On Florida’s Gulf Coast, the environment never felt separate from ordinary life. It was in the mangroves and tidal flats, the wetlands, ditches, and pine flatwoods, and in the way heat, rain, flooding, and development shaped how people lived from day to day. I learned early that environmental damage is never only a matter of scenery. It alters water, wildlife, public health, and the texture of daily life all at once. My love for the environment began not in grandeur, but in attention: noticing what blooms after rain, what gathers at the edges of wetlands, how quickly a place can be diminished, and how much life depends on systems people barely see. Attention became responsibility. My studies are helping me work toward climate action by giving me a practical path into environmental service. I am pursuing biology with a growing focus on ecology, applied entomology, and public health. In Florida, climate change is not theoretical. It appears in heat, stronger storms, flooding, saltwater intrusion, stressed habitats, invasive species pressure, and changing mosquito dynamics. What draws me most is work that connects environmental stewardship to community health, because climate change will not be answered by declarations alone. It must also be met through habitat protection, land management, restoration, ecological monitoring, and public education. My experiences in mosquito surveillance, prescribed burns, invasive plant removal, and conservation service have shown me that careful scientific work can protect biodiversity while also helping communities adapt to environmental change. I want to build a career in which ecology is useful in that direct and public way. The advice I give family and friends about reducing their carbon footprint begins with plants, because landscaping is one of the clearest places where people can make meaningful change. Having worked in the nursery industry, I have seen how often people are encouraged to choose landscapes that are water-hungry, chemical-dependent, and maintained for appearance rather than function. I would urge them to replace high-input ornamentals with natives, or at least with climate-appropriate species that need less irrigation, fertilizer, and intervention. On the Gulf Coast, that means planting with habitat, heat, and water in mind instead of trying to force a yard to resemble some greener, less difficult place. I would also ask them to think beyond the individual plant and consider the whole yard as habitat. A native plant matters most when it is part of a living system: host plants for butterflies, flowers for pollinators, shrubs and trees for cover, leaf litter left where it can do some good, and less mowing overall. A “clean” yard is not always a healthy one. Lawns and highly managed landscapes often demand more water, more fuel, and more chemicals than people realize. Even reducing turf, watering more carefully, and planting for shade can make a difference over time. Beyond landscaping, I would still offer the familiar advice: combine errands, waste less food, use home energy carefully, buy less impulsively. But I would frame all of it through local knowledge. Learn what belongs where you live. Learn which plants feed birds and insects, which are invasive, and how water moves across your property after a storm. Once people understand their home as part of a larger living system, better decisions become easier to make. Environmental responsibility begins, I think, with paying attention. If you know a place well enough, you stop wanting to force it into something wasteful and unsuited to itself. That is where climate action becomes real: in the daily choices that make our homes, landscapes, and communities more resilient, more honest, and more alive.

People often notice my tattoos before they notice the field notebook, the species lists, or the fact that I can speak at length about mosquitoes, wetlands, and Florida plants. This is not a tragedy. It is simply one of the ways a body enters a room before a mind is permitted to speak. My presentation is visibly alternative. I am tattooed, femme, and deliberate about how I look. In my Chinese-Filipino family, that has not always been easy to carry. My grandparents, who raised me, come from a world in which the body is not only personal. It is also familial. It reflects discipline, respectability, sacrifice, and the hope that the next generation will justify what was given up for them. When they say they are sad I have “ruined” my skin, I hear sorrow, fear, and a real difference in how beauty, dignity, and selfhood are understood. Love does not prevent misunderstanding. Sometimes it sharpens it. I have had to learn how to hold affection and tension in the same space. Science, too, has its unspoken dress codes. STEM still carries a powerful visual mythology of who looks credible: neutral, neat, unremarkable in ways meant to signal seriousness. For a long time, I worried that being visibly self-fashioned would make me easier to dismiss, as though tattoos or femininity might negate rigor. I am also bisexual and gender-expansive, and part of my time at New College of Florida was spent exploring a more nonbinary sense of self before settling into the more femme, woman-aligned presentation I inhabit now. None of this has been fixed or linear. But there were times when I felt I was being asked, quietly and persistently, to become more legible in order to be trusted. That pressure taught me something useful. Having to think consciously about how I am read made me more observant, more resilient, and less interested in performing authority than in earning it. It made me more suspicious of conventions that present themselves as neutral when they are only customary. It also sharpened a quality that already mattered to me: attention. I am drawn to what is overlooked or misread—the insect in the ditch, the retention pond that becomes an ecological and public-health story once one learns how to look at it, the disturbed lot bright with wildflowers that most people pass without seeing. In that sense, my scientific interests and my alternative identity are not separate matters. Both come from learning to take seriously what others flatten, dismiss, or fail to perceive in full. My path in STEM has not been straight. It has included grief, burnout, family expectation, and the long work of returning to school with a clearer sense of who I am. I am now pursuing biology with a growing focus on applied entomology, ecology, and public health. I want to contribute to my field through work that is careful, practical, and humane. I also want to contribute through presence. I want other students—especially those who look unconventional or come from families carrying their own histories of sacrifice and expectation—to see that seriousness and self-expression do not cancel one another out. I want to help build a STEM culture where credibility comes from curiosity, discipline, skill, and care.