Yes, I already have a bachelor's degree. It's an art degree. It was all I knew ever since I was a child, and everybody told me I was going to be "the next Picasso". I wish they hadn't. After graduating I knew creating and selling art wasn't for me (staring hours at a painting and trying endlessly to match colors wasn't exactly engaging). This realization was a shock to the system. I didn't know my next steps or what I'd do for work. I asked myself, what else do I like? After long deliberation, I decided it was food. It was still creative, but with a purpose. At least I could feed people. I always loved finding good flavors and combinations and was driven to learn more. Therefore, I thought I would be a good fit to work in restaurants. Turns out that not having any experience in kitchens was a big deal; nobody was taking me. That did not deter me, however. I started as a cashier at a Kmart's cafeteria. I could observe and learn, read books, and watch Top Chef in the meantime. Eventually, I took a semester of International Cooking classes. Then I got a job at a restaurant, first as a cashier, and then finally as a cook. Not a month later, Hurricane Maria happened. In Puerto Rico, where I live, that's like saying pre-pandemic times vs after. The state of the country was in disarray. Many businesses ceased operations or closed, including where I worked. I made the difficult (but necessary) decision to move to New York City, where I knew opportunities and experiences abound. New York was no "walk in the park", but it taught me many things. Personally, I learned tenacity, courage, and respect for myself and my boundaries. Professionally, I gained admiration for interesting and amazing food: fruits, vegetables, dairy, and meat from talented local farmers. This led me to have deeper questions about what we were eating, the quality of the produce, the way it is produced, the way it is handled, and how it all affects its flavor as well as other properties. Through the pandemic, I had enough free time to explore these ideas, and I started studying biology and chemistry on my own, with increasing enthusiasm and curiosity. It ultimately led me to where I am today, starting a new bachelor’s degree in biology with a minor in chemistry, at the University of Puerto Rico, to research plants and their properties. 10 years after I graduated, I am starting over. I am back living with my parents (because I can't afford to live alone), working as a cashier at a comic bookstore (the very first store I ever worked in), and I am a student again. Of course, the times are different: I had COVID twice, both times with long COVID symptoms, which interrupted my work and partially my studies (but I ended up with two A's and a B), and I still have some medical complications stemming from the stress and tumult of the last six years of my life. Nonetheless, I believe I understand myself much more now than the 18-year-old me that went for that first degree. I know that I want something practical, mentally engaging, purposeful, as well as creative, for my career. I want to pursue a career in science. And as with anything, it's a step-by-step process. The first step? A bachelor’s degree in science.

I lived through dial-up, the exponential growth of the Internet, the birth of major social media sites and Google, the disappearing of phone chords, and the metamorphosis of the phone for calls and occasional text to an everything-and-everyday computer gadget that you can't leave your house without. Technology changes the fabric of our reality (or how we see it) and how we interact with it. I will never cease to be amazed by it. The computer is by far the thing that captivates my mind the most. I am using it to apply to scholarships like this one without leaving my house, to type and see as the letters "magically" appear on the screen without much effort or time. I am using it to study my topics of interest, like the biochemistry of plants and their flavor components; using it as a window to connect with what other scientists around the world have researched and learned, contributing to a faster rate of knowledge building and peer reviewing; and using it to store massive amounts of information in the form of text, graphics, and images. All in a relatively tiny box of components, working together to perform many different tasks. It helps me as a student now, but it will also help me as a scientist in the future once I enter the research world. It will help me study plants' cells and molecules up close, acquiring, storing, and comparing data. It will make it easier to model scenarios or graphics, enhancing my understanding of their complex biochemistry. No matter what point I am at in my research, I will use a computer to aid me in my process. The more technology advances, the more I will be capable of doing, faster and cheaper, as has happened in the previous decades in the STEM field. These advancements and their aid in research permitted medicines to be discovered, as well as diseases, pathogens, and viruses and the ways to combat them. Technology opens a window to understand how life works, and this knowledge becomes the basis for new knowledge to develop in different fields. If used correctly, technology is an excellent tool for the advancement and betterment of humanity.

I am rebuilding my life by going back to school to make a career in science. It was not an easy process to change the whole outlook of my life and pivot from what others expected of me. I was always drawing, writing, and doing artistic things since I was a baby. After graduating with a bachelor's degree in visual arts, however, I came to a crashing halt realizing that this was not something I wanted as a career. Being a saleswoman is not my forte, and I wanted to do something more dynamic with a practical purpose. I will always have my artsy side, but I wanted something different in my work sphere. After much introspection, I decided another thing I loved was food. After doing a student exchange in Spain and traveling around Europe, cooking with new ingredients and tasting interesting dishes sparked my curiosity and desire to make the most delicious meals possible. I remember the first time I saw mayonnaise being done from scratch on a cooking show and marveled at the idea of how simple things like eggs and oil can unite (emulsify) to create such a lovely sauce. It turns out cooking is a culinary *art* after all, but it is also a science. After working my way up from being a cafeteria and restaurant cashier that occasionally helped in the kitchen, to prep cook, line cook, and chef de partie, I started to have many questions and intrigues about what makes a vegetable, fruit, or herb tasty. I wondered why some seem more intrinsically delicious than others and how, no matter how well you cook, if you do not start with very good ingredients, the end result will never be as good as it can be. That is when I started studying the science behind food and ingredients. I asked my chefs questions, inspected the new and exciting produce the local farmers would bring to the restaurant, and read books about the quality of produce. I even thought about going to work on a farm to gain experience in how to cultivate vegetables. Then the pandemic hit. Without much to do, I went online and absorbed like a sponge everything I could learn about cells, DNA, plants, and chemistry. After almost a year, in another restaurant, I had the experience of tasting a particular type of habanero, called habanada, bred to have no spice, just juicy and floral sweetness. It blew my mind. I read about how growers can do this, with techniques that have been done almost since the beginning of agriculture, and I knew that this is what I wanted to study and work on. The pursuit of quality of flavor is what led me to where I am today. The artistic side, the chef side, and the inquiring and analytical mind combined, making me feel complete. I do not know exactly where this will lead me, but I know I only see myself in a career in science.

Imagine you have been cooking all your life with regular produce from the supermarket, and you become a chef, work in a highly acclaimed restaurant, and with the immense variety of ingredients that enters the kitchen, your view of what a fruit and vegetable is makes a 180° turn in your head. A few years later, you are introduced to a pepper called habanada, which is like the habanero, except it is not spicy but floral, juicy, and sweet. You are told this is a specialty cultivar, bred to be this way. And you think, how is this possible? What are the steps to get there? (Spoiler, it can take years, up to a decade!) How can a person understand deeply enough how the intrinsic properties of a plant work so that with selective breeding (techniques used since the beginning of agriculture), they can produce a fruit like that? Well, that is what happened to me. That was the deciding moment that propelled me to go back to college to study biology and chemistry. Not long after the "Habanada Moment," as I call it, I was unemployed during the pandemic. During all that free time, I was studying on my own about cells, DNA, enzymes, and such, and I realized I wanted this as my career. I was always curious about things, wanting to know the why and the how, and the scientific side of things. I had been unknowingly doing this all my life with all the questions that popped into my head, especially about what life is and how it works. Currently, I am doing my own research about the relationship between phytochemicals (plant chemicals) and flavor. Thousands of phytochemicals have been discovered, but only a few hundred have been studied thoroughly. It is a topic at the forefront of today's scientific studies, mainly because of their health benefits. One source of these benefits comes from the colorful pigments of fruits and vegetables. However, many aromas and flavors come from phytochemicals too, so there is a relationship between nutrition, flavor, aroma, and color, and I want to identify how they intersect precisely. I see it as the key to opening a hidden book about what more a plant can offer us, which is already a lot. Looking back, all of this would not have been possible without the support I received from my chef, Ginger Pierce. Being a woman in the food industry can be pretty vicious at times. She fought hard to be in her position and knew how hard it was for us newcomers, so she always kept an eye on us. I had never felt so supported, understood, and encouraged before. In other restaurants, where representation was scarce, others would look at me with different eyes, question if I could handle a grill, carry a tray a few pounds heavy, or properly do x, y or z when I was more than capable of doing all that and more, with proper sanitation skills, impeccable plating, and attention to the details of each order. Having another person in a supervisor role that understood my position allowed me to shine and not be looked down upon. I believe this is why having a diverse background in the workforce is crucial. Besides having different cultural ideas to merge and interact with, it also creates a supportive environment for everyone involved, not just a specific demographic. I know I will be eternally grateful for my chef, and I can only wish to follow in her footsteps once I fully enter the STEM community.

It might be taken for granted now, but the discovery of DNA and its structure is by far the most fascinating and incredible thing to be discovered, in my opinion. It is like opening a book under lock and key, realizing it is written in a foreign language, and then deciphering the code to reading that language. And with the knowledge of this book, we can open many other books that tell us so much about ourselves and how life works. That we managed to do this, in the span of a few decades, with something so tiny that resides inside the nuclei of cells, it's incredible. By extension, using the technology of x-ray crystallography to "take a picture" of the helix structure, and interpreting the distorted image to infer its shape correctly, is also quite an ingenuity feat. Of course, this is an oversimplification of what was years of experiments, discoveries, and even luck findings of scientists from different disciplines tackling their problems or questions at hand. But it shows how the scientific pursuit, perseverance, and ingenuity can reveal incredible aspects about life itself. DNA is at that core, as without it we wouldn't have the code to produce and reproduce ourselves. Having that knowledge opens up scientific queries in many of its disciplines. And the cycle continues.