My name is Savannah Poskey, and I am a Hispanic woman in STEM. I grew up on the southside of San Antonio in a low-income family with five other siblings that all needed to get by on the backs of my parents who didn't have opportunity to finish college or in my dad's case--even attend high school. My parents were both working at restaurants nearby, with only one car that they shared, and more often than not, they were pawning their belongings just for us to keep going. We were enrolled in government programs for housing and food stamps but still struggled to afford or fit into what we could afford. We also lived in an area with a lot of crime, and we were robbed more than once, always getting anything nice taken away from us before we could enjoy it. Later on, my father had to have a major surgery that left him out of work and our mother as our sole provider and as his caretaker, only bringing more problems to the table. When the crime started getting more dangerous, my parents started saving as much as they could and we were finally able to move to a tamer part of town. We were still a large and low-income family, but things started to look up. My mom got a more stable job, though still at a restaurant where she is currently still employed, and my dad has found many different job opportunities since then. He now works as a licensed security guard. We still struggle every month to maintain a better life on this nicer side of town in our rented house with six people and new additions to the family, but we do our best. I am disabled and currently on a fixed income with Social Security due to having epilepsy, so I never have my own money to spend on myself after paying my part of the bills and buying resources for the house each month. I just try to focus on being grateful that we've come so far since we lived in that first little house and that we get to be here now. I am passionate about the science field of STEM because of my own experience with epilepsy. When I was ten years old, I had my first seizure. Since then, it's been a very long ride with attempting to figure out why they started and how to get them under control. Growing up, I saw the same doctor for about ten years and as my epilepsy developed, changed, and worsened, he seemed to always have the same answer: increase the dosage of my pills. I took the same medication all ten years that I saw him, just at varied dosages, and any new developments were brushed off by him. He never wanted to order tests on me and often told me that the things I experienced were simple things everyone goes through, even when they clearly weren't. I felt unheard and unseen by my own doctor and helpless to what was happening to me when the medication didn't help. This led me to having a desire to study into neurology myself, and to be a neurologist to other people like me--one who would actually listen to their concerns and give them the best treatment possible rather than brushing them off like my neurologist did to me. When I finally switched to a different provider and started seeing a new neurologist, he changed everything about my routine, and he was shocked to hear that I'd been taking the same medication for so long. He was willing to do the tests I had been asking my old neurologist to do for years, and I finally felt heard and cared for. Neurology is such a fascinating field of study to me. I remember being so excited to do our nervous system unit in my high school anatomy class and knocking it out of the park. We learned about many different neurological disorders, including my own, and it was my favorite part of school to this day. I love every part of it, and I would love it even more if I got to apply my knowledge of it in the future to helping people who are struggling just like me with neurological disorders to live the best lives they can with the least disruptions from the unfortunate effects of their chronic illnesses. It would mean the world to me if I could help someone walk better, see better, relieve aura symptoms of all kinds, and just make them feel like their provider genuinely cares about them as the world tries to find cures for their disorders. Applying the findings of neuroscience to give treatment to neurology patients that works the best for their specific case and disorder is the most important thing in the world to me, and I know it can make a major difference in a lot of peoples' lives, just like it did in mine.