With my skill level, advancement, and success in music, I felt confident that performing professionally was my dream for years. With time and experience, though, I uncovered a new dream that roots to my childhood of playing with toy helicopters: Aviation. Recently, my family went to Arizona to raft in the Grand Canyon. While river rafting was great, I was deucedly awed by the transportation variety; The commercial flight from Minneapolis, MN, to Las Vegas, NV, the small jet plane ride to the ranch we stayed on, and most impactfully, the helicopter rides in and out of the Grand Canyon. At age 8, I participated in the EAA Young Eagles flight program at my local airport. I flew in a small, fixed-wing plane with an experienced pilot and even took over the controls for a moment. I recall adoring the uninterrupted sky - aside from the initial twisting in my stomach. Succeeding this vacation, I discovered another Young Eagles flight program was being held nearby the next weekend. I attended this event with my mom who saw the light in my eyes as I got to once again go up into the skies. At this point, having had more flight experience, I deciphered that the thrill of helicopter flight brought me inarguable excitement compared to regular planes. I relentlessly craved to feel the freedom of motion and closeness with the sky from helicopters that fixed-wing aircraft simply could not provide due to their manner of mechanics (wings versus rotors). I immediately insisted on adjourning a helicopter discovery day at my anticipated college, Lake Superior College, in Duluth, MN. To no one's surprise, I was again immeasurably captivated by the euphoric, free feeling of flight, and felt ecstatic being able to take over the controls of a helicopter rather than the small, fixed-wing planes I had handled during the EAA Young Eagles flights. These experiences officiated my dream of becoming a helicopter pilot. Hence, I set-off on my way to apply for Lake Superior Colleges Professional Pilot of Helicopters Associates degree program, which is operated through Lake Superior Helicopters, a Duluth, MN, charter company partnered with the college to provide professional aviation schooling. Overjoyously, I was accepted, and am now in the phase of planning my future career and 10-year outlook. Upon my high school graduation, I will attend LSC / Lake Superior Helicopters in the Fall semester of 2022. Unlike other Associates programs, however, the cost of flight school is domineering. A singular hour of flight time in a standard helicopter costs at least $600, and in more specialized helicopters, hourly costs climb to almost $1,700. Over the course of 2.5 years, this Associates program requires at least 200 hours of flight time - not including any additional hours flown to master certain skills. The cost of flight schooling itself, without considering the price of general tuition and books through Lake Superior College, arrives towards a grand minimum of $200,000 - far above the cost of an average, full 4-year university. Upon graduating from Lake Superior College / Lake Superior Helicopters, I plan to work as a tour pilot and/or certified instructor in order to build my flight hours and achieve my goal of becoming an EMS or Police helicopter pilot. In 10 years, I plan to be working as a pilot in one of these fields in Colorado and paying off whatever financial debt remains after the provision of gracious scholarship providers without a single regret, as I will be one of few successful women to obtain an indefinitely euphoric career.

Throughout my life, I have held plentiful dreams, each of which I have seemingly set my entire heart on. These dreams ranged from being a professional basketball player, serving as a tank operator in the military, to performing as a trumpeter in the nation's finest symphonic orchestras. With each of these dreams, I have engaged in related extracurricular activities and leadership roles; Additionally, my family and friends have always unconditionally supported my drive, even while it changed drastically as I grew up. With the support of friends, family, and scholarships gifted by gracious providers like yourself, I will be able to successfully pursue my long-lost and refound dream of becoming a helicopter pilot without the stress of paying in-full for flight schooling. While I have not been fortunate enough to live in a city and attend a big school with dozens of opportunities to take courses, camps, and discovery days related to Aviation, or have a solidified, well off financial situation due to my fathers diagnosis and passing from Alzheimer's disease, I still plan to attend helicopter piloting college at Lake Superior College for 2.5 years, then transfer to a four-year university in order to complete my ground studies and other mechanical studies. While I will continue to hold my prior passions (music, body work, sports) as hobbies, I want to devote my work ethics, great communication skills, accountability, self-control, integrity, and overwhelming responsibility into aviation - specifically helicopter piloting. Immediately upon graduating, I plan to work as a helicopter pilot tour or tour guide pilot in order to build my flight hours. As I continue to build this time with my consistent, powerful work ethic and any financial support I can receive, I plan to eventually serve as an emergency services pilot in either EMS, policing, or investigative intelligence agencies. I would love to fly serving the critical role of saving lives, whether it be human lives due to an accident or wild animals from a wildfire. With your unimaginably compassionate contribution of scholarship money towards my flight training, I will be able to successfully advance into the glorious field of aviation despite the lack of resources I’ve been provided with based on location and family situations. I have built myself into an accomplished, focused, disciplined, awarded, and respectful individual out of a tiny Wisconsin village with few opportunities, and I look forward to showing my family and community members what can be achieved with hard work and gracious supporters like yourself and others.

From an early age, I have performed various acts of community service. Not only has this service helped the environment and peers around me, but it has also guided me towards a surrounding community of supportive friends and resources. From ages 10 to 14, I lived with my uncle, over an hour from my own home, for weeks at a time during my summer vacations in order to plant and manage their local gardens, clean the local businesses and town hall, and play music for children at the library down the road. By doing these acts of kindness, I was able to spend plentiful quality time with my family and their friends, who in return provided me with opportunities to express my musicality through trumpet performances / gigs, lessons on how to work with machinery, and more generally - a gracious community of friends to lean upon for anything I may need, whether it be advice for careers, college, or how to bake the best chicken around the county. As I entered middle school, I noticed that my hometown American Legion and uncles town, Weyerhaeuser, WI, VFW Post had not had a trumpet player to honor the troops / fallen veterans during patriotic and/or memorial services for close to a decade. Without question, I immediately jumped on this chance to help out my local groups of veterans, which was heartwarmingly received by them and the communities connected to them. For some attendees at these military services, it was their first time hearing a live trumpeter in years - often bringing them to tears; This fact in itself has been my biggest personal motive to continue my service. Since I began playing patriotic tunes and Taps for these groups during middle school, I have continued to serve as an honorary member of their legions. Not only has this specific service deeply impacted the patriotism and gratitude of my communities, it has also opened me to numerous other slots to express my musicality, meet people with common interests, and once again, it has created a pool of supportive friends who I am confident will always lend a listening ear or lending hand to myself. While the community I reside within and those surrounding it are extremely small, seeing how raw, deep, and of pure gratitude people's reactions are towards my service drives me to never stop pushing to help wherever I can. Community service is far more than simply working or “wasting time” for free; It is an opportunity to bring a glorious glow to the lives of those around you while also building a support system of peers to rest yourself within. Upon looking back at the community service I have provided over the years, it is easy to realize that if everyone did even a little bit of heartfelt service for their community, from big cities to rural communities like my own, the world around us would drastically change emotionally and environmentally for years to come.