Ever since I was a kid I have been interested in serving my community through service that very few can understand. I come from an Army family where my mother, father, and stepfather all served during my childhood. I always looked up to my parents serving our country and aspired to be like them and join the armed forces myself. I saw my parents deployed and in the worst possible places during the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts and always hoped that they would make it home safely and without injury. That started my interest in the medical field and since then I have started my long journey towards a nursing degree. Currently, I work in a hospital as a CNA and I work a second job with a rehab facility. Every day that I work I see patients from all walks of life and I strive to help them in any way that I can. Whether that is lending a helping hand in their journey to better health or lending my ears to listen, talk, and understand what some of my patients go through daily and how that has ultimately affected where they are and how they have come to be in the hospital. I am very close to completing my BSN with only one year left in the program and I am very excited about where the nursing career path will take me in regards to helping my patients regain health more than I have ever been able to in the past. When I complete the nursing program I want to work in either the ICU, ER, or in the OR so I can work with some of the most critically ill and acute patient populations that there are. I want to be able to help these patients in their hardest and worst times and I want to make a lasting impact on my patients so that they understand why I have come to be a nurse in the first place. So when asked why I am interested in pursuing a nursing career the reason is to best help my community and my country through selfless acts of kindness and through medicine that can one day save the lives of my patients. I don’t apply to scholarships solely for monetary assistance but to ultimately further my impact and drive into becoming what I have always wanted to be, a nurse.

I have dealt with addiction my entire life. Most of my cousins are on the streets, homeless, addicted to heroin, methamphetamine, crack cocaine, opioids, or some combination of these and more. I have watched them from a young child turn from family members I relished memories of playing the GameBoy and watching cartoons on our grandparent's couch after school into ghosts of what they once were. They all started families young with other people addicted to drugs and this led to them throwing away the lives of a future generation of children who won’t know true innocence or a real family. When I was two years old my parents divorced and my brother and myself were in between split households for the majority of our childhood. My father was an abusive alcoholic and continued to be until I was seventeen years old and when he kicked me out of the house one night after he came home from the bar intoxicated. I jumped from couch to couch until I landed at my mother's for the remainder of my short-lived, covid plagued, senior year. I raised myself and built up my life from rock bottom. My interest in health care started when I watched my mother start her dream as a nurse at forty-five years old after she retired from the Army. I saw what she did and listened to the stories she told me about her experiences joining the medical field. I started working at Mosaic Life Care about a year and a half ago as a PCA. Working virtually on the bottom of the food chain I have an appreciation for what LPNs, RNs, MDs, Analysts, Financial services, and various other positions I work with on a day-to-day basis that makes Mosaic, as a whole, run smoothly and efficiently. My position has lent me the opportunity to see quite a lot on the floor as Saint Joseph has a large percentage of drug addiction and drug-related crimes. As a person who has been around and has personally experienced addiction of all kinds I always strive to talk to my patients who fall in this category and connect with them on a personal and professional basis. With coming into the nursing program I look to the future on how I can best guide and help people who don’t have a support system or who may have one but just need a helping hand and ears to listen. I am going to use my degree after I graduate as a tool to use what I have to help people who oftentimes think they don’t need help or who can’t help themselves as they are blinded by the pains and pleasures of addiction. This essay is not written with just the purpose of receiving a scholarship, I would rather speak from the heart than speak as a robot who just wants someone to pay for their college. Regardless of whether I am chosen as the winner or not I want to thank you for the opportunity of consideration. This topic is near and dear to my self and who I am today and I will continue to currently help others in all walks of life and look forward to having my nursing degree so I can help patients with addiction in much more depth than before.