I actually just binged the cutest modern day rom-com over the weekend! It's a three movie trilogy, about a girl and her first crush/boyfriend. I'm sure you are rolling your eyes, BUT HEAR ME OUT! Remember being in high school, and wondering when you would have your first kiss? Whether you are a boy or a girl, this was a big milestone! As a girl, we often dreamed of our first kiss happening the way it does in movies. Fireworks, and butterflies, and all the feels! It would be a magical moment that we remembered forever! More often than not, that was so far from our actual experience. Likely it was awkward, uncomfortable, and something we remembered forever, but for all the wrong reasons. However, even as an adult with two kids, I can't help but be nostalgic for the unrealistic expectation set by our favorite romantic comedy movies. The Kissing Booth triology of movies was such a cute movie, and even though it was set between the end of high school and college, it was done in a way that brought back all those feeligs of first curshes, and boyfriends, and kisses. Navigating friendships, and of course the beginning and end of all of those things as you transition from high school to college. What is worth holding onto? What should you let go to make room for new experiences? One of my favorite parts about this movie is how it navigates life long friendships, new romantic relationships, but also the pursuit of finding out who you are. Without giving anything away, part of the plot in the third movie was the main character trying to decide where she was going to go to college. She was torn between trying to make everyone else around her happy, and lost sight of what she wanted to do with her life. Her friends mom gave her great advice in telling her that she has noticed her reasons for the two schools she was torn between had nothing to do with HER personal goals. She asked her what she wanted to do and go to school for. This is such an important question that I don't think gets asked enoughed of teenagers. What do you like? What are your interests? What is it that you want to do in life? These important questions get asked way too late, and often the reason so many people change careers later in life. If we ask our teens these type of questions, we can do a better job of guiding them in the right direction to help fullfill their goals! This is another reason why, while this movie may seem like it is geared more toward teens/young adults, it is such a great movie to watch as an adult and especially a parent. Understanding the experiences your teens are going through, because sometimes we may be too far removed from that period of our lives to remember (or in some cases blocked it out). These kinds of movies are wonderful reminders that our teens have feelings, and they are really just trying to understand and navigate the world. They don't know what they need or how they feel, but it would be beneficial for us as adults to really try and see them so that we can better support them! Hopefully you watch the movies and enjoy them as much as I did! And if you have teens, especially teen girls, I highly suggest watching it together!

I often visualize the life of my dreams, and honestly, there aren't a lot of things missing. The thing I dreamt about most throughout my life was family. Growing up in an unstable and chaotic environment, stability was something I often longed for. I dreamt of a time when I would be an adult, with my own car, home, kids, husband, and career; all the things I saw as success. As an adult, success has many lawyers and sometimes it doesn't all come at once. I spent most of my college career dreaming of becoming a corporate lawyer. I made it to law school, and found out I was pregnant with my daughter during my first semester. What I had to decide was what kind of future I wanted, and what sacrifices I was willing to make. The more I thought about it, I decided that the career I thought I wanted in law wasn't worth sacrificing being there for my daughter. So for many years, I tried to chase part of my dream of being a corporate lawyer by working in the corporate world, and feeling like I failed a part of myself by not finishing law school and choosing motherhood over a career as a lawyer. It took me until my second child was four years old to realize that, while I didn't have the career I thought I would have at my age, I did have the family I dreamed of. I am already living part of my dream life! In all that time thinking I failed, I didn't see what I had around me! I have a beautiful marriage to an incredible man and two healthy, happy, brilliant, athletic and beautiful children who are thriving! Growing up in a home where my mom had a different last name and stepdads I did not get along with, I never felt completely like we were a family. Having the same last name as my kids means more to me than I can probably ever put into words. The last piece of my dream life is one of my earliest dreams I forgot about for a long time. This past year of finding my footing after getting laid off has made me remember that I originally wanted to go to school for psychology. There is such a gap in the mental health space for adolescents, especially for people who can really connect with them, and even more of a gap in mental health professionals who are black. I want to fill that space. So, my dream life consists of being an advocate and helping children navigate this new world. At the highest level, my dream would be to change the way that we work with children and adolescents. I realize there is a lot that I don't know, and I am excited to have an education that will fill those gaps, and I am excited to utilize that knowledge in a way that will change the way we help children. In the meantime, I will continue living the life of my dreams while also working toward my dream career. Materially, I want to buy a house, and I want to be able to buy my kids cars when they are of age and to be able to provide them with whatever opportunity they want for their future whether that's college or to start a business or pursue a sport, etc. Stability and security! Living the life of my dreams looks likemy little family happily thriving in our respective passions while continuing to enjoy spending time together!

The Black community has long been applauded for its strength and ability to persevere in the most atrocious conditions. They are commended for their ability to grow through concrete and find joy and laughter in every situation. But, what if we raised our black sons and daughters to feel all of their feelings? What if we didn't force them to be strong and to push their feelings down, ignore their traumas and invalidate their experiences but rather, allow them to fully express all of the facets of who they are as an individual? This is my utopian vision for optimal mental health for the Black community, and it starts with us. It starts with the parents and the adults acknowledging their traumas and healing from them. I do believe that we are seeing a generation of young Black people acknowledging that the way things have been done historically isn't working and that we can look to other communities as an example, in process not practice, of what it means to heal and advocate for our mental health. One of the biggest obstacles facing the Black community is the lack of diversity in the mental health space as a whole. No other race or community is going to be able to relate to the generations of trauma Black people face, as well as the current trauma they face through systemic oppression. The black experience is unique to the black community, and there are very few people in the mental health community who can truly understand what they have and are currently going through. Social media has been an incredible tool for our current generation because they can see what's possible. The generations before us only saw what they were able to see when they walked out the door. We have to have people who understand what the Black community has gone through at every level of their development and growth into adulthood. Childhood trauma looks different for Black children because they experience systemic oppression at every level; financially, academically, socially and professionally. To achieve social justice for Black communities, we have to have people like us who understand and have done the work for their mental health. I have never personally met a black therapist. I see them in interviews and on social media, but never in my communities. As a mother, I see how important representation is for children and adults. Something I never realized growing up until I started to see characters and other people who looked like me and my family. That sense of not feeling like an other, or an outcast, and feeling like I have a place in the world made such a difference in my self-esteem as an adult. My kids don't have any perceived limits on themselves because they see people who look like them doing the things they want to do. That is an experience all children should have, and that is an experience that adults should have as well. I want to help people feel seen and understood. I want people to feel like there are no limits for themselves, and that they don't have to just grow through the concrete and survive, but that they can have a life that they can thrive in! My motivation for pursuing my Masters in Psychology, followed by a PhD is driven by my passion for helping people and wanting to see adults and children thrive in this world!

It has been more than ten years since I sat down at a computer to write a personal statement. The life I was writing about, and the life I was hoping to pursue are drastically different to the current reality I find myself at 33. I come from a very chaotic and subtly unstable background. I say subtle because, from the outside looking in, things always appeared to be fine. I didn’t grow up with a dad, my mom had two serious husbands during my childhood. One from first through middle school and the other from high school to now. Both relationships were extremely abusive, to her, to my brother and to me. She wanted so badly to create a family, and that desperation attracted the wrong people. But to hear my mom tell it, we always had what we needed and for the most part, she did show up, at least until we got to high school. She tried, I truly believe that, and I hold no resentment toward her, but our relationship has been extremely strained since I was in college and currently haven’t spoken to her in more than a year. Understanding this piece of my life is important because it was the catalyst that drove the direction of my life. I ended up emancipating myself in college so that I could receive the full amount of financial aid. I was not receiving any support, financially or otherwise, from my mom. I was lucky to meet the Vice President of Student Affairs who helped me get a job on campus so that I could pay back the debt I owed from my first semester and continue taking classes. I was not able to take classes during the spring semester of my freshman year, but I was able to work and live on campus, crashing in a friend’s dorm, until I was able to start taking classes again the summer before my sophomore year. You will see in my transcript warnings, probation and dismissal. You will see poor grades, and you will see that I graduated with a 2.1 GPA. What you won’t see is that I worked multiple jobs at a time, while taking a full course load (because no one told me that I should take fewer classes to better manage things). You won’t see that I didn’t buy my first computer until I was a junior, and I believe that is when I bought my first books. Before that, I borrowed books from friends in my classes and would rent laptops from my school library to write papers and turn in assignments. As you can imagine, this made it difficult to study for tests, as I didn’t have the coursework. I also didn’t know that I should tell someone that I was struggling and ask for help. I wanted to graduate because all my life I had been told that that was the way to a better life. That was the way to earn money, buy a house, and live the dream. The world was falling apart in 2008 when I graduated from high school, and I was doing my absolute best to make sure my own world didn’t fall apart right there with it. I had to graduate, I had to accomplish this goal because it was going to be the first step toward success. I needed to be the first person in my family to graduate from college and build a stable life for myself, and my family. I managed to figure it out. I managed to get by enough to graduate and get my diploma. Not even a year after I graduated from college, I became pregnant with my daughter. I was attending law school in Arizona with no family around, and serious life decisions to make. The father, my now husband, got a job opportunity in Oregon and I decided to move back closer to my friends and family in Florida. This was the hardest decision I had to make, to forego my career in my twenties to have a family. After I had my daughter, we moved to be with her dad in Oregon, where we grew our family for the next 4 years. Personally, it gave my husband and I a chance to figure things out together. We had been close family friends since we were in Kindergarten, so we weren't strangers. Having a baby when we did was a huge surprise, and far from the plan, but we were able to work it out and build a beautiful life together. Today, ten years post-graduation, my family is everything I could have ever dreamed of having. Professionally, for the past couple of years, I have felt far from where I thought I would be career-wise at this point in my life. Over the past few years, I found myself contemplating what was next. Last year, I was four years into a job that had growth potential for me to get my financial advisor's license and become a partner. I couldn’t do it. It didn’t feel right, and it wasn’t something that I wanted to do. In a very random turn of events, I decided to pursue a life-long hobby and become a certified yoga instructor back in 2020. I got laid off in August 2022 and decided to utilize the certificate I had and teach yoga full-time. I decided to start teaching small events once a month that ended up being a mommy and me yoga classes. The thing is, I didn’t change my class because there were kids in it and I realized the kids were keeping up just fine and loving it. I had thought of teaching yoga in schools. I read somewhere that there are schools in other countries that practice yoga and meditation instead of detention and that they have had excellent results in the behavior of kids who participate in these practices. I created a course that included yoga stretches but also taught emotional awareness, breathing exercises, meditation and more. I was able to get this program in two different schools and work with kids ages five to thirteen. This experience has led me to apply for a master’s in psychology. I want to be able to help more kids, but I need to have more education to understand how their minds work. I want to understand them, and I want to know what I can do to better support and advocate for them on their behalf. I guess you can say my own past experiences have led me to want to be the adult I always needed growing up, and the adult I can see many of the kids I work with need. Long term, I would like to pursue a doctorate and maybe participate in research on how introducing the practice of yoga, meditation, breathing exercises, etc. early in a baby/toddler’s life can positively affect their ability to adjust and navigate the world as they get older. We know that these practices work and have positive effects on kids, teens and adults, but what if we can introduce them early enough so that we aren’t using them as a response to the traumas they have already experienced? What if we can help families from the very beginning of the parenting journey use these tools to support the child through all stages? This is just one way I hope to combine everything, but I want the tools to be able to work with families and help them. I can’t predict the future, but if you ask me what I hope to get out of this program it is the ability to work with schools as a psychologist to help kids and provide families with different resources to overcome obstacles, whatever those obstacles may be. I believe this because I've lived it, and I watch my kids do it. I watch the kids I teach do it too, and to be able to work with them beyond a few weeks is why I want to become a licensed Psychologist. This scholarship will benefit me on this journey because it will alleviate the financial burden going back to school will have on my family and me, in addition to the amount of student loans I will have to take out. I had to overcome many obstacles during my undergrad years while receiving my Bachelors. It was not an easy journey, but one thing that it did was prove that I am capable of accomplishing anything I set my mind to. I now have life experience, support and resources to accomplish whatever goal I set, and I did not make this decision to go back to school lightly.

I grew up in a very chaotic, unstable home with a mom who had narcissistic tendencies and abusive stepdad's. (Yes, more than one.) It took me a long time to be able to admit that to myself, and even writing that now creates a pit in my stomach. See, I wasn't allowed to speak about anything negative or bad, and if I tried to I was often gaslit and told that I was exaggerating or flat-out lying. I believed it because my mom wasn't a monster. She truly tried her best, I believe, but her unhealed traumas got the better of her when she married her current husband. The love you attract is generally as deeply as you love or respect yourself, and she has spent so many years not believing she deserved love, even from herself, and chose men who reflected that. I made this same mistake when I was in college and found myself trying to escape an abusive relationship. It was all I saw, so it was what I thought was normal to have. It wasn't, and isn't. A huge part of my healing began when I got my yoga teaching certification in 2020. I had been doing yoga most of my life, something I credit my mom with introducing me to at a young age. Having this foundation has guided a lot of how I was able to get through some of the lowest, toughest points of my life. Moments I didn't want to continue, I was able to come back to the mindfulness aspect of what yoga teaches. To sit with myself, and reflect on the reality vs. my feelings. The truth of the situation, gain clarity and make decisions from that space vs. an emotionally reactive place. This took an insane amount of mental toughness that almost broke me when I got to a place of peace. I needed support as a child, I needed someone to be there more than they were. I especially needed someone during my teen years and early twenties. That feeling of having to face everything alone, of having reached out for help from so many people, including professionals, and being told I would figure it out because I was strong, is honestly gut-wrenching. I did figure it out, I kept going, even on the days I didn't want to and even on the days where it felt impossible. I don't want anyone to feel like this. I am taking the steps to change my future and the future of my family, and I now have the support and the resources to do so. I want to become a mental health professional so that I can support kids and teens during their childhood, and provide them with the tools and resources, along with the support, to succeed as adults later. I want fewer adults to have to heal in their 30s plus, and more of our youth to give the preventative resources they need to support their growth. Receiving this scholarship will allow me to pursue my master's, and eventually Ph.D., in psychology with reduced financial strain on my family. In turn, I will be able to work more closely in the mental health field and help more people.

I am a 33-year-old wife and mother of two kids. After more than ten years in the financial industry, I was laid off from my most recent job a year ago. I made a hard pivot into the mental health space, something I have always been passionate about and practiced myself, but now I have fully immersed myself in this new industry and I am ready to take it to the next level. I got my Yoga Teachers Certification back in 2020, and last year officially launched Motion Yoga and its subsidiary, Little Sunshine Kids Yoga. Motion Yoga is the company I teach under for retreats, events, and studios. I started doing sunrise yoga on the beach every month. Many of the students that would attend were parents, and they wanted to bring their kids with them. I opened it up as a mommy and me yoga class and brought my eight-year-old with me. The caveat is that I did not change the sequence that I was teaching because there were kids, which most places would make the class easier, and the kids in my class kept up with their parents! They loved it, and I started thinking that there needs to be more options for kids to participate in yoga without the silly stories or free-for-all that most kids' yoga programs offer. That is when I started Little Sunshine Kids Yoga, an after-school yoga program that lasts for six to twelve weeks and teaches kids mindfulness, meditation, breathing exercises, what emotions are and how to identify them, and of course, yoga stretches. So far, this program has been taught in two different schools, at a summer camp, and has taught 42 kids ages 5 to 13. As incredible as this accomplishment is, I want to be able to work more closely with schools. I want to understand the mind and behavior of the kids I work with, to better support them and provide them with the tools and resources they need to be centered, confident and successful people now and in the future. The research that yoga and meditation help with so many mental health issues and traumas is already out there, but so far it is being utilized as a treatment after the fact, rather than preventatively. I believe that we can give people the foundation early in their lives and as they encounter different obstacles, they will come back to these tools. I believe this because I've lived it, and I watch my kids do it. I watch the kids I teach do it too, and to be able to work with them beyond a few weeks is why I want to become a licensed Psychologist. This scholarship will benefit me on this journey because it will alleviate the financial burden going back to school will have on my family, in addition to the amount of student loans I will have to take out. I had to overcome many obstacles during my undergrad years while receiving my Bachelors. It was not an easy journey, but one thing that it did was prove that I am capable of accomplishing anything I set my mind to. I now have life experience, support and resources to accomplish whatever goal I set, and I do not make the decision to go back to school lightly. I am going to accomplish this goal, and I am going to help so many children grow up with stable mental health.