At the age of 5, my dad brought me to the US with the hope of providing me with a better education. My mom, who suffers from severe Schizophrenic episodes and is not a US Citizen, made the sacrifice of letting us come here as she knew it was best for us. Although I have been able to occasionally visit her for brief periods over the summer, she has never been able to attend my award ceremonies, Water Polo games, choir and band concerts, or simply share any of the hardships I have experienced alongside me. Nights where I went to bed in tears as a result of not knowing how to handle my period, were not uncommon. My dad at times did his best to comfort me, however, nothing can replace a mother’s warm embrace. Having a mother with mental issues, especially due to the lack of resources and stigma in Peru has been hard on all of us and has certainly forced me to mature early, but it has also guided my career interest in neuroscience. As I became fascinated by the brain and its vast room for research, I realized it provided me solace with a scientific understanding of why my mother behaved the way she did. Neuroscience gave me the hope to be able to alleviate my mother’s suffering. Specifically, my desire to do research with AI and biomedical engineering applied to neuroscience blossomed when I saw videos like “How a Brain Implant and AI Gave a Woman with Paralysis Her Voice Back” as it showed how AI/technology applied to neuroscience are actively changing lives, and the fascinating potential this field has amazes me. This is what AI and medical inventions should be used for, giving people their freedom, voices, and control over their bodies. But I take comfort in the fact that neuroengineering could be used for the average person's life, too. Recently, I became a participant in a sleep experiment a local research university is conducting on adolescent teens, using different light patterns. Taking inspiration from my summer capstone project and the current research paper I wrote in AP Psychology about the vitality of REM/Dreaming and a particular brain wave combination that predicts glucose levels for diabetics, the Circadian rhythm is something I also wish to explore. I became more confident that this was my vocation when I attended this Neuroscience intensive summer camp at a research university where we presented a group capstone project; there we made a well-thought-out end product where we applied technology and AI to Narcolepsy. During high school, I also took the initiative to start a Neuroscience Society. Looking back at my roots as a 5-year-old girl from a small remote Pueblo in Peru, I now find myself incredibly proud of my journey and the potential I still have yet to discover. Whenever a challenge presented itself, usually related to lack of food, transportation, or money, I did not let it discourage me but found ways to solve it. My circumstances are precisely what have allowed me to become not only more resourceful, and indeed value education, but it has given me a genuine desire to give back my very best work to the community. Whether it is through tackling neuroscience-related problems and solving them with Neuroengineering discoveries and research— or sponsoring educational scholarships as I am grateful to have received for girls with the same determination! With your scholarship and thus relief from financial burdens, you will not only help me accomplish my goals, but those I will affect along the way.