. In writing, there is one way to reach many different answers, because applying the same method to everyone's minds never reaches the same result. Math, on the other hand, works inversely, yet based on the same principal. There is never one definitive way to reach the same answer. In my Multi-variable calculus class, we had an assignment to integrate a very difficult four-dimensional hypervolume. While not everyone took the same method - some used cylindrical integration, some used spherical, one even kept it in cartesian, all of us reached the same value at the end. This is part of the beauty of math. Solving a math equation gives me the same kind of joy as others may experience when completing a nice puzzle, or figuring out who it was who stole your donut in the morning (though the result of that is often much more violent). As someone who struggles with self-doubt, I always feel a sense of reassurance that, yes, I am actually capable, whenever I finish a math problem correctly. As well, the application of mathematics into my physics courses is a delight. I could never stand my biology class - too many different nomenclatures; but physics? That is nearly all mathematics. Engineering physics is such a beautiful course - integrate to find the velocity - derive to find the force - it feels perfect. Not only does physics benefit from math, but so does coding. Python is the main coding language I use - and the inherent mathematical nature of it is so perfect to me. As well, as a musician, music composition flows so naturally to me, all because I analyze music as though it were math - math not out of logic, but the math of emotions. Thank you.

Gavin Grimm vs. Gloucester County Public Schools. 2014. This Supreme Court case is what brought the "issue" of transgender people using the restroom they desire into the public eye. 2021. I, a transgender girl, attend Gloucester County High School. My freshman year, I was constantly harassed every morning by this group of guys - they would throw full plastic water bottles at my head, leaving bruises; the teacher just watched. This school was not and would never be safe for anyone like me. Halfway through my freshman year, I attempted suicide. This had been a long time coming, the harassment and bullying, combined with how severe my dysphoria had become all came together to create the perfect storm of suicidal ideation and self harm. I remember being taken to the emergency room. My mom brought my favorite book for me - but she didn't bring it for Marie, the girl who tried to take her own life - she brought it for Martin, the kid that, in her eyes, Marie almost killed. I tried to persuade her and my stepdad to be okay with who I was, but they never would be. They still aren't. My senior year I am still a transgender girl, and still suffering the repercussions of my suicide attempt. My grades that year slipped horribly. I was always a Straight-A student. I got D's in some of my classes. Even to this day, I fell from almost top of my class to barely top 10%. My attempt failed to take my life in the present, but it certainly took my life in the future away. I now barely qualify for any of the colleges I would have easily slid right into. I used to attempt frequently. Freshman year was simply my first time. I once concocted a plan to take a knife from my kitchen, walk out into my backyard and stab myself in the chest so that even if I were to be found, I would have already been dead by the time I was found. My parents found my plan and punished me further for this. When I tried to explain where my suicidal thoughts had come from, my parents simply blamed my friends, the queer friends of mine who went through the same harassment and bullying, for me being suicidal. They refused to believe me when I explained we helped one another - they thought I was carrying the burden of all of my friend's struggles. They tried to send me to church to heal my suicidality and my queerness. I used to be singled out, in front of approximately 50 kids my age, plus/minus two years, and told how what I was was a mockery of God, a mockery of all things holy. I'm still not over the trauma of what I experienced at those church groups. When I was 15, I tried to fully and wholly come out to my parents, for the last time. By the end of the night, I had to walk out of my house and run down the street wearing nothing but pajama pants, a hoodie, and crocs, in winter, at night. I fully believed I was not physically safe at that location. Even now, still, as a trans girl, I can't think of either my mom or my stepdad with any real love - because I know their love isn't for me. It's for Him. A Him who never existed.