Before the divorce, my family was whole. At least that’s what I believed through the rainbow lens of being a kid. My dad spent time with me; he was goofy and energetic. After he lost his job, we moved for a new opportunity and we were happy, then debt crept in. The cost of the new house alongside moving from our only support group was too much for us to handle. We started cutting costs, moved to a smaller house, but the stress caught up to their marriage. By the fourth grade I was beginning to resent my parents for the nights of yelling and days of silent tension until one day, it was over. My dad moved out and it became my mom, my younger sisters, and me. That’s when my mom began her recovery from alcoholism. She started attending 5 o’clock meetings and I got used to cooking dinner for my sisters. My mom had always been kind enough to shelter me from the adult issues we faced when my father was around but once it became just her, my kaleidoscope glasses fell to the floor and I realized just how stressful her life was. She worked physically demanding jobs, went to AA meetings every night, and barely fed herself. I watched my mom give every ounce she had to feeding my sisters and me while she said she “wasn’t hungry”. She never complained. I’ve always been a smart kid so whether she realized it or not I knew the truth, we were struggling. I was too little to work, so I took care of my sisters. I made sure they did their homework and chores. I did what my dad used to do. When school trips came around, I’d lie and tell my mom I didn’t want to go so she wouldn’t have to pay. I knew it was too much. This continued until I was in the seventh grade. I got comfortable taking care of my family. I struggled in silence, and this certainly didn’t help my social life but it was worth it knowing I was helping my momma, lightening her load when I could. I love her with every fiber of my being, she’s the strongest person I’ve ever met. I became so accustomed to survival mode that I forgot what it was like to live for myself. I was set on working fresh out of high school, of course I dreamed about college and a career but I knew it wasn’t practical. I was so wrong. After four years of school and the worst bout of depression I’ve ever experienced in my life, my GPA fell to a 1.6. I almost gave up on education entirely. We moved back to Alaska in 2021 and I met an entirely new world of people that completely changed my outlook on life. I found the support system I didn’t have in Montana. I realized I could live for myself again. I joined sports, clubs, and even theater. I pushed myself academically and emotionally. I met my now life-partner who believes in me as fiercely as I’m beginning to believe in myself. The move saved my life. But it was my mom’s resilience, and the love we share, that gave me the strength to seize the opportunity. This scholarship would lift a significant burden from my shoulders, allowing me to focus on building the life I’ve always dreamed of. I want this not just for me, but for my momma, my sisters, and the little me I used to be, the one who held onto hope.

I’ve always loved cities. Thousands of people gathering around a singular point and living among each other, building feats of engineering never dreamed of before to sustain their numbers. So many cultures and needs can blur to become a singular organism, the city. Cities have arteries and lungs, white blood cells and red, highways become veins, building into organs. Cities breathe and process waste just like any complex organism and it’s absolutely beautiful. The way street lights react like bioluminescence when they glow at night. It’s all so astounding and wonderful to me, and none of it would be possible without infrastructure. Most people never notice infrastructure until it’s in disrepair or poorly designed. But if you take the time to observe how everything functions up close you begin to realize that infrastructure can do everything from shaping a city's needs to reflecting the values of the city's legislators and engineers. Which is why it’s incredibly important that when designing infrastructure today engineers must be aware of the future and how well their designs will serve their users for the next decade or more. This is especially important now, with the onset of the climate crisis, cities are becoming hotter and more dangerous with every single-digit increase in average temperature each year. The fires in Los Angeles and the heat waves in northern cities have never done damage to this degree ever before. Having engineers who understand the long-term impact of their work is vital to the survival of cities and the people that live within them. I want to be an engineer so I can represent the needs and ideas of the next generation of urban citizens. Designing accessible, and sustainable infrastructure built to not only last but to build wealth for the people that rely on it is my dream and it has been since I was a kid. In middle school my love for cities and engineering began with the children’s game, Minecraft. I’d build intricate networks of housing and streets down to the last detail using the blocks provided. I built rail networks for minecarts, streets for horses, and houses for the villager inhabitants. But this passion is more than just building for fun. I’ve lost family members due to poor design and a lack of proper safety measures in transportation. My aunt Linda passed away in a car accident a few years ago after drifting off the road and colliding with a tree. She was barely in her 20s. I think about her a lot, all the time she’s missed all the life she could have lived if that road had just been designed even just a little bit safer. Maybe I wouldn’t have lost my aunt and my mother, her sister and closest friend that day if a guardrail had saved her car from crashing so abruptly. Alaska is full of stories like my aunt’s, people die on our icy, dangerous roads every year. My friend’s mother was disabled in an accident with a moose, she still struggles to walk and take care of herself and her children. I know people burdened by debt due to the costs of repairs or insurance related to their vehicles. Not all of this can be attributed to user error. In Alaska and many other places in the US people are practically forced to drive and risk their lives every day due to decisions made by engineers and urban planners from nearly a hundred years ago. The American dependence on cars is draining the wealth from our cities, with infrastructure costs far higher than that of similarly sized countries that depend more on rail and pedestrian infrastructure in their major cities. These modes of transport are not only safer than the forced reliance on cars but better for the environment and the transportation budgets of our cities. I want to have a hand in building the infrastructure to reduce our reliance on the automobile and build wealth for future Americans. A truly wealthy and sustainable future is not one where the lower class can afford to drive but where the wealthiest choose to use public transportation. It can be, and has been done, in other countries who suffered from the same problems as ours. I believe that with proper legislation and engineers who work well with them we could build a better future. I want to work with legislators and city officials to change how we build our cities and build a brighter, more sustainable, and accessible future for every urban resident. For me it’s more than just a career but a lifelong passion for engineering and cities. In my freshman year alone, I’ve joined the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) and the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) so I can meet more like-minded people and establish the importance of engineering at my university. I am the current acting vice president for SWE and have recently been elected to take the president’s position next year. We’ve run several events to build up the numbers of underrepresented communities in our engineering program while also building up our current members and giving them access to internships and scholarships to ease the burden of their education costs. I also got selected for the UAF Career Pathways Internship with the Alaska Department of Transportation and will be spending part of my summer working with talented engineers all over the state. I have another internship with the University of Alaska office of federal relations where I will be visiting DC for 10 weeks learning from our representatives and preparing to eventually work with legislators myself. I am dual majoring in both Civil Engineering and Political Science with Sophomore and Junior class standing respectively. In just one year I’ve come so much closer to achieving my goals and becoming the engineer I’ve dreamed of being since I was a kid. With every opportunity, internship, and scholarship, I am working to build a safer, more equitable world, starting with the cities we call home.

Our family has lost so many an elder and so many siblings, aunties, and cousins in just these past few years alone, but the person whose loss impacted me the most was my grandmother, Cea Anderson. Ever since I was a baby, she has been a powerful presence in my life, and I'm not the only soul lucky enough to have been touched by her. Every new friend of hers I meet has so many stories about how she went out of her way to help them and care for them as if they were family. I have an uncle (in our culture, we call our family friends "auntie" or "uncle") who is now happily married and living in his own home with 4 beautiful children because she was able to help him out of a difficult period of his life. A scripture she printed is still taped to his wall, gifted to him by my grandmother as a prayer of hope and a blessing over his home. I see it every time I visit and am reminded of her. He told me, "I never took it down because it's a reminder that she loves and cares for us even after she passed." knowing how much that little act means to him was more impactful than she could've ever known. My grandmother is still one of the most resilient women I have ever met. She survived the Alaskan 1964 earthquake. Unphased and unharmed, she pressed on and helped her parents care for her half-dozen siblings. She made her way through college on her own and chose to take Alaskan Native Studies at UAF to learn the ways of our native ancestors and bring that culture to the rest of our family and the rest of my generation. After all of this, she managed to beat breast cancer THREE times. It's rare for me to ever meet one person who survived one round of Cancer, let alone three, and still be living on as if it's not a big deal. Throughout every round of treatment, she never lost hope or let the dread of death get to her. She stayed her kind, loving self despite all of it. Grandma was honestly more worried about her kids than her own health, checking in on my mom and asking how we were while battling one of the deadliest diseases known to man as if it was just a broken leg. I still don't think I could ever be as strong as she was during all those times of hardship, but every time I meet a new challenge, I try to amount to her kindness and overall enthusiasm for life. My grandmother was a teacher and a prominent figure for the rights of our native people and her beliefs in our religion. I learn more about her every day, and knowing just how dedicated she was to her education and how proud she was of me kept me moving forward no matter how difficult school got. Her calls when she was still around were always about checking in on my grades and my dreams about the future, and that care and attention to my wants were so inspiring to me during the exact time when I needed it. Losing her was one of the hardest things to ever happen to me and my family, and I miss her every day. I hope she's proud that I'm going to the same college she did to work for our state, making it safer and more equitable for everyone here.