I have enjoyed cars my entire life. My earliest automotive memories involve carefully parking Hot Wheels cars in perfectly aligned rows along the walls of the hallway leading to my bedroom. My parents always got frustrated that our walls were lined with perfectly parked toy cars. As I grew older, my mechanical curiosity in them increased. My grandfather had two Corvettes, and just sitting in the driver's seat sparked my imagination. My other grandfather had a fishing boat, and helping him change the oil provided my first real experience working on an engine. Those early moments instilled an appreciation for the machinery that powers our movement. In my early teenage years, I began tinkering with remote control cars. I have owned three 1/10 scale vehicles that I have modified to have stronger parts, faster and more powerful motors, and custom-painted bodies. I replaced parts when they broke from my shenanigans, jumping the car as high as I could in the back yard or drifting the car into the curb by accident. When I finally got the keys to my first car, my dad's 2012 Ford Focus that he let me drive, I immediately started experimenting with ways to optimize and personalize it. I installed my own speaker system, upgraded the headlights, and meticulously researched reliability modifications. I took over all my own routine maintenance, including oil changes. This method of hands-on learning was incredibly rewarding, and it quickly proved crucial. Near the end of my first year driving, a tire popped at highway speeds. Thankfully, because I had spent so much time working on the car, I had the confidence to safely jack the car up and switch to my spare on the shoulder of the road. While changing a tire is a foundational task, it reinforced my ideas about myself: I enjoy working on, improving, fixing, and modifying cars. I love putting in the physical and mental work to make a vehicle perform at its best. This intrinsic drive is exactly what pushed me to pursue advanced studies in mechanical engineering at Northwestern University. I am no longer just replacing parts; I am learning the foundational science required to design them. Looking forward, I am committed to dedicating my career to the automotive industry. My ultimate goal is to work as an automotive engineer, ideally rooted in manufacturing and design in Southeast Michigan, though I am open to wherever the industry's advancements take me. Whether I am focusing on the efficiency of next-generation powertrain solutions or the complex sensor integration required for autonomous vehicles, I want to be on the front lines of automotive innovation. This scholarship would be an investment in that goal, helping me bridge the gap between the little kid who lined up die-cast cars in a hallway and the engineer designing the next generation of performance vehicles.