My name is Rachel Perez Vazquez, a young woman of color living in white America. I have created ambition and passion from broken concrete. I weaponized the struggle that drowns my family into academic drive. I am a first generation Mexican-American student, in search of a meaningful education to inspire the young girls of my family. My family has only ever known poverty and constant struggle, after 20 years migration hasn’t eased their economic burden. My mother has been single handedly raising me for all of my life. She has done her best to provide for our small family but the political climate has made that extremely difficult. She was out of work for months because of the high ICE raids in our city. We tried our best to navigate our daily lives with the threat of being separated or even killed looming over our heads. She works everyday to provide us with a roof over our head even if all we rent out is a 100 square foot room to share. However this has not always been the case, my mother was a stranger throughout my whole childhood. My older sister is responsible for the person I am today, she opened my eyes to a better future. My sister was the first in my family to attend college, she eventually had to quit to help support our family. Even without a degree i’ll always be proud of her for exploring a realm never seen by anyone in my family. She is my number one driver in my pursuit of a higher education. It is mandatory to complete my education because I will forever be in debt to these hard working women for all of the sacrifices they have taken for me. I haven’t always had a clear understanding of what I wanted my future to look like. I never took school too seriously, I tried my best to succeed in my classrooms but never had the calling to take it further than that. I just wanted to get by and live my life as an adult. Until I moved to Oregon, halfway through my freshman year of high school my mother could no longer survive in the city of Los Angeles. We left everything we ever knew behind, and started from scratch. The transition was sudden and lonely, I had trouble making friends and felt out of place in the learning environment. All I knew was that I wanted to get out of there quickly. Until I had a meaningful conversation with our career coordinator, she asked me what I wanted to do after high school. That was the moment I decided architecture was the career for me; with her help I found so many great opportunities and connections that support me to this day. That is why I am overly excited to start this new chapter in my life, where I can start to take my studies to the next level. I constantly fantasize about life after college. I plan to work and gain meaningful experience that shapes the quality of my work for better. I want to design proper environments for struggling communities, and for our wonderful earth. My biggest goal is to open an architectural firm that thrives under POC leadership. As a woman of color I want to create a place where racism doesn’t dictate professional growth and solely feeds positivity into a deserving team. I am truly excited to experience what life has stored for me, because I know I will achieve greatness.