Being involved in the arts has completely changed my life. It has expanded my mind, and melted my heart, and continues to make changes in me every day. Growing up, I experienced many hardships, with poor health and an unpredictable home life. Music gave me foundation. I gave me community, and it showed me how to be loved and love gently. Music made me a better collaborator. It showed me when to take charge and when to blend in with the choir, when to raise another's voice instead of my own. It gave me the tools to hear people with greater equity, and understand the dynamics underlying each phrase. It gave me confidence, and showed me that maybe I do have what it takes, leading me forward through time in steady rhythms and driven tempos in a world that is often loud and unpredictable. When it came time to choose my advanced education, and decide what impact I wanted to have on the world around me, I found there was an obvious choice. I wanted to use the thing that had given me so much to provide tools to those who needed them, based on their goals, values, and their individual relationships with music. I wanted to use the enormous power for change that lies within music to impact my community, so I choice music therapy and voice. I could never stop performing, so I wanted to give myself the tools to keep it in my life through voice studio, where I have found my confidence (and my decibels). I realized that my voice had more power behind it than I ever knew, and have fallen in love with opera and art song, and the passionate storytelling that one can do with them. After college, I hope to continue to bring art to my community, while allowing it to make changes inwards as well. I remember a song I sang in freshman year choir, "How Can I Keep From Singing". The entire song was founded on that simple phrase, which rings so true to us singers. How can I keep away from what drives me? How can I keep from my community, which has shared in so much love and vulnerability? The answer lies in the song itself- we can't. My high school choir teacher always said that if music chooses you, you can't escape it, it will follow you and have you. I agree with her, and I would have it no other way. I hope that I can provide music to others who need it too. Thank you for your time and consideration.

Music has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. As a child, I was lucky enough to make music with my father and sister every night, and I only grew to love it more as I grew up. I played in orchestra and eventually sang in Colorado All-State Choir, which gave me the confidence to pursue a career in music therapy and voice. Music therapy is all about connecting to people, taking your time to understand them, their values, and what music means to them. I have a passion for this work, and providing tools to people that best match their individual needs. I also love storytelling through music, and write and perform music in my community. One of my role models in the music industry would have to be the comedian and songwriter Bo Burnham. I have been inspired by his passion and drive, and his ability to create entire projects by himself, from scratch. If he has an idea, he works tirelessly to achieve it. If he has something to say, he finds a way to connect people to it through comedy and music. I always love a comedian's ability to share accessible stories, to tell the stories of the times in a way that people will actually listen and open up to, and I try to incorporate that into my songwriting and artistic and therapeutic practices. I want to be an inspirational and driven member of the music industry. I want to be a multifaceted artist, and allow myself to get creative by using all of my skills for my art. I want to be a bold and reliable member of my community, and provide art to people regardless of their background. In the future, I would also love to do non-profit work for schools without funding for the arts, because all people deserve music. I have not spent much time thinking about how I want to be remembered, as I tend to think in terms of the impact I can have in my life. I hope that I am remembered as a person with great drive, humor, and lasting artistic impact. I hope that I am able to build something lasting for the artists that come after me, and that I have music that is touching enough to endure longer than I will. In life, I am working towards these goals, and I hope that I can bring that to the world that I love so much. Thank you so much for your time and consideration.

I am a dedicated music therapy student in Colorado. Throughout my time in college, I have performed in recitals, operas, shows, and countless gigs. I have concentrations in voice and guitar, where I aim to expand my artistry and become more multifaceted as a performer and therapist. I am passionate about using music to give people the tools to their success, building specialized sessions based on their personal goals and values. Throughout my practica, I have experienced the immense power for change that music possesses, and I have been honored to facilitate that change as a therapist. I have seen seniors come out of their shells and isolation and children build their ability to communicate without speaking. I have learned the ways that I can encourage people to find their power, with music as the motivator and language shared between us. Besides music therapy, I love art song and opera, and have experienced deep internal change as I have explored my voice. Through studio, I found my voice and my confidence, and realized that I could be a leader in ensemble and my life in general. I found the power held within my voice, that I can fill an auditorium without a microphone and tell stories with music. I find immense joy and solace in my vocal work, and have fallen in love with story telling and problem solving through music. This inner work has also created a drive to share my art with others. I love bringing music to my community, whether it is through the performances I do through retirement homes, offering low-cost services to ensure art is accessible to our seniors, or through shows I do at school. This scholarship would allow me to finish my last year of college with minimal debt. The scholarships I relied on for my previous years of school no longer exist, and without them I have been in a period of unknowns and stress. I would be the first woman in my family to achieve a graduate degree, and I want to keep inspiring my nieces to achieve higher education as well. With this scholarship, I will also be able to continue to provide low-cost music to my community as well, without needing to increase my price to afford the cost of living. Most importantly, this scholarship will help me become a licsensed music therapist, and get me closer to my aspiration of performing and providing palliative care to children with critical conditions. Last year, I wrote a song for such a child as part of the non-profit Chase the Music's work, and the experience was extremely eye-opening and meaningful to me. Getting to know the child and their family made me understand the immense need that these families have for music. I hope to provide that with evidence-based methods, and bring joy, comfort, and song to the people that need it most. Thank you so much for your time, consideration, and this opportunity.

Music has changed and shaped my life in nearly every way you can imagine. I have so many memories of my dad bringing in his guitar to sing to my sister and me when we were little kids, every Sunday school song you can think of and “The Itsy Bitsy Spider”, changing the words so that my sister and I would call out for him to fix it. I always thought “in excelsis deo” in “Angels We Have Heard On High” was in Chelsea’s deo after our old border collie. I think these moments founded my love for music, and the desire to have it in my life always. When I was younger, I would sit behind our electric keyboard and makeup songs, plunking out tunes with no real direction. I would sing about whatever I was doing, regardless of how much it annoyed my poor sister, and my love for music only grew as I got older, performing as “cat” for the church musical of the ark story, getting my first solo in “Away in the Manger". I remember seeing my first orchestra concert at Colorado State University and falling in love with the Cello, which I would later play in middle school and part of high school. Music always led me away from tough times, from sorrow. For some time, being held accountable for Madrigals Choir or the musicals that I was part of were the main things that kept me going, even when I truly wanted nothing more than to give up. Music provided me with a community and a place to believe in myself and a future that I was happy in. Eventually, through a lot of self-work and continuing down the musical path, I achieved that future. I started showing up to rehearsals not just to survive, but because it was my choice, because it was what I loved and what fulfilled me. I started working even harder at home and kept up with my friends in voice lessons. I let the music move through me, rather than just pushing me along, and with that and my wonderful community of teachers and peers, I found true joy. I could not have done that without my choir teacher. She is an amazing woman, a person that I admire and that worked with me even when I did not believe in myself. For a long time, up until my Sophomore year, I was only singing Tenor and some Alto; I thought that my high register was lackluster and that it would never get better. My teacher, however, believed in me and worked me up to singing soprano pieces. The next year, I auditioned for All-State with a mezzo-soprano piece and got in, and a year after that, I got in again. So, music has shaped my life, both internally and externally, pushing me through when I am at my worst and being my joy when I am at my best. I love music, and I don’t think I could get away from it even if I tried. I am excited to go to college and continue pursuing music through Music Therapy. I feel that I have found my calling and that the professors at CSU will help me develop the skills to show others how music can transform them too. Thank you for your consideration.

As a high school senior, I have had to solve many problems for myself and others. For my friends, I love to help create plans to help them stay organized with their schooling and personal lives. For me, my health has gotten in the way of many things that I have loved to do in the past, and I had to find ways to maintain a high standard while also working with the illnesses that work against me. This was especially evident last year when my health was at its lowest. With this, I had to think hard about my priorities and imagine ways that I could get through the year at the challenging school that I have gone to during the hardest year. Many of my teachers were impressed by the fact that I did not just drop out, but after all the time that I had spent working hard, I was not interested in giving up or even working at a lesser standard than I had been. One way that I came up with to persevere was by audiobooks. As a person with chronic migraines, I was unable to read the usual 20-40 pages a night, and that best way I could continue to understand the material. I used music not only as something to work on and improve but also as a conduit for peace. I set my room up to help manage my ADHD and the general stresses of life, working by a window for natural light and listening to lo-fi music as I worked. It is hard to pinpoint one specific thing that I created that solved the overarching problem of my health struggles against my schooling. It was more a collection of things and a management of my environment that helped me get through everything. My school is small (my graduating class is 18), and because of the school's relative youth (I started in first grade the year the school was founded), they did not have the recourses or the general knowledge on how to help me, so I had to come up with these methods on my own. While this was frustrating for me, I was determined to communicate with my school about the methods that helped me and what they could do to support me, as I knew these problems would affect other students after me. I have always wanted to make my community a better place, and I hope my efforts will help others in the long run. I think a problem I would love to solve if I had the recourses would be specific support for people with health struggles in smaller schools. I would love to create classes not only for counselors but for other administrative staff to help them understand the problems that students like me face. I do not have illnesses that show obvious physical signs, so I believe the biggest problem I had in gaining understanding was that they could not see my issues obviously, and they had a hard time because of that. I worry for other people in a similar position because of this, as the energy that has to be spent getting people to listen can be extremely difficult to maintain when you are already facing these issues. I would want to institute a culture of understanding and kindness, and make sure that even small schools have an understanding of how to help students with unique needs thrive, as everyone deserves support and love from their communities, and there is no more important time for it than in your youth.

I have a Big Brown Dog (TM) named Mowgli whom I love very much. Mowgli is about one hundred pounds, but he is quite unlike any dog we have ever had. Mowgli can be a little intimidating at first, being a German Shepherd, Pitbull, and Rottweiler mix, but once he's in his blue bow tie, it is pretty hard to feel scared. He enjoys spending his free time chasing butterflies and catching locusts in the backyard (and maybe accidentally eating them). When he feels lonely, he cries like a Husky, and it is so cute it is only a little bit annoying. Mowgs is a very good boy, a bit chunky, but with a truly impeccable spirit. When we first got Mowgli, it was really my older sister who championed getting him. You see, I was only a fourth grader at the time, and I was pretty much just excited about everything in the whole world. My parents really wanted a pure-bred Australian Shepherd. My sister, however, had other plans. The one day that we went to the very sketchy animal shelter, my parents were looking at labs, I was distracted by something random, and my sister had chosen the scrappiest looking, mange-ridden dog in the building. My parents were not impressed. Regardless, my sister persisted. She wrote my parents a six-paragraph essay on why we needed the scrappy puppy and converted her closet mirror into a brainstorming list for names (I could look, but my suggestions were apparently very stupid). The final straw for my parents was when she tearfully told them that they could get the other dog and she would be ok. We got Mowgli. The beginning of having him was pretty stressful though. He was a great dog, the kind that has one accident in the house and then never does it again, the kind that chews up some of your furniture legs but never your shoes. Still, we found out that he had a very severe heart murmur, so severe in fact that our vet had us take him to Colorado State University so their vets could be shocked by it too. We were told that he was not going to make it past one and that many shelters would have put him down by now. We were not going to do that of course. Like Clifford, the more we loved him, the more he grew, and now, almost seven years later, Mowgli is better than ever. I really love my dog, he is a ridiculous, gigantic lap dog (he loves to sleep directly on top of you), and he makes me excited to have a dog (albeit smaller) in college.

I have encountered all kinds of people in the online space. Playing games like Overwatch and Destiny 2, I am no stranger to sexism and bullying because of my gender. As soon as people hear my voice, the entire tone of the team chat will often shift. While I strongly believe in the benefits of these online spaces, I also think there are many hard-to-solve problems, as it is so easy to cover your tracks and avoid punishment in these spaces. I believe that the best course to take while engaging in these spaces is to know yourself. If you are the kind of person to take things seriously, open chat might not be for you. Then again, I believe this issue deflects blame that should be placed on the corporation and those actually causing the problems. Sometimes, people will know just what to say to cause the most harm, and it is important to take breaks while playing. I hope that gaming companies will find better solutions so that online spaces will become safer for consumers. Of course, these interactions have every ability to seep into our real lives. When people begin to think that there will not be any consequences to their words, it can have disastrous consequences. We see this often in our world, people radicalizing under causes that they hear about on the internet, and of course, they hear it there because it is the only place where our social consciousness does not always exist. The lack of filters can also have a negative effect on young children, especially considering how children are engaging on the internet at younger and younger ages. While these children tend to have more generalized protection, there are many ways to bypass the safety measures in place, a worrying thought when thinking about a child's social development. In general, I think a stronger message on the impacts of our online interactions could be crucial in cultivating a safer society. Many people go online to find some sort of escapism from their normal lives, but this dissociation from oneself and ones online identity can also do great harm. We have seen a decrease in bullying in schools, but many have moved to doing this online. Still, I think there is great hope for these spaces as they mature, and it is important to remember that these chats are still in their infancy.