For my entire life, I have lived in a woman-dominated household. Despite being connected in our womanhood, my mother, younger sister, and myself have all had vastly different experiences with nutrition. Due to these various nutritional life stories I’ve seen unfold in real time, if awarded with the Amber D. Hudson Memorial Scholarship, I would dedicate my time and hard work towards assisting women of all ages in their dietary choices, with a focus on how their sex requires not only specific nutritional guidelines, but more in-depth research in the healthcare field as a whole. I first began thinking about nutrition as a science during COVID, when my mother took to using the nutrition tracking app Noom to manage her weight. COVID was a time where few things were certain, and our family saw food as a source of control and comfort in the chaos of the pandemic. Our meals grew healthier and more diverse over time as we cooked recipes from a wider variety of cultures, some of which are staples at our present-day dinner table. But as the years have passed, I’ve also seen how premenopause has affected my mother’s physical and mental health. Food is now a source of anxiety, not joy; exercise has become a necessary and dreadful chore due to her ankle pain. While research on menopause has been on the rise in the last decade, it’s far from where it should be. I hope to change this by incorporating menopausal stage health into my senior undergraduate research capstone in a few years. Presenting on this important life stage in female health at my institution’s semesterly research symposium will bring school-wide awareness to this vitally important aspect of health. This scholarship would fund said menopausal research, providing even greater potential for findings in the field. Perimenopause and menopause are not the only points of turbulent hormonal change in the female life cycle. Puberty also demands much nutritional attention from the growing individual, as I have seen in my 14-year-old sister. In addition to being a metabolically vulnerable teenager, she is also a soccer and track athlete recovering from an ACL tear, so educating her on how to properly fuel her body is critical. However, as those familiar with teenagers will know, my sister is less than flexible when it comes to eating balanced and healthy meals, which is in large part due to her reluctance to participate in cooking meals. I believe that hands-on cooking involvement is one of the simplest yet most effective ways to get hesitant eaters to enjoy healthy food. Once an individual, regardless of age or past food experience, learns what’s happening behind the scenes, their new understanding will motivate them to be open to new food experiences. The Amber Hudson Scholarship would go a long way in helping me to collaborate with local organizations, particularly The Cutting Board Academy based in Cleveland, to teach the importance of nutrition education for individuals from all walks of life. I would particularly make an effort to establish cooking classes for teenage athletes and girls to showcase to them how to nutritionally take care of their bodies given their unique circumstances, emphasizing how to avoid eating disorders and eat healthy while still enjoying mealtimes. With a combination of hands-on research, community outreach, and clinical experience, I will strive to bring change to the field of women’s nutrition. I hope to see my efforts come to fruition one day in my career as both a researcher of nutrition sciences and an outpatient RD, both with a focus on women’s nutritional health.

The most profound mental health journey I’ve experienced is best explained through the lens of my favorite Ukrainian childhood book. It’s a whimsical little story called “Hto Roste u Parku”, or “Who Grows in the Park”, and features a little sprout trying to figure out which big tree he will grow to become, and where his place is within the park. The page featuring poplar trees is where the key to this crucial list can be found: a rather funny word, pooh. Pooh has many meanings; it can be the fluff of a kitten, the feel of a cloud, or in this case, cottony poplar seeds. More intangibly, though, pooh describes a feeling of security and warm fuzziness. It perfectly encapsulates the feeling of comfort I found in adding to my list of favorite Ukrainian words, whether it was penyok (stump) on a hike with my family or the inexplicable tstchshsch (used as a euphemistic swear word in my family). Out of all these words, though, the one that ended up resonating most with me was not the one I expected - kaparstvo, a dialect word for “mess” and the polar opposite of the pooh feeling I held onto so tightly. What kickstarted the kaparstvo was a shift in location. Moving from a relatively small and quaint Connecticut town to Buffalo, an unapologetically in-your-face neighborhood built for the extroverted, hastily introduced me to the emotion of grief. I was too afraid to process this new and complex feeling, and wasn’t ready to accept that my pooh-ish childhood memories were drifting away at an accelerated pace. Being from an immigrant family also exacerbated the turmoil - my parents had come to America from Ukraine after they graduated college, and carried the expectation that I would be able to handle the location shift as well as they had back in their 20s. To their dismay, I switched to emotional autopilot. As the kaparstvo took hold of my relationships with my loved ones, and war in Ukraine heightened the tension, the objective of my sophomore year became survival. It took multiple types of interventions for me to even acknowledge the existence of the kaparstvo. The first step was therapy, where we put a name to the grief that I was experiencing and brainstormed ways to pop the bubble of isolation that I had surrounded myself in. Though I was initially resistant to the idea that I would need a professional’s help to unmangle my anger at my parents and the world, over time I came to realize that therapy is more of a conversation between two people than a typical doctor’s appointment. When my therapist helped me to discover avenues to solving my problems, along with reasoning behind why pursuing those avenues was a worthy use of my time, I used what emotional energy I did have to slowly chip away at those difficulties. Over time, the various tensions that the move to Buffalo had instilled in my brain receded, and I found myself finding positive moments in my band class, the couple of friends I had connected with, and even my part-time coffee shop job. As my self-confidence and assertive qualities grew, the kaparstvo slowly became less groundbreaking in my life. My motivation, I learned, needed to be intrinsic. I worked for myself and for the greater good now, not for the chance to visit my Connecticut friends, or for praise from my parents. Looking back on these experiences in hindsight, after completing my first year of my undergraduate studies, I’m able to recognize that moving to Buffalo provided me with more opportunities and experiences than my relatively sheltered Connecticut town ever could have. Not only does the larger urban area of Buffalo have many more social events and career options, but being thrust into an unfamiliar environment like that at the age of 15 challenged my previous emotional and mental state in a way that led to comprehensive growth. Perhaps the biggest takeaway I learned from the emotional moving journey is that the only person who can turn your personal kaparstvo into fluffy pooh, is you yourself. Therapy provides you with the toolbox to get started, and loved ones are there to cheer you on. That outer influence and help will be most effective, though, once you accept it and come to terms with your mental health journey. Only once you make an effort to love and work on yourself, can you be like the sprout from “Hto Roste u Parku” and blossom from a fragile seedling to a beautiful and sturdy gingko tree.