During my high school career, I’ve accumulated over 100 hours of community service from various activities. I have had the opportunity to volunteer at my local fire department, an animal rescue shelter, National Honors Society-sponsored tutoring, high school orientation tours, and the Cazenovia Junior High Drama Department. I enjoyed every minute of working for my community and gained a lot through all of my experiences. While I’ve participated in a lot of different kinds of volunteer work, nothing has been more influential and beneficial to my life than my time working with the Junior High Drama department. I worked as stage crew for the middle school musical during my sophomore, junior, and senior years of high school, which added up to around 100 hours altogether. While I started off as a simple stage hand and set builder, I ended up becoming house manager by my senior year and was able to lead an amazing group of people throughout the show. I was also able to help the kids in the show, which helped me find my passion for psychology. My volunteer work required me to help the middle schoolers in case they ever forgot a prop or costume but also to make sure that they were prepared for the performance. I did mandatory check-ins on them before every performance and got to know them very well throughout the 3 months of rehearsals and shows and I became close friends with many of them. However, it wasn’t until after the final show that I realized how much helping kids like them means to me. After the final performance, there was a cast party in the cafeteria that all the crew was invited to. I gave my senior speech to all of my workers, thanking them for volunteering their time to the show and allowing me to boss them around. When I was finished, a large group of kids had gathered at the table to thank me and a few other people for helping them out during the show, which caused a few tears to be shed. This moment knowing that I had made a difference, even just volunteering a few hours of my week to them meant the world to me, and I knew then that I was going to pursue a job in psychology. Though all of my experiences in volunteer work were extremely beneficial to me, working with the drama club allowed me to find my future career. So, I will now be attending SUNY Binghamton this spring semester to major in psychology. Hopefully, I will attend until I earn my doctorate so that I can become a licensed therapist to continue helping people every day that I work.

As a queer teenager growing up in a conservative town, I leapt at the opportunity to be in my high school’s first inclusivity club. From junior high to my senior year, a tiny GSA club called Sanctuary became my home, and I was lucky enough to be able to lead it for 4 years. Being the person in charge of such an important, safe place for young kids and teens was an eye-opening experience and was a key inspiration for my love of psychology. For as long as I can remember, I have always been extremely open with my identity and how I express myself through clothes, artwork, and music. Unfortunately, in the close-knit community that I grew up in, my “eccentric style” was not as accepted as I’d hoped it would be. Luckily, my young naiveness kept me from realizing the amount of bullying and harassment I was enduring on a day-to-day basis. It wasn’t until about 7th grade, when I was outed to my entire school, that I became fully aware of my situation. From that moment on, being pushed around and yelled at for looking and acting differently became less funny and confusing and much more stressful. Luckily, once I entered high school, I realized that there were a lot more targets available than just a thirteen-year-old with a ton of confidence and even more Hawaiian shirts. After half a year of searching for a community that I felt safe in, I stumbled into Sanctuary Club. The first meeting I attended was in mid-December of 2019, when it was composed of about 11 teenagers with one teacher sitting in a circle and talking about their feelings. For some inexplicable reason, hearing about the ups-and-downs of this group struck a chord in me, and I knew that somehow this was going to be a huge part of my life. Through a year and a half of remote meetings, where our members slowly started dwindling in number, I stuck with the club and eventually began to lead the group. I was making calls to schools, working with county-wide organizations, and giving my whole life to 5 people who could not have cared less, all at the age of fourteen. During the summer before sophomore year, our advisor left, our old members had graduated, and it was my job to rebuild Sanctuary from the ground up. From then on, our club became an activist group for education and equality, specifically surrounding the LGBTQ community, around the school. In my time leading this brand-new group of students, I saw shy kids become loud, proud advocates for the LGBTQ community and fight for what they believed in. I witnessed eighth graders standing up against juniors and seniors to protect themselves and their classmates. After years of giving back to my small community, and building up an army of young, passionate activists, my love for psychology had been sparked. I'm currently planning to enroll in SUNY Binghamton, which is on the more expensive side of SUNY colleges. Earning the scholarship will help me in being able to attend the full 4 years and eventually get my doctorate. I aim to become an even bigger advocate for LGBTQ rights, as I'm heading off to a very large environment, and a scholarship like this will be a huge step in helping me get there.

I have worked for my entire life to be able to crush my dad at any Mario Kart game. Honestly, I am really not a video game person, but Mario Kart has always stood out to me. It has always been the game that my family got together to play during holidays or non-busy weekends. So, in my competitive nature, I made it a point to get extremely skilled at this game, particularly Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. I remember one time I challenged my little brother to a game, where if I won, he had to do my dishes, but I had to wear distorted vision glasses the entire time I was playing. I won by a landslide, and he had to do the mountain of dishes I had let pile up for the entire day. At a thanksgiving celebration with my friends, I beat them in every single race, except for Dry, Dry, Desert where I placed 2nd. I blame joy-con drift for this, but I suppose I won't complain. However, even after years of training, I still end up neck-and-neck with my dad during races, but hopefully time away in college will allow me to get the training I need with new people to be able to surpass him in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe prowess.