Everybody wanted to be a "gifted kid." Skipping class once a week to go on a field trip to a middle school with a bunch of other smart students sounded like a dream come true. That's why, when I found out I was accepted into the gifted program, I told everyone I knew in a crazed excitement. I was one of the "smart kids;" I got to do fun stuff while the rest of the students had to learn. Little did I realize that this "fun class" would turn into one of the worst diagnoses of my life. By the end of my elementary school career, anxiety took root in my mind. Academic pressure from parents, teachers, and peers gave me the mindset that anything below an A was a failure. In middle school, the workload grew and the difficulty increased. By high school, I was drowning in work. I hadn't built the proper study habits to excel in higher level high school classes without sacrificing sleep, social life, or my grades. Since I had pressure put on me to excel in grades, I chose to sacrifice sleep and a social life to make sure I could accomplish what was necessary to succeed in high school. Because of this sacrificial way of thinking, I developed extreme depression and anxiety. I even developed PTSD-like symptoms of nightmares, emotional outbursts, and paranoia triggered by external stimuli. When I graduated high school with a Summa Cum Laude status, I believed all that pain was worth it. All those sleepless nights, those days spent wishing to die, the panic attacks that left me weak and helpless, but at least I got a 3.9 GPA. This is the curse of being a gifted child. In our current system, it is a gilded prison. Children are lured in by the promise of fun and excitement, then are ostracized by their peers and pressured by their parents and teachers to be no less than perfect. The children then develop other crippling mental illnesses that will never heal. Because they are born with a special mind with a special way of learning, gifted children are “gifted” a brain that never stops bleeding. This is the system that I wish to change. I am currently an undergraduate student studying psychology at the University of Central Florida. Through coursework and extracurriculars, I am building my skills in research and academia so that I might pursue research beyond undergraduate school. My main area of focus will surround understanding and advocating for the mental health and wellbeing of gifted children. These studies will include the neuroscientific differences between “normal” brains and “gifted” brains, the behavioral differences between each group of children, and different methods of teaching that can accommodate for each child’s type of learning. I then plan to share my research to parents and teachers alike and reform the “gifted” program to allow both groups of children to interact in the same school but allow for different types of learning. Even now, as an undergraduate student, I believe gifted children to be “special needs” students, and I hope to reform the system to recognize them as such. By teaching the teachers and faculty about my research, I plan to change how school treat gifted children so that the academic pressure they face will be lessened and they can integrate easily among their other peers. By teaching the parents, I hope to lessen the child’s academic burden within the home and provide parents and children with necessary resources to help them navigate being a “gifted kid.” With all of this research and all of this advocacy, my main goal is to completely reform the gifted system and provide resources for gifted kids to excel in an otherwise difficult environment. While I will start in Florida, I hope to spread my teachings internationally so that all schools will recognize gifted kids’ needs and accommodate for them. It has taken years of therapy, self-reflection, and mental work just to recognize that my anxiety and depression are not normal. I am still working through the long-lasting effects of that anxiety, of the loneliness caused by being gifted, of the depression that nearly stole my life many times. I still have regular panic attacks, anxiety scares, depressive episodes, and my fear of failure may never go away. This is a pain many other “gifted kids” still experience and it’s a pain we wouldn’t wish on any other child. Hopefully, through my research and advocation, the system will change and no gifted child will ever experience that pain again.

The public school system in the United States is effectively destroying the mental health of children. Each student has had one or more bad experiences with some teachers screaming at or threatening them, some outright neglecting them and their needs, and some going so far as to put the student in physical danger either through mild acts of violence or extreme negligence. The school staff often prove no better, with counselors and office staff more worried about a student's attendance record and GPA than they are about the child's well being. School lunches either refused to serve children who couldn't pay or were so awful that they became inedible, leaving many kids hungry. Add this to 7 hours of school a day with an equal amount of homework a night if not more and it's no wonder there's an increase in student anxiety and depression. Especially in the modern day, where students looking for a break from school see teachers all over the country complaining about how awful and stupid their students are. I was one of these kids. I suffered massive burnout by the time I turned 15 that only grew until I graduated. I saw how the schools treated their kids first hand, and I decided the moment I was given my high school diploma that it was time for a change. While an undergraduate student, I plan to engage in many research opportunities to improve my skills as a researcher and data analyst. I plan to become a research assistant for 2 years and to formulate my own Undergraduate Thesis by the time I earn my Bachelor's. Once I'm in graduate school, I will be dedicating all of my time to researching different potential changes in the school system. I am unsure of which specific area I want to explore first, though I have many ideas including implementing a recess for all grade levels, expelling the idea of a multiple choice test, and diminishing the homework load students bring home. As soon as I earn my PhD and have enough research, I will then advocate for these changes to happen all across the country, using my results to prove why these would be effective. I will continue my research in other areas, but I will advocate for one change at a time to improve the mental health of students in public school all around. At this same time, since I will be working with school-age children, I will also offer my services to teachers, parents, and kids who need extra support. To parents and teachers, I will provide resources on how to help children struggling with different mental illnesses and conflicts, along with being there as counsel should they need it. To students, I will offer safe spaces to talk about the struggles they face at school and my support should they ask for it. So many adults have given up on children, especially in times post 2020, and kids need the support of an adult to navigate their life through the highs and lows. While I work to make their lives better nationally, I also plan to help as many students as I can personally so they can say at least one person was there to help them through their darkest times. I remember being at school and having no one on my side. I remember staying up until the early morning crying while doing homework, teachers refusing to help us understand concepts, and counselors turning me away because of my GPA. I want to stop these events from ever happening to future generations.

Supporting the needs of gifted children is actually where I want to focus my efforts while (and after) obtaining my Psychology PhD. Because I was a gifted student in grade school, I saw first hand how the school system failed to provide them everything they needed to be their best self and instead tore them apart from the inside out. Since high school, my passion has been to advocate for the needs of gifted kids and I plan to do just that as I go through college. As a gifted kid, I saw the way teachers alienated them from their classmates firsthand. In elementary school, I was forced away from my regular class once a week to go to a special "gifted class" where often times we did independent research projects on random hyperfixations. When I was in my regular class, the other kids thought I was stuck up and convinced I was better than them, which meant many didn't want to be friends with me. Those who didn't think these things already had their own friend groups that I would often be excluded from. My teacher would hold higher emotional and intellectual standards for me, expecting me to be the better person in every argument regardless of who was in the wrong and frowned on me whenever I got any academic question wrong. In middle school, "gifted kids" were separated from the "regular kids" and had extremely high standards put on them by the teachers. To this day, I remember one teacher saying "a B in middle school will carry with you to college." I never got a chance to talk to anyone in the "regular" program because even our lunch seating was segregated our first year. By high school, I and the other "gifted kids" had so much burnout that unless there was parental pressure to get all As, most people got Cs or below. Many "regular kids" outperformed the "gifted kids" and laughed at them for doing so badly. Throughout this time, I suffered from anxiety and depression, and the most people- including trained therapists- cared to ask was "well how are your grades doing?" I knew, once graduating high school, that I wanted to make a change for these kids so no one would face the same problems I and many others faced in school. Right now, my plan is to use my time in undergraduate school to learn about the different problems facing "gifted kids" and think of solutions that could work while keeping them integrated with their "regular" peers. In graduate school, I want to begin my research into these different solutions and rest their implementation in the public school system. I specifically want to focus on the pacing of each child's lessons so that they are engaged in the curriculum while keeping them in the same classroom as their peers. From my own experience, keeping a gifted child at the same pace as those who are not is just as harmful as removing them from the classroom entirely. I also want to find resources for children who struggle from burnout, anxiety, and/or depression so they can receive the mental help they need beyond "what do your grades look like?" With my research, I then want to advocate for these changes to be implemented into school systems nationwide so that no child ever feels the pain I and my peers felt for having a different mind. I want to spread my findings to every state and use my influence to bring these changes to every school, public and private. I want to give these children the resources and tools I wish I'd had when I was their age. As a gifted kid, I know how it feels to be alienated from everyone else. With my research and my knowledge, I hope to make that alienation impossible while uplifting these kids to reach their fullest potential. Just like every other kid, gifted kids deserve to be supported, too. I will do whatever it takes to make sure that happens.