Growing up, I saw firsthand how incarceration and poverty create cycles that are hard to escape. Living in a low-income single parent household teaches you about the impact of circumstance very early on. As a child I had a keen financial and social awareness developed in part due to the adversity I have faced. I've improved significantly as a student because I feel an intrinsic imperative not to repeat the mistakes of those who came before me. For a long time, I felt like I was carrying the weight of something I couldn’t control, something that had already determined my future before I had a chance to define it for myself. There's an additional sense of instability that comes with living in a household with a single father that was pursuing higher education. We moved a lot when I was a child, and my current high school is the first institute I've attended for more than two consecutive years. Had I not experienced transferring across 13 different schools and multiple state lines, I wouldn't be such a dynamic and well-rounded student. I began to see my education not just as a way out, but as a way forward. I don’t want to just escape the struggles that come with poverty and generational trauma; I want to break those cycles. While I have had my personal struggles with self-advocacy in the public school system, I know that ultimately I am not anti-intellectual. It is this understanding about what it means to move through academia that was imparted upon me by my father that has provided me with the motivation I need to continue to navigate the educational machine. At the root of my educational endeavors is a hunger for information. The thought of a world where I am naive or apathetic affords me the discipline at times to break out of a tough phase of life that I may be experiencing. This motivation and cyclical pattern recognition has also allowed me to take tangible steps towards success in a more expedited manner. I want to be part of the change that ensures future generations have opportunities that weren’t always available to those before us. It’s critical to me to provide the world with work that is substantive and long lasting in nature. Allowing myself to be un-beholden to my circumstances has greatly increased my perceived ceiling of possibility. Reminding myself that resilience is also just as much a part of my family as any other negative issue is a positive reminder. A pervasive trueness to these values has taught me that giving is about healing, and that it’s important to make sure the struggles of the past don’t dictate the future.