It was past midnight, twelve degrees, and I was speed-walking back to my dorm in just a sweatshirt, cursing my own bad planning for the eight cold minutes ahead. Then I passed a woman on the sidewalk wearing even less, sitting on a trolley grate to catch the thin warmth rising through it. She wasn't asking for anything. She didn't look up. And I realized I was bracing for eight minutes of cold while she was bracing for the whole night. I folded my sweatshirt, set it beside her so I wouldn't startle her, and walked the rest of the way home with numb arms and a warmer chest. That instinct is the truest thing about me, and I know exactly where it comes from. I spent most of my early teen years feeling invisible in rooms full of people who knew my name - too anxious, at my lowest, to even eat lunch alone. This gave me a hypersensitive radar for the quiet one in any room, the person about to be overlooked; and I move toward them. I remember the small things. I never miss a birthday. My real goal, above any title, is that everyone I know has at least one person to text on their worst day. If there's no one else, I want it to be me. That's the mark I want to leave on the world; I want to be the reason fewer people ever have to feel unseen.

Under the fluorescent lights of a rec center, I watched a young student peel her first 3D print off the bed - a small Hello Kitty charm for her Crocs. Over three days, I taught her and her classmates the basics of 3D printing and Python through Funbotics, an education nonprofit where grant funding put printers into the hands of more than three hundred students who would otherwise never have touched one. We prioritized communities with little discretionary funding for STEM education. Watching her, I thought I knew exactly what my impact was: giving these kids the skills they need to thrive in this age of new technology. I chose an engineering school that is 51% women, and I don't take for granted that I can go days without being the only woman in the room. But a balanced classroom doesn't mean bias has disappeared - it just means it's learned to stay quiet. I learned how quiet when an AI corrected me. I was using an LLM to draft the Python curriculum for that very program; my boss tasked me with fitting nine hours of lessons across three days. As I refined the plan, the model flagged a tradeoff: to stay inside the limit, I'd have to cut the final project. "Is that okay with him?" it asked. I stopped. My boss's name was Sarah. I had never mentioned a gender - the system simply assumed one. The tool I was using to teach girls they belonged in technology could not imagine a woman in charge. It was a small moment, but it widened everything. These are the systems millions use daily - the ones schools teach with, the ones policymakers consult to govern nations. Beneath the surface, they quietly decide what a "normal" user looks like. Bias doesn't have to be loud to be everywhere; it only has to be trained in once and deployed at scale. I could teach a hundred bootcamps, but if the tools those students grow into keep whispering that someone like them doesn't lead, I'd only be preparing them for a system that wasn't built for them. So I want to work at both ends at once. I'm studying electrical engineering and artificial intelligence because the problems I want to solve lie in both areas. As a machine learning engineer, I want to design models and the methods that hold them accountable: testing pipelines that catch a biased assumption before it reaches a user, training approaches that refuse to treat one kind of person as the default. The other half is physical. The same systems that quietly erase people also consume staggering amounts of energy - the data centers and the chips beneath them. I want to design chips and ML algorithms for energy efficiency in chip design, so the intelligence we deploy at scale is sustainable as well as fair. An equitable system that burns the planet to run isn't truly equitable. I want both to be prerequisites, not afterthoughts. That's the scale I'm reaching for - not only the three hundred students a grant can touch, but the millions quietly shaped every day by systems that decide who counts as default. I still think about that student and her print. Someday she'll ask a machine for help and see herself in the answer - not the exception, but the default. I plan to be one of the people who put her there.

Under the fluorescent light of a rec center, I watched my young student carefully peel her first 3D print off the bed- a small Hello Kitty charm for her Croc shoes. I'd spent three days teaching her and her classmates the basics of 3D printing and Python through Funbotics, an education nonprofit I volunteered with. With grant funding, the organization put 3D printers into the hands of more than three hundred students who would otherwise never have touched one- much less fully build and CAD design with. We prioritized programs in communities with minimal discretionary funding for the latest technology education. Watching that girl, I thought I knew exactly what my impact looked like- I was giving her and the rest of my students a leg up to being a part of the world of technology that they could thrive in. Coming from an engineering school that is 51% women, I can go days without being the only woman in the room. This is the world that I thought I was helping my students grow up to learn and work in. I am proud to stand among majorly women engineers, but I quickly realized that these biases didn’t disappear- they just quieted. I was using an AI assistant to help draft the Python curriculum for those bootcamps. My boss had asked me to fit the lessons into nine hours across three days, and as I refined the plan, the model flagged a tradeoff: to stay inside the limit, I'd have to cut the final project. "Is that okay with him?" it asked. I stopped. My boss's name was Sarah. I had never mentioned a gender; the system simply assumed one. The tool I was using to teach girls they belonged in technology could not imagine a woman in charge. It was a small moment, but it widened everything I thought my impact had to be. These are the systems millions of people use every day- the ones schools teach with, the ones policymakers consult to govern entire nations. And quietly, beneath the surface, they assume our bosses, our leaders, and our CEOs are men. I could teach a hundred bootcamps, but if the tools those students grow into keep whispering that someone like them doesn't lead, I'd only be setting them up for a system that wasn’t designed for them . So I plan to make my impact from both ends. I will keep doing the hands-on work putting skills and tools into the hands of kids the system overlooks, because no abstract reform replaces a child holding something she made. But studying artificial intelligence and electrical engineering, I also intend to shape the systems those kids will inherit: designing AI models, and the methods that hold them accountable, so fairness is prerequisite rather than an afterthought. The girls I taught will grow up to use these systems, teach with them, and one day shape them. I want the technology waiting for them to already see them. That is the scale I'm reaching for- not only the three hundred students a grant can reach, but the millions who will be quietly shaped, every day, by systems that decide what a "normal" user looks like. The most lasting way to give back is to make sure the people you lift up aren't written out the moment they arrive. I still think about that student and her print. Someday she'll ask a machine for help and see herself in the answer- not as the exception, but as the default. I plan to be one of the people who put her there.

“I shifted, near the beginning of this discussion of the value of friendship, from the question of what it is for friendship to be valuable to the question of what is involved in valuing friendship. These are different questions. People value many things that are not in fact valuable. What I want to suggest, however, is that the claim that friendship is valuable is best understood as the claim that it is properly valued, that is to say, that the reasons recognized by someone who values friendship are in fact good reasons. Consider, as a contrast with friendship, “fanship”: the state of being a devoted admirer of some famous person, such as a movie star, a singer, or an athlete. Some people value fanship. That is, they think that being a fan makes life better, more enjoyable, and more interesting. They may also think that it is important to be a good fan: that there is good reason, say, to see all the movies in which their favorite star appears as soon as they come out, and to defend the star when others criticize her, and that it would be a great thing to see the star in person, even from a great distance. According to the account of value I am suggesting, to hold that fanship is not valuable is just to hold that these reasons are not good reasons, or at least that a person who gave them great weight in shaping his life would be making a mistake. On the other hand, to hold that fanship, or friendship, is valuable is to hold that the reasons involved in valuing it are good ones and that it is therefore appropriate to give this notion an important place in shaping one’s life.” - T.M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other Beneath the calm surface of this passage, Scanlon advances a quietly radical claim: that valuing is not a feeling but a form of reasoning, and that to call something valuable is therefore to make an argument that can be wrong. The contrast he draws between friendship and "fanship" is not an observation about which attachments run deeper or feel nobler. It is a precision instrument, built to demonstrate that what we value is answerable to reasons - that a person can be sincerely, expertly, wholeheartedly devoted to something and still, in centering a life on it, be making a mistake. The passage's underlying message is that the hardest task is not to feel strongly but to value rightly, and in the right proportion. The argument turns on a distinction most people never pause to draw. Scanlon separates what it is for friendship to be valuable from what is involved in valuing it. The first phrase names a normative fact about the world; the second names a psychological act of a person. To value friendship, on his account, is to recognize certain considerations as reasons - to treat "she is my friend" as grounds for loyalty, attention, and sacrifice. But recognizing something as a reason and that reason actually being good are two different matters, and the gap between them is where his entire view lives. He marks that gap with one quiet sentence: people value many things "that are not in fact valuable." Valuing is fallible. The act can misfire even when it is sincere. This is why Scanlon redefines the valuable as the properly valued. To say friendship is valuable, for him, is not to point to some further property glowing within it - a hidden quality the friendship possesses in addition to its ordinary features. It is to claim that the reasons recognized in valuing it are "in fact good reasons." Value, on this account, does not sit above reasons and hand them down; it dissolves into them. The thing is not first valuable and therefore reason-giving - it is reason-giving, and that is all its being valuable amounts to. The small phrase "in fact" enforces the point, driving a wedge between believing one's reasons are good and their being good, and locating value entirely on the far side of that wedge, beyond the reach of mere conviction. The brilliance of the fanship example lies in how carefully it is built to fail. Scanlon constructs the fan as a structural twin of the friend: the fan has reasons (to see every film, to defend the star), holds commitments, recognizes standards for being a good fan, and is willing to let this devotion shape their life. Every formal feature of valuing is present. What is striking is the diagnosis Scanlon declines to give. He could have indicted fanship for being one-directional - the star does not know the fan exists, and nothing is owed or returned. That would have been the easy verdict. But he refuses. According to his theory, the defect of fanship cannot be that the relationship is unequal; it must be that the reasons are not good enough. By keeping the diagnosis at the level of reasons rather than relationship, Scanlon stays faithful to his own account: if value just is the goodness of reasons, then even the failure of a misplaced devotion has to be a failure of reasons, and nothing else. Here the passage becomes more careful than it first appears. Scanlon does not simply declare the fan's reasons worthless. He writes that these reasons "are not good reasons, or at least" that a person who gave them "great weight in shaping his life would be making a mistake." That hedge - "or at least" - quietly opens a second possibility. Perhaps the fan's reasons are not nothing; perhaps the enjoyment is real and counts for something. The error, then, may not be valuing fanship at all, but valuing it too much - granting it the kind of weight that should be reserved for things that can bear it. The defect he names is one of proportion, not absence. This is why the vocabulary of "weight" matters: valuing wrongly is often not a matter of caring about the worthless, but of letting a small good occupy a large place. The detail that one can be a good fan reveals a further layer. Even an attachment that may be mistaken has its own internal standards of excellence - the devoted fan does it well or badly. So "valuing well" splits into two questions the passage keeps from collapsing: whether one values the right things, and whether one values them skillfully. A person can be a flawless fan, meeting every internal standard of fandom, and still have made the prior error of building a life around fandom at all. The distinction Scanlon opened at the top - between the act of valuing and the worth of what is valued - returns here one level down, now dividing competence from correctness. The word that carries the most weight in the passage is mistake. With it, Scanlon closes off the comfortable exit into taste. If valuing were mere preference, no one could value the wrong things; they could only value different things, and there would be nothing to be right or wrong about. By insisting that a person can err, Scanlon makes value an object of rational assessment rather than personal report. We become accountable for what we value in the same way we are accountable for what we believe - answerable to whether the reasons hold, not merely to the sincerity with which we hold them. The passage ends on its quiet positive counterpart. To hold something valuable, Scanlon writes, is to hold that it is "appropriate" to give it "an important place in shaping one's life." Appropriateness is fittingness - the right response, proportioned to the reasons. It is the calm opposite of the mistake: where error is disproportion, value is the warrant for a fitting weight. And the recurring image of "shaping one's life" tells us why any of this matters. Value is not an abstraction to be catalogued; it is what we permit to organize a life. To be mistaken about it is therefore not a small lapse of judgment but the slow misbuilding of a life around reasons that cannot carry it. The passage's underlying demand follows, and it is severe: it is not enough to love something, nor even to love it well. One must love what there is genuine reason to love, and only as much as the reasons can bear. Valuing is not the place where reasoning stops and feeling takes over. It is reasoning - conducted with a whole life as the stake.

I chose an engineering school that is 51% women, and I don't take for granted that I can go days without being the only woman in the room. I'm proud of that. But a balanced classroom doesn't mean bias has disappeared - it just means it has learned to stay quiet. For most of high school, I assumed that becoming an engineer meant leaving advocacy behind. Computer science and social justice didn't overlap, I thought. There was no room in code for the things I cared about. Then an AI corrected me. I was using Claude to help draft a sample Python curriculum for a new coding-outreach program at the nonprofit where I worked. My boss had asked me to fit the content into nine hours, split across three days. As I refined the output, the model flagged a tradeoff: to stay inside the time limit, I'd have to cut the self-guided project at the end. "Is that okay with him?" it asked. I stopped. I read it again. My boss's name was Sarah. I had never mentioned a gender - the system simply assumed one. To this tool, the person in charge was a man by default. It was a small moment, but it cracked something open. These are the systems millions of people use every day, the ones schools use to teach the next generation, the ones policymakers consult to make decisions that govern entire nations. And quietly, beneath the surface, they assume our bosses, our leaders, and our CEOs are men. Bias doesn't have to be loud to be everywhere. It only has to be trained in once and deployed at scale. That is what I want to build against. Studying artificial intelligence and electrical engineering, I want to design not just AI models but the methods that hold them accountable - the testing pipelines that catch a biased assumption before it reaches a single user, the training approaches that refuse to treat one kind of person as the default. I want to make fairness in these systems measurable and expected, not an afterthought engineers apologize for later. For my community, this means systems that serve the millions who would otherwise never know they were being quietly written out - the girl drafting her first lesson plan, the woman whose authority an algorithm erases in a single pronoun. For me, it means I no longer have to choose. I spent years believing I had to pick between being an engineer and being an advocate. That moment taught me I can do both. I want to build AI that never again assumes the boss is a man - so the next girl who asks it for help sees herself in the answer, instead of being written out of it.

My whole life, a single word held up my entire sense of worth: smart. I was the kid who couldn't start anything without a goal and a plan to guarantee I'd reach it, terrified of disappointing the people who'd decided I was clever long before I believed it myself. Leaning on one trait felt safe. It was actually a trap: when your value rests on a single thing, you crumble the moment it's challenged. And I never truly believed the label - I just felt like I was forever racing to catch up to who everyone already assumed I was. Then my world shrank. COVID sent my school remote halfway through seventh grade, and when the choice came, I chose to stay fully remote - anxious, my self-esteem at its lowest. I spent nearly two years almost entirely inside my own head. I had never learned to make a friend; I assumed I was a burden, so I waited for people to reach out, and they rarely did. By the time ninth grade arrived, I was starting high school after a year of near-total solitude, battling depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts. The week before school began, a flood tore through my neighborhood - five to seven feet of water that destroyed our car and drowned the first floor of our home. The football coach sent his team to help families dig out. I heard the noise, peeked into the garage, and there they were: boys from my grade, the first people my own age I'd seen in a year and a half. I ran upstairs and had my first panic attack. Not because of the flood. Because I had been seen. That fear followed me into high school, and it lived loudest in the cafeteria. I'd time my walk through the hallways to "accidentally" fall in step with the one or two friends I had, just so I wouldn't have to walk in alone. Some days I missed them and ate with a spotlight on me, my chest constricting every time someone I knew glanced over. I never bought lunch off campus, even though we could - I knew no one would wait for me if my order took the longest. The gap between me and the perfect high schooler I imagined felt physically painful. Climbing out wasn't a single moment; it was a slow refusal to keep living that way. I learned that confidence isn't something you're born with, the way my older brother seemed to be - the effortless center of every room. It's something you practice until it's real. So I practiced walking toward people instead of away, and slowly, people walked back. What I did with that is the part I'm proudest of. The isolation gave me radar: I can find the quietest person in any room, because for years I was her - so I make her the most seen person there. I remember the small things, and I'll show up with a friend's favorite takeout the week she's drowning in midterms. I know everyone's birthday, and I make an absurd deal of it: a handwritten card, their favorite candy, and a text at midnight - because no one's phone should sit silent on their birthday the way mine did the night I turned sixteen. I don't save this for close friends, either; I bring it to club meetings, office hours, dining halls, the random run-ins on campus. My real goal, the one I'd put above any title, is that every person I know has at least one person to text on their worst day. And if there's no one else, I want it to be me. I didn't realize how far I'd come until a friend told me she'd skipped lunch because she had no one to go to the dining hall with. "Why not just go alone?" I asked. "I do it all the time." She looked at me like I was speaking another language. "That's because you don't care what people think," she said. "I'm too anxious to eat by myself in front of everyone." If only she knew. A few years earlier I was her - the spotlight, the constricting chest, the silent phone. For someone to look at me and see the fearlessness I used to envy in everyone else told me everything about the distance I'd traveled. Mental health taught me that the loneliest you can feel is in a crowded room - so now I walk into every room assuming someone in it is quietly going under the way I once was, and I look for them, even the strangers, even the ones who would never say a word. I'm still ambitious, but I no longer chase goals to prove I'm worth something; I chase them because I want to, and I refuse to let them define me again. I've stopped treating life as something to accomplish and started treating it as something to live, and to share. I get to be the source of warmth I once spent every lunch period wishing for. So I make sure no one around me eats alone - or wonders, at midnight, whether anyone remembered.

My parents bought their first home in America in the most flood-prone neighborhood in our county - not because they didn't care, but because it was what we could afford. We sat less than a mile from the Sound Shore, beside a man-made creek that overflowed with every hard rain. The agent never mentioned that. My parents, new to the country and its paperwork, had no one to translate the warning signs and no savings to walk away once we understood them. So we stayed, bailing water out of the basement year after year, like most of the first-generation families around us who'd been steered into the same mistake. In 2021, the water rose five to seven feet through our streets. Homes and churches already on their last legs were damaged beyond repair, and their owners - people like us - couldn't afford to rebuild. So twenty of us started our own chapter of the Fuller Center. For four years we recruited, fundraised, and knocked on doors to find who needed us most, gutting waterlogged walls and replastering them before mold could take hold. I'm proud of that work; I believe we gave a piece of our community back its footing. But that isn't the first thing I thought of when I read this prompt. I thought of a night during my first winter of college. I was walking back from the engineering building after a late study session - around twelve degrees, and my poor planning had left me in nothing but a sweatshirt. Speed-walking toward my dorm, I passed a woman sitting on the sidewalk wearing even less. She wasn't asking for anything. She didn't even look up. Going to school beside Philadelphia, I'd passed people like her before. But this time I caught myself mid-complaint about my own eight cold minutes and realized she was bracing for the entire night. I stopped. It was past midnight - nothing was open to buy her anything, no building open for her to step into. She sat on a trolley grate, holding onto the thin warmth rising through it. I looked at my watch: five minutes left in my walk. I pulled off my sweatshirt, folded it, and set it down beside her so I wouldn't startle her. Crossing the street, my arms numb in just a t-shirt, I glanced back. She had picked it up and was turning it over in her hands. I smiled, a little warmer than the cold should have allowed, and hurried home. I don't tell this story because I think I'm the kindest or most selfless person. I tell it because I grew up in a house that needed saving, in a community that quietly needed it too - and that taught me to recognize the look of someone with nowhere to go. The Fuller Center taught me how to rebuild a home. But it was a folded sweatshirt on a freezing sidewalk that taught me what I actually believe: character isn't built in the work people applaud. It's built in the small refuges we offer when no one is watching, and no one will ever know.