For much of my life, the “American Dream” felt like a phrase meant for other people: people different than me, people with privilege, money, connections, or stability. I did not grow up with any of those, I grew up in a country where your dreams had to fit within the boundaries of what your circumstances allowed. And yet, even as a child walking on cracked roads, crossing rivers due to unbuilt bridges, and watching monsoon landslides cut off entire regions, I felt a quiet longing for something more, not for luxury, but for possibility. Before coming to the United States, I gave to my community in every way I knew how. I worked on WASH projects, disaster preparedness, and rural development; I taught children, supported families, and tried to improve systems that had been broken for decades. But no matter how hard I worked, I ran into the same wall again and again: my own limitations. I didn’t have the resources, the training, the ideas, the exposure, or the tools to make the large-scale changes I dreamed of. I could help individuals and families, but transforming systems felt painfully out of reach, I often felt like I was trying to build an entire house with only my bare hands. That is why the American Dream means something deeply personal to me. To me, it is not about wealth or status, it is about freedom: the freedom to learn, to grow, to access knowledge that my home country could not offer, and where the sky is my limit. America, is a place where ideas collide, where innovation thrives, and where you can learn from people whose lives look nothing like mine. It is a melting pot of cultures, traditions, and technologies; a place where even the simplest systems: transportation, water networks, education, emergency response: operate at a scale and sophistication that is hard to imagine elsewhere. Coming here is not about “reinventing the wheel", it is about learning from a nation that has built some of the world’s strongest wheels and understanding how to adapt those ideas for communities like mine. Being here allows me to see things in a bigger space: across disciplines, across cultures, across ways of thinking. It gives me access to classrooms where innovation is encouraged, to mentors who push my boundaries, and to a diverse range of people who challenge me to see the world differently. That, to me, is the American Dream: the chance to expand what I believe is possible. But the Dream does not end here. My goal has never been to build a life only for myself, for my dream is circular; I want to take every lesson I learn here and pour it back into the communities that shaped me. I want to return with new skills, better tools, stronger ideas, and a vision that is bigger than the limitations I once carried. The American Dream, for me, is the ability to turn opportunity into responsibility, to take the freedom offered here and use it to serve people who may never have the chance to leave the villages they were born in. My definition of the American Dream is the privilege to grow beyond my circumstances, and the responsibility to lift others as I rise. For me, that is the only dream worth chasing.

I am from Nepal, a land of extraordinary mountains, rivers, and deep valleys, where beauty and hardship often exist side by side. Growing up, I learned early that in many communities, opportunity is not determined by talent or ambition, but by whether a road exists. Each monsoon season, landslides erased entire footpaths and rural roads, leaving families cut off for weeks at a time. Transportation failures shaped who could reach school, who could reach a hospital, and who was left waiting behind. The 2015 earthquake made that reality impossible to ignore. I was at home when the ground began to shake, and buildings that had stood for generations cracked open and collapsed, ancient buildings turned into rubble, and families were buried beneath their own roofs. Relief teams tried to reach the worst-hit villages, but the roads had collapsed or had never existed. I remember watching people wait for help that simply could not reach them. As a child, I did not know the words infrastructure resilience, but I understood what the isolation, fear, and the cost of broken systems were. Those were the experience that planted the first quiet seeds of engineering inside me. Years later, during undergraduate fieldwork, those seeds became conviction. In a remote village, I stayed with a family whose elderly father walked with a painful limp. During dinner, I asked about his injury. He told me he had slipped years earlier while cutting grass and sliced his leg with a sickle. With no road, no ambulance, and the nearest health post hours away, he treated the wound himself, and it became infected. When a medical team eventually reached the village years later, the only recommended treatment was amputation. At his age, he refused. His suffering was not a personal misfortune, it was structural. Transportation, healthcare, sanitation, and water systems had all failed together, and he was living with the consequences. That moment crystallized my understanding: engineering is not just design, it is dignity, it is safety, and it is the difference between hope and hardship. This realization reinforced my decision to work for the change as a civil engineer. Working on rural road alignments, water supply systems, and watershed projects showed me how deeply interconnected our infrastructures are. A washed-out road means no access to healthcare, a damaged pipeline means unsafe drinking water, a slight change in construction plan can trigger landslides that isolate entire communities. Infrastructure is not a single sector, it is the backbone of human society. Today, as a first-generation immigrant pursuing my master’s degree in Civil Engineering in the United States, I have committed myself to water and wastewater systems, because this is where communities like mine, and underserved communities everywhere, need the most urgent support. I carry with me memories of mothers walking hours to reach unsafe water sources, schools without functioning toilets, and clinics without reliable treatment systems. These memories guide my academic choices and fuel my desire to serve. My goal is to become an engineer who designs climate-resilient, sustainable water and sanitation systems for vulnerable and marginalized populations. I hope to work with governments, organizations, and communities to create solutions that endure disasters and uplift the community as a whole. Although my specialization differs from Dr. Hassan's focus on transportation, his values resonate with me: engineering as service, education as empowerment, and mentorship as legacy. Like him, I want to uplift communities shaped by hardship but driven by hope.