I've been making music for almost ten years, mostly self-taught, mostly late at night. I don't come from a musical family. The one thing I got from my estranged father was an ear for sound, and I ran with it. When I produce, I don't start with a plan. I start with a sound that shouldn't work. Synths chopped until they lose their shape. Drum breaks distorted past recognition. I break things on purpose and follow curiosity instead of instructions, trusting that the mess will eventually reveal its own logic. That process taught me how to think like a mad genius. I'm studying AI and Machine Learning at Purdue, and I think about code the same way I think about music. Both are systems you can pull apart and rebuild. Both reward people willing to experiment without permission.

I've never been incarcerated, but my mother, who was an activist, was. When I was eight, ICE detained her, held her in a facility, and then deported her. She had legal status. She had a work permit. None of that stopped them. Her incarceration wasn't criminal. It was a bureaucratic punishment for being outspoken. While she sat in a cell, I sat in foster care, waiting, because the agencies in charge of my safety never bothered to talk to each other. Her incarceration stole years from us. After she was deported and we finally reunited, we moved to Turkey, then Morocco, while I continued school online. If none of that had happened, I probably would have followed a regular academic path. Classrooms, grade levels, a normal pace. Instead, I sprinted. I finished sixth grade in one year. Seventh and eighth the next. By 14 I was taking full‑time college courses on top of my remaining high school requirements. That speed wasn't ambition. It was necessity. The only way to not fall permanently behind was to push forward faster than any system ever expected me to. That forced acceleration ended up revealing something I might never have learned otherwise. When stability disappears and the usual supports crumble, you either sink or you learn to build your own structure. I chose the latter. I started treating my education like a development project: breaking courses into tasks, tracking progress on Trello boards, holding weekly check‑ins with my mom like a scrum master. I taught myself programming during those years, languages, frameworks, full‑stack tools, because code was one of the few things that followed clear logic. The chaos of immigration and incarceration had no manual. Code did. So now I can dream big because I already survived the version of life where everything falls apart. I made it through foster care, deportation, and being a student in three countries with a laptop as my main classroom. That doesn't mean I'm grateful for what happened. I'll never be grateful for the time my mother and I lost. But I do trust my ability to recover and rebuild, because I've already done it. That's what fuels my career ambitions. At Purdue, I'm studying Machine Learning. I want to create educational tools that work for students in crisis, tools that adapt when a kid's life gets turned upside down, the way mine did. My mother's incarceration showed me that institutions can break without warning and that the people inside them can be forgotten. I won't build technology that assumes everyone has a steady home, a consistent school, or a safe landing pad. I'm building for the ones who don't. I'm building because I was one of them, and I still made it.

My plans for the future are pretty straightforward. I'm going to Purdue to study Machine Learning, and I want to spend my career building educational technology that doesn't collapse the moment a student's life gets unstable. That goal comes straight from my own experience. After my mother was deported, I did school online while moving between countries, often without a classroom, a consistent teacher, or even reliable internet. I had to figure out how to learn in chaos. Now I want to build tools that make that process easier for the next kid in a similar situation. Concretely, I want to design adaptive platforms that work offline, adjust to irregular schedules, and provide structure for students who are displaced, learning a new language, or cut off from traditional schooling. I know the difference a well-built system can make because I've been on both sides of broken ones. When child welfare and immigration enforcement refused to communicate, I ended up in foster care. That experience taught me that coordination matters. I want to build software that bridges institutional gaps so that families don't get lost the way mine did. This scholarship would help by directly reducing the financial weight that sits on my family right now. My mother recently lost her job. We're still recovering from years of legal fees and relocation costs. Purdue's price tag is higher than what we can manage without outside help. I've been applying for scholarships, filing appeals, and looking for any path that closes the gap between the aid I've received and what's actually owed. Every dollar I can secure through awards like this means one less dollar I have to borrow. Less debt means more freedom. It means I can focus on my coursework instead of scrambling to cover bills. It means I can take advantage of research opportunities and internships, not just whatever job pays fastest. I want my time at Purdue to be about building skills and relationships, not just surviving financially. A scholarship like this moves me closer to that. Long term, I plan to work in the intersection of machine learning and human-centered design, either in the private sector or through public service roles that align with my values. I'm also interested in using my technical skills to support community organizing and advocacy work, the kind of work that helped my family when we needed it most. I don't need a flashy career. I want to be useful, and I want to build things that hold up when people are under pressure. This scholarship isn't just about money. It's about giving me the stability to pursue the education I fought to reach. I've spent years building structure out of chaos. Now I'm asking for the chance to keep doing that at a higher level, with better tools, in an environment built for it. That's my plan. This scholarship helps make it real.

My name is Naseem Johnson Byah. I was born in Boston, but a chunk of my childhood played out in Morocco and Turkey after my mother was deported. She was a legal immigrant with a work permit, but she was also loud about immigrant rights, and that made her a target. When I was eight, police came to our apartment and took her. I landed in foster care while she fought the system for years. Eventually we reunited and moved across continents, rebuilding life from scratch more times than I can count. I finished school online, my mom as my only teacher, teaching myself to code in whatever room we could rent that month. Education mattered to me because it was the one thing nobody could take. Our housing, our money, our family unit, all of it could disappear overnight. But what I learned, the skills I built, those stayed. I wanted to understand why the systems that were supposed to protect us failed so completely. How could child welfare, immigration enforcement, and the courts all exist in the same city and never once coordinate to keep a kid out of foster care? That question pulled me into computer science. I started to see code as a way to design structure where none existed. At Purdue, I'll study Machine Learning so I can build tools that don't collapse under pressure, tools that might actually catch people who are slipping through gaps. Basketball entered my life for just one season, my freshman year, when I lived in Maine. I played point guard for the Gorham Rams. I was never the best player on the court, but I loved the role. A point guard has to see everything at once: who's open, who's gassed, where the next pass needs to go. You learn to scan for what others miss, and that mental habit has stuck with me. When I debug a project or manage a team spread across time zones, I'm still scanning, still trying to see the whole floor. I also served as the team nutritionist, which surprised me because it meant teammates trusted me with their well-being. I learned that leadership can be handing someone a meal plan and checking in later to see if they stuck to it. That season gave me something rare during those years: consistency. Practice was on Tuesday and Thursday. Game was Friday. Expectations were clear. After the chaos of moving between countries and learning in four different time zones, the structure of a sports team felt like relief. It taught me that I work best inside clear systems with defined roles. That's a big reason I chose Purdue, a place built around engineering structure, where expectations are direct and I can focus on building. My background isn't neat or linear, but it has given me a sharp eye for what holds people together when everything else falls apart. Education, for me, has always been a way to turn that insight into something useful. The discipline I picked up from sports keeps me moving when motivation fades. I'm building toward a future where I design tools that provide the stability I once had to scrape together for myself.

Being mixed has meant my culture was never just one thing. My mother is Moroccan, an immigrant rights activist who was detained and deported even though she had legal status. My father is African-American. Growing up, I moved between countries, but I always knew I was Black in America, where that identity carries weight, history, and a certain vigilance. Watching my mother fight the immigration system while also understanding the Black American struggle taught me that injustice is not distributed evenly. It clusters around people already vulnerable, and it often wears the mask of bureaucracy. I was eight when police came to our apartment and took my mother away. She was outspoken, and that made her a target. I ended up in foster care, shuffled between agencies that didn't talk to each other. That experience imprinted something on me: systems supposedly built to protect can fail in silence. My mother, a Black immigrant woman, was caught between two forms of marginalization, and it scattered our family across continents. I carried that instability with me through years of online school, teaching myself to code in a cramped apartment in Morocco while trying to keep up with an American curriculum. Those experiences directly shaped my beliefs about justice. I don't see it as an abstract ideal. Justice is when the institutions that govern people's lives actually work for them, not against them. My mother's fight, supported by Black organizers, Jewish allies, and immigrant rights groups, showed me that coalition works when we refuse to let anyone be invisible. I spent much of my childhood surrounded by Muslim communities, though I'm now agnostic. Mosques like Al Huda in Chelsea, Massachusetts, and the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center were spaces where I saw people organize, share resources, and show up for one another. Those communities weren't just for Black Muslims. They were for everyone, and that mattered to me. That belief now fuels my college goals. At Purdue, I'm studying Machine Learning because I want to build systems that don't collapse under pressure, systems that coordinate agencies and put resources in front of people before they fall through the cracks. I've already started building small versions of that: a music platform for independent artists, Discord bots that manage community logistics. I learned that code could be a tool for structure when everything else felt chaotic. My career aspirations stem directly from my identity and my history. I want to design educational technology that serves students whose lives are unstable, displaced kids, language learners, those in under-resourced schools. The African-American community has long known what it means to be underserved by institutions, to be over-policed and under-supported. I carry that awareness into every project. I don't want to build tools that only work for people who already have stability. I want to build for the ones who don't. A challenge that impacted the African-American community is the intersection of immigration enforcement and Black families. My mother's case became a local rallying point, highlighting how the deportation machine tears apart Black immigrant households. I witnessed community members, many from mosques like Al Huda and ISBCC, show up, reminding me our struggles are linked. That solidarity taught me impact isn't just personal success; it's ensuring nobody gets left in the gaps between broken systems. That's the principle I'll take into my career, whether I'm writing code or advocating for policy. My culture, a blend of Moroccan resilience and African-American endurance, has given me a lens that sees both the cracks and the possibility of repair. I'm building for that repair.