I want to build a technical foundation strong enough to create practical climate solutions for the communities I hope to serve throughout my career. Over the past several years, I have worked in climate communications, writing about carbon removal technologies, translating regenerative agriculture research for broader audiences, and evaluating early-stage climate ventures for investors. These experiences taught me how to communicate complex climate issues clearly and effectively, but they also showed me the limits of working without deeper technical expertise. I can explain why soil carbon sequestration matters, but I want to be able to evaluate whether a specific methodology is scientifically sound, understand why sequestration rates differ across soil types, and assess which adaptation strategies are most effective in different environmental conditions. I realized that if I wanted to contribute meaningful solutions instead of simply discussing them, I needed to strengthen my technical knowledge. This fall, I will begin a Master's in Climate at Columbia University with an Advanced Certification in Climate and Food Systems. Through this program, I will gain training in quantitative climate assessment, GIS and spatial data analysis, systems modeling, and the scientific foundations of soil carbon and regenerative agriculture. These skills will allow me to move beyond communicating climate solutions from the outside and instead contribute directly to evaluating, designing, and improving them. After completing my degree, I want to work with organizations designing climate adaptation programs for agricultural communities. My goal is to help develop climate and carbon initiatives that are scientifically rigorous, economically realistic, and genuinely beneficial for the people expected to implement them. I am particularly interested in closing the gap between climate research and the practical solutions that farmers and vulnerable communities can actually access and afford. Ultimately, my ambition is to build expertise that creates a measurable impact. This scholarship would help provide the financial stability necessary for me to fully dedicate myself to developing the technical skills, knowledge, and experience needed to contribute meaningful solutions in climate and food systems.

In 2016, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, and in 2017, my father was diagnosed with glioblastoma, a brain cancer. At the time, I was in high school and was one of four children in an immigrant family without a financial safety net. I watched both of my parents navigate life-threatening illnesses at the same time while our household continued running because it had no other choice. When I think about resilience, I think about my mother. While undergoing radiation treatment for her own cancer, she drove my father to chemotherapy appointments, which was over a 45-minute drive each way, brought him home, went to work, and still returned home each night to make dinner for our family. She did not have the option to stop because our family depended on her income and stability. Despite physical exhaustion, emotional stress, and the responsibility of caring for four children, she never allowed us to feel like a burden. She made sure we continued to have opportunities, structure, and support even as our family faced overwhelming uncertainty. My father passed away only a few weeks into my freshman year of undergrad. After receiving the call, I returned to campus because education represented everything my parents had sacrificed to provide for us. My mother believed strongly that continuing my education was the best way to honor those sacrifices and create long-term stability for our family. Her determination pushed me to keep moving forward even during one of the most difficult periods of my life. The years that followed tested me in ways that were not always visible academically. During 2020 and 2021, grief, financial instability, and my mother's ongoing treatment affected every aspect of my life. My academic performance declined significantly, and there were moments when simply remaining enrolled felt like an accomplishment. I considered leaving school several times, but I chose to stay, sometimes out of spite and other times out of guilt. In my final semester, I earned a 3.83 GPA and received Dean's List recognition. That achievement represented more than academic improvement. It reflected persistence, discipline, and my determination to finish what I started despite the challenges my family and I had faced. These experiences shaped the way I understand hardship and opportunity. They taught me that resilience alone is not enough when people lack support systems, financial protection, and access to resources during moments of crisis. Watching my mother continue working through cancer treatment and watching my family navigate loss without adequate support showed me how deeply systems affect people's ability to survive and recover. Those experiences motivated me to pursue graduate work focused on climate and food systems, particularly in communities that are most vulnerable to disruption and least equipped to recover from it. My ambition is rooted in creating meaningful change for people facing instability and hardship. My drive comes from the sacrifices my parents made to keep our family moving forward during impossible circumstances. Their example taught me the importance of perseverance, responsibility, and service to others. I want to use my education and experiences to contribute to stronger systems that provide stability, protection, and opportunity for communities that need them most. My mother taught me that even when life becomes unstable, you continue building toward something better. I intend to use everything my family endured as motivation to create a lasting impact for others.

I believe, and have learned through experience, science, policy, and reality, that sustainability isn't a value add in climate and food systems work, it's the entire point, and after several years working at the intersection of climate communications and finance, what I've come to understand is that "sustainability" as it's usually framed still manages to miss the people most affected by its absence. I learned this firsthand when I co-founded Cura, a zero-waste platform I believed was contributing to climate solutions. The further I researched our supply chain, the clearer it became that we were selling the appearance of sustainability rather than its substance, curated products from the same mass-production systems as conventional retailers, marketed to consumers who wanted to feel better about their choices. I couldn't launch it, and that clarity redirected my focus entirely, away from consumption-side solutions and toward the structural systems that determine whether communities survive climate disruption at all. Food and agriculture is where that redirection landed me, and it's where I believe sustainability work is most urgent and most poorly served by existing frameworks. Agriculture accounts for a significant share of global emissions while simultaneously being one of the sectors most devastated by climate change, and the farmers absorbing that devastation, particularly smallholder producers in the Global South, are the least responsible for it and the least supported in adapting to it. My great-grandparents' farm in Pakistan became unviable not because of poor management but because water infrastructure failed, and no policy existed to protect equitable access. Sustainability, in this context, isn't about carbon labeling or conscious consumerism; it's about the systems governing land, water, and food that can be made to work for the people who depend on them most. After graduate school, I want to work at organizations designing climate adaptation programs for agricultural communities, evaluating which regenerative practices are viable in specific contexts, building carbon initiatives that support farmer livelihoods rather than extracting value from them, and translating climate science into tools that resource-constrained farmers can actually use. The gap between what researchers develop and what farmers need is where I want to operate, and closing it requires both technical rigor and an honest accounting of whose sustainability we're actually designing for. The planet needs more than green business models and renewable energy targets, though both matter. It needs people willing to ask who is being protected by existing solutions and who is still being left outside them. That's the question I'm committed to spending my career on.

My dad died three weeks into my freshman year of college. My mother, who was still undergoing cancer treatment at the time, became our sole provider overnight, working full-time, managing her own illness, and raising four kids without the option to stop, because stopping wasn't something our circumstances allowed. Growing up watching her navigate that taught me something I couldn't have learned any other way, which is that resilience isn't a personality trait; it's what happens when systems fail people, and they have no other choice. That understanding sits at the center of everything I'm working toward. My GPA dropped significantly during 2020-2021, when the weight of grief, financial instability, and my mother's ongoing treatment made simply staying enrolled feel like an achievement. I stayed anyway, and in my final semester, I earned a 3.83 GPA and Dean's List recognition. This fall, I'm beginning a Master's in Climate at Columbia, focused on food systems and climate-smart agriculture for smallholder and economically marginalized farming communities, the communities I grew up understanding, whose failures aren't about effort but about which systems support them and which don't. My mother showed me that you keep going even when the structure around you collapses. I'm using that to build the technical foundation to make climate solutions actually reach the people who need them most.

My grandfather was raised in Amritsar, Punjab, and lived there until the India-Pakistan Partition forced his family, like millions of others, to leave everything behind and cross the border. He still talks about Amritsar the way people talk about a place that never fully leaves them, his school, his neighbors, the streets he walked as a child, the life that was interrupted overnight by one of the most significant migrations in human history. That story has always felt like the foundation beneath my own, a reminder that the ground people stand on is never as permanent as it seems, and that the communities and systems that support people or fail them, determine everything. Growing up Punjabi-Pakistani in the US, I carried that history alongside my own experience of navigating between cultures, between the expectations of home and the realities of building a life here. My educational journey has been shaped by both a deep respect for learning instilled by my family and an awareness, sharpened by my grandfather's stories, of how quickly opportunity can be taken away when systems break down. That awareness is a large part of why I'm pursuing graduate work in climate and food systems, with a focus on the agricultural communities most vulnerable to climate disruption. Financially, this degree is a significant stretch. I'm a first-generation graduate student being raised by a single mother who is not in a position to contribute to tuition or living expenses. I completed my undergraduate degree with a 3.15 GPA while managing considerable personal challenges, and I've been awarded merit-based scholarship funding that I'm deeply grateful for, though it covers only a portion of my first semester. I'm supplementing with external scholarships and will take out graduate loans as needed, though I'm already carrying undergraduate loan debt and want to minimize how much more I accumulate, as there is no family financial safety net I can fall back on. This scholarship would directly reduce my dependence on loans and allow me to stay focused on my coursework and the work that follows it. I'm not asking for support because I lack commitment; I have built a career in climate over several years, specifically to arrive at this program ready to do meaningful work. I'm asking because the financial barriers are real, and because every dollar I don't have to borrow is a dollar that doesn't follow me into the career I'm building for communities that already have too little margin for error.

Taylor Swift's "You're On Your Own, Kid" is the song I return to every time I feel defeated, when I'm comparing myself to others professionally, physically, or otherwise because it captures something I've never heard articulated so precisely: the experience of being in your mid-twenties and caught between still feeling like a lost kid trying to figure it out, while simultaneously becoming someone your family and oldest friends no longer fully recognize. The song centers on a romantic relationship, but for me it has always been about something else entirely. I immigrated from Pakistan at eleven, grew up between two worlds, and spent most of my twenties building and abandoning things: a startup I couldn't launch in good conscience, a career I outgrew before I understood it, a version of myself that fit everyone else's expectations better than my own. "You're On Your Own, Kid" felt like it was written for that in-between place, almost like a purgatory. The line "there's just one who could make me stay" has always been my mother for me, the only real reason I'd ever second-guess leaving my home, leaving comfort, leaving the familiar. She's been through so much, and I've watched her keep going anyway, which is maybe why the song hits differently every time I hear it. Choosing yourself while loving someone that much is its own kind of grief. But the chorus is what undoes me completely, because it reframes loss as motion, burning bridges, disappointing people, outgrowing places, and calls all of it forward rather than failure. Moving to New York, starting over academically and professionally in a field I'm still learning to belong in, becoming someone my hometown self wouldn't fully recognize, that chorus felt less like a song lyric and more like permission. Permission to go anyway. Permission to not have it figured out. Permission to be on your own, kid, and mean it.