My name is Ben Keith. I'm a senior at South River High School in Edgewater, Maryland, and this fall I'm heading to the University of Alabama to study mechanical engineering. I didn't grow up knowing exactly what I wanted to do. What I knew was that I liked taking things apart and figuring out how they worked. Lawn mowers, bikes, anything I could get my hands on. Engineering is the grown-up version of that. I want to build things that matter, specifically medical devices or prosthetics, things that make somebody's life measurably better. High school changed me more than I expected. I walked into South River's football program freshman year never having played a tackle game. I didn't know the plays, didn't know the culture, didn't know if I belonged. Our team went 1 and 9 that year. Most people would have walked away. I stayed. Not because I was talented but because something about the grind felt right. I started showing up early, staying late, lifting in the offseason when nobody was watching. By sophomore year I earned a varsity spot. By senior year we went undefeated and won our first ever county championship. Same program, completely different results. That taught me what determination actually looks like. It's not a speech. It's years of quiet work that nobody sees until the scoreboard changes. I also play basketball. We won the state championship this year. Two team sports, two different rhythms, but the same lesson: you don't get to skip the hard days and still expect to win. My weaknesses are real. I'm not a natural test taker. I didn't take the ACT or SAT because standardized tests don't reflect how I learn. I learn by doing, by building, by failing and trying again. That's a weakness on paper and a strength in practice. I've had to find schools and programs that value the whole person, not just a number. Alabama saw that in me and I'm grateful for it. Community matters to me. Every week I volunteer at a Special Forces Memorial Garden near my house. It's not a cemetery. It's a living garden meant to honor the men and women who served in special operations. My grandfather is Lt. Colonel William Smith, U.S. Army retired. He gave decades of his life to service, and a lot of his brothers never came home. I show up every week to pull weeds, plant flowers, and keep the pathways clean. It's not glamorous work. But maintaining that space says something about what we value. I also volunteer at a local women's shelter and help organize food drives through our football team's community service program. Faith runs through all of this for me. I'm not the loudest person in the room about it, but I believe God put us here to take care of each other. That shows up in how I treat teammates, how I serve my community, and what I want my career to look like. This scholarship would make a real difference. My family is committed to getting me through college, but the cost of out-of-state tuition at Alabama is significant. Every dollar of scholarship support means less debt and more freedom to focus on my education instead of worrying about finances. I don't take that lightly. I read about Treye Knorr and what his family hopes this scholarship represents. A young life with limitless potential, honored by investing in someone else's future. I can't promise I'll change the world overnight. But I can promise I'll show up every day, do the work, and use whatever I build to give back to the people around me. That's what I've done for four years of high school, and that's what I plan to do for the rest of my life.

I'm not the kid who stands up in front of a group and quotes Bible verses. That's not how I grew up. My family believes in God, we pray, we try to live right, but we're not in church every Sunday. My faith is more about how I treat people than what I say out loud. Speech and debate taught me how to actually put that into words. When I joined Speech and Debate at South River, I figured it would help me get more comfortable talking in front of people. I play football and basketball so I'm used to pressure, but standing at a podium with nothing but your words is a completely different kind of nerve-wracking. There's no team to lean on. It's just you and whatever you believe. The first time I had to write a speech and deliver it, I realized I had to figure out what I actually stood for. Not what my parents told me or what I heard growing up, but what I personally believed. That's harder than it sounds. You can go through life nodding along to things without ever stopping to ask yourself why you believe them. Speech and Debate forced me to stop nodding and start thinking. One of the things I kept coming back to was how I was raised. My family isn't loud about faith but we live it. My grandfather, Lt. Colonel William Smith, served in the Army for decades. He didn't talk about duty and sacrifice like they were big concepts. He just did it. My parents are the same way. Show kindness, work hard, take care of the people around you. That's Christianity to me. Not a performance. A way of being. Debate specifically taught me how to listen before I respond. When you're debating someone you have to actually hear their argument before you can engage with it. That changed how I talk to people about faith. I don't try to convince anyone. I try to understand where they're coming from first. If someone asks me what I believe, I can explain it now without getting defensive or awkward. I can say that I believe in treating people with respect because that's what God asks of us, and I can say it in a way that sounds like me, not like I'm reading from a script. I volunteer every week at a Special Forces Memorial Garden near my house. It's a living garden, not a cemetery, meant to honor service members who gave everything. I show up, pull weeds, plant flowers, keep the pathways clean. Nobody makes me do it. I do it because it matters. That's faith in action to me. You don't need to announce it. You just do the work. Speech and Debate gave me the tools to explain that part of myself when the moment calls for it. Before, I would have just shrugged and said "I don't know, I just try to be a good person." Now I can actually articulate why. I can connect it back to how I was raised, what I've seen in the people I respect, and what I believe God put us here to do, which is to take care of each other. I'm heading to the University of Alabama next fall to study mechanical engineering. I want to build things that help people. That's the same belief dressed up in a career. Speech and Debate didn't make me more religious. It made me more honest about the faith I already had.

Freshman year, I showed up for football tryouts having never played tackle football. Every other kid had years of youth league behind them. I didn't. By week three of the season, it was clear that the gap wasn't going to close on its own. Our team went 1-9 that year. The problem wasn't that I lacked effort. It was that I didn't have a system. I was practicing the same way as everyone else, but I was starting from a different place. Same reps, same drills, same film — and I was still a season behind. So I started building something different. I mapped out where I was losing assignments, specifically which plays I missed and why. I added morning sessions before anyone else arrived. I started watching opponents' film differently, looking for tendencies rather than just formations. I created a tracking system — nothing elaborate, just a written log — where I could see what I'd worked on, what was improving, and what wasn't. That system was something I made. It didn't come from a coach or a playbook. I built it out of necessity, and I kept adjusting it as I got better. By junior year it was second nature. Senior year, we went undefeated and won the first county championship in school history. What I took from that is not that hard work pays off — everyone says that. What I learned is that generic preparation doesn't work when you have a specific gap. You have to diagnose the actual problem, then build something designed for that problem. That's the process I want to keep applying. The second problem I'd solve, with the right resources, is in medical devices. My dad works in medical device sales and I've grown up understanding that the gap between what technology can do and what actually reaches patients is real. A lot of the hardware used in orthopedic surgery still relies on implant designs from decades ago. They work, but they require significant recovery time because of how invasive the procedures are. There's a design problem there. If I had the tools and the time, I'd focus on minimally invasive fixation systems — hardware that achieves the same structural outcome with a smaller physical footprint in the body. The engineering challenge is in the materials and geometry. You're trying to maintain mechanical load-bearing capacity while reducing cross-section. That's a genuine constraint problem, not a theoretical one. It would require materials science expertise I don't have yet, and testing infrastructure that's beyond where I am now — but it's the kind of work I'm planning toward. The system I built as a 15-year-old with a notebook and some extra practice sessions was small. But the process was the same: find the real constraint, build something specific to it, and keep adjusting. That's what engineering is. It turns out I've been doing a version of it for years without calling it that.

Most people drive by memorials without stopping. That's not a criticism — it's just true. There are a lot of them, and a lot of people moving fast. The Special Forces Memorial Garden in Annapolis honors soldiers who gave everything for missions most of the public will never fully know about. I volunteer there every week. I show up, I do what needs to be done, and I go home. It's not complicated. What motivated me was simple. I started going because someone I respected suggested it, and then I kept going because I realized how much the place mattered to the families who visited. You notice things after a while. The way someone will stop at a particular stone and stand there for a long time. The way a kid will ask their parent a question you can tell neither of them is ready to answer. The place holds real grief. Being part of keeping it well felt like the right thing to do. What I've contributed so far is consistent, reliable presence — the kind of work that doesn't make headlines but that keeps a place like this intact. Gardens don't maintain themselves. The work is physical and specific and it matters. If I could expand the effort, I'd focus on awareness. A lot of people in the community don't know the Garden exists, or what Special Forces actually are, or what it costs someone to serve in that capacity. I'd like to help change that, whether through school outreach, coordinating more regular volunteers, or working with the Garden's leadership to tell those stories more publicly. The sacrifice honored there deserves more than just the people who already know to look for it. It deserves to be found.

Starting high school, I didn't have a clear plan. I knew I wanted to go to college. I knew I was going to play football, even though I had never played tackle before. Those two things didn't feel connected at the time. They do now. My freshman year, our team went 1-9. I was figuring out assignments that other kids had learned in middle school, making mistakes at a pace I had to get comfortable with fast. I remember thinking I had made the wrong call trying out. But I kept showing up, and over time the game started to make sense in a way it hadn't before. Not because someone handed me the answers. Because I put in the time to find them myself. That experience taught me something about learning that I didn't fully understand until later. When you're behind, there's a temptation to pretend you're not, to cover it up and hope nobody notices. The better move is to just get comfortable being the one who doesn't know yet. That mindset, honestly, has done more for me academically than any study habit I've read about. The subjects I struggled with didn't get easier by avoiding them. They got easier when I sat down and worked through them, sometimes badly at first, sometimes over and over, until I understood what was actually happening. My GPA is 3.8. I didn't start there. It built over time, the same way everything else has. By senior year, our team was undefeated. We won the first county title in school history. I was part of something that seemed impossible four years earlier. I've thought a lot about what changed between that 1-9 freshman season and senior year. It was the same guys, mostly. The same coaches. What changed was what we were willing to do in the off-season, in the weight room, in the extra film sessions. Nobody handed us the championship. We built it one day at a time, and most of those days felt ordinary while we were in them. Education has worked the same way for me. The growth isn't dramatic. It doesn't feel like anything on most days. It's just showing up again and again until you look back and realize you're not the same person you were. I volunteer every week at the Special Forces Memorial Garden in Annapolis. The Garden honors people who gave everything for missions that most people will never know the details of. Standing there, especially early in the morning before many people arrive, I think about what it means to do something that costs you a lot and that you may never get credit for. Those soldiers chose that. They trained their whole careers for work that demanded precision, endurance, and the ability to stay focused when everything around them was uncertain. I think about engineering the same way. Mechanical engineering isn't glamorous. It's math, it's thermodynamics, it's tolerances and failure modes and working through problems that don't have clean answers. That's what draws me to it. I've committed to the University of Alabama to study mechanical engineering starting this fall, and I'm not going in with the expectation that it'll be easy. I'm going in with the expectation that I'll be behind at first, that I'll have to work through it, and that it'll click eventually if I don't quit. The problems I want to work on are the kind that have real stakes. I'm drawn to medical devices, infrastructure, systems that people depend on. My father works in medical device sales, so I grew up around conversations about what those technologies actually do for patients. There's something about knowing that the thing you built is keeping someone alive or moving that makes the hard work feel worth it. There's also a practical challenge I carry. College is expensive. My family is supportive and we're doing what we can, but the financial reality of four years of engineering school is something I think about. Scholarships are not abstract to me. They're the difference between borrowing less and borrowing more, between stress I can manage and stress that takes up space in my head. I take every application seriously. I want to use my degree to build a career where the work matters, where the problems are hard enough to stay interesting, and where I can look back and say I built something real. That's the direction education has given me. Not a specific job title or a company name, but a way of thinking about work that I didn't have before high school, before football, before I started showing up somewhere every day and figuring out how to get better. The classroom is the next chapter of the same story I've been living for four years. I'm ready for it.

The first thing I noticed about "Rudy" was that he had no business being on that field. Everyone around him was faster, bigger, more talented. He knew it. They knew it. And he kept showing up anyway. I watched it for the first time freshman year. I had just started tackle football. Never played before. Our team went 1-9 that year. I was lost most of the season, figuring out assignments I should've learned years before everyone else did, getting beat on plays I didn't understand yet. I remember watching Rudy get crushed in practice over and over, getting up, lining up again. That felt familiar in a way I couldn't quite name yet. What the movie gets right is that nobody really sees what the showing up costs. From the outside it looks like determination or heart or whatever word people use. From the inside it's quieter than that. It's just deciding every single morning that you're going back. Not because it feels good. Because you said you would. Rudy's teammates didn't exactly welcome him. He was in the way. He wasn't supposed to be there. That part I recognized too. Starting something years behind everyone else puts you in that position. You spend a long time being the guy who makes mistakes other people stopped making in middle school. You either get over being embarrassed or you leave. By my senior year, our team was undefeated. We won the first county title in school history. I've thought about what changed between that 1-9 freshman season and that one. Mostly it was just time. Year after year of the same weight room, the same film sessions, the same practice fields. Nobody handed us anything. We built it one day at a time, and most of those days felt ordinary while we were in them. Rudy doesn't get a bunch of magical moments. He gets one play at the end. That's the whole payoff for years of work. The movie treats that like it's enough, because it is. You don't always get to see the scoreboard move because of you. You do the work because that's what you signed up for. I'm heading to Alabama in the fall to study Mechanical Engineering. I know it'll be harder than anything I've done academically. There will be problems I can't figure out. But I've already been through years of getting knocked down on a football field, and I know what it feels like to show up the next morning anyway. That's what Rudy gave me. Not a speech. Not a blueprint. Just proof that the gap between where you start and where you end up is mostly filled by showing up. I still think about that more than anything I learned from school.

My grandparents, Dr. H.L. Keith and Emeline Keith, both died within three months of each other. My grandmother was diagnosed with cancer. My grandfather found out and was gone two months later. The doctors said his heart gave out, but I think everyone in the family knows what actually happened. He loved her for decades and couldn't picture a world without her. A month after he died, she was gone too. I was 17 when it happened. My dad lost both his parents inside of a season. There's something about watching grief hit a parent that changes how you see things. My dad is not the kind of person who falls apart. He kept moving, kept showing up. But I noticed things. The way certain songs hit him different. The way he'd go quiet sometimes and come back without explanation. Loss doesn't go away. It settles in. My grandfather was a dentist his whole career in Wilmington, North Carolina. My grandmother kept the life that made that career possible. They had that kind of partnership where you can't really separate one story from the other. When she got sick, it broke something in him that couldn't be fixed. I used to think of love as something you feel. After watching what happened to them, I think of it as something that costs you everything at the end if it's real. That changed how I think about the people still in front of me. I'm less patient with wasting time. Not in a dramatic way, just quieter than that. I text my dad back faster. I show up to things I might have skipped before. I try not to take for granted that someone will be there next year the same way they are right now. It also changed how I think about work. My grandfather built a 40-year career doing something precise and patient. You can't rush dentistry. You have to care about the details that nobody else sees. That's stuck with me as I head into mechanical engineering. The problems I want to work on are not going to bend for someone who checks out when it gets hard. My grandfather never did. I don't plan to either. I volunteer at the Special Forces Memorial Garden in Annapolis. The Garden exists to honor people who gave everything. Standing there, I think about what it means to have left something behind that still matters. My grandparents left that for my dad. My dad carries it. I try to carry it too. I don't think I've fully figured out what their loss means yet. I'm not sure you're supposed to at 18. But I'm not the same person I was before it happened. I think more about what I'm building and who I'm building it for. I think about time differently. And I try, whenever possible, not to waste it.

I'm William "Ben" Keith, a senior at South River High School in Edgewater, Maryland. This fall I'm headed to the University of Alabama to study Mechanical Engineering — a path that feels right for reasons I didn't expect. Freshman year, I walked onto the football field having never played tackle before. That part matters because nobody made me. I chose it. We went 1-9 that season. I didn't quit. I showed up every single day — watched film, hit the weights, figured out where I fit and what I was actually capable of. Every year after that we got better. Senior year, we went undefeated and won the first county title in South River history. We also won the 2026 Maryland state basketball championship. But the trophy isn't the point. The point is the gap between 1-9 and undefeated, and what I learned in that gap. Adversity doesn't end when you lose — it ends when you decide to stop letting it define the ceiling. I learned that you can walk into something you've never done, look terrible at it, keep working, and eventually become something you weren't before. That same logic is why I chose engineering. The problems don't care if you're good at first. They care whether you're patient and precise and willing to work through twenty variables until something gives. That's where I want to spend my career — on problems that require that kind of sustained effort. Outside of football, I volunteer every week at the Special Forces Memorial Garden in Annapolis, Maryland. The Garden is a living tribute to fallen special operations soldiers — not a cemetery, but a working garden built and maintained by volunteers. My connection to it runs through my grandfather, Lt. Col. William Smith, and his legacy in the special forces community. Standing in that space every week does something that's hard to explain. It puts the problems I'm carrying into proportion fast. These were people who showed up for something much larger than themselves, and they paid everything. The least I can do is show up and keep the place worthy of them. It's shaped how I think about the work ahead. Engineering is where I'm headed, but the reason is simpler than the career path. I want to build things that work, solve problems that matter to real people, and be someone who doesn't walk away when it gets hard. Whether that leads to structural engineering, aerospace, or something I haven't encountered yet, the common thread is the same mindset that carried me from 1-9 to a county championship. Valerie Rabb spent her career helping students access the education they'd worked for. That kind of commitment means something to me because I've seen what it looks like when someone just keeps showing up for others — in a garden, on a football field, in a classroom. The impact compounds. I plan to spend my career doing work that compounds the same way.

Freshman year, I was the last kid anyone expected to make the varsity football roster. I had never played tackle football before showing up at tryouts. Coach saw something I didn't. The first time I missed an assignment in practice, he didn't yell. He pulled me aside and said something I've thought about every day since: "The guys who make it aren't the most talented. They're the ones who refuse to be comfortable making the same mistake twice." That was it. No long speech. He walked away and let it land. Our freshman year team went 1-9. There were stretches where quitting seemed easier than showing up to get beaten again. Coach never talked about winning. He talked about who you were going to be when things got hard. Film sessions, extra reps before school, conversations about mental toughness that I didn't fully understand until years later. He had this way of making you feel accountable not just to the team, but to some version of yourself you hadn't met yet. What changed in me wasn't football technique. It was the way I started thinking about difficulty. Before Coach, I treated a hard thing as a signal that maybe it wasn't for me. After enough sessions of him refusing to accept that logic, I started treating hard things as the only ones worth doing. That shift didn't stay on the football field. It moved into the classroom, into the way I approached Speech and Debate, into the hours I spend every week volunteering at a Special Forces Memorial Garden. Every time I thought about cutting corners, I heard that voice: don't get comfortable with your own mistakes. By senior year we went undefeated and won the first county championship in school history. I'm not going to pretend the wins didn't matter. They mattered enormously. But what mattered more was standing in the locker room after the final game and realizing I had become someone I didn't know I could be. That transformation started with one coach who didn't let me get comfortable with mediocrity when I showed up with zero experience and a lot to learn. I'm going into mechanical engineering. I don't know exactly what I'll build or where I'll end up. But I know I'll approach it the same way Coach taught me to approach the gap between 1-9 and undefeated: one day, one decision, one refusal to quit at a time.

Football is probably the first thing people think of when they picture me. I walked onto the field freshman year having never played tackle football before. We went 1-9. I didn't quit. I showed up every day, watched film, hit the weights, and figured out where I fit. By senior year we went undefeated and won the first county title in school history. That's what I am. Not the trophy. The gap between 1-9 and undefeated. I also volunteer every week at a Special Forces Memorial Garden, honoring soldiers who gave everything. Standing there puts things in perspective fast. Engineering is where I'm headed, and it fits the same way football did. I want to understand how forces act on structures, how a problem with twenty variables still has a solution if you're patient enough to find it. But what actually defines me is simpler than all that. I don't quit. I show up. When something's hard (a season, a class, a commitment), I don't look for the exit. That's been true since I was a freshman getting knocked around in practice, and it's still true now.

I'm a high school senior from Edgewater, Maryland. I play football and basketball at South River High School, I volunteer every week at a Special Forces Memorial Garden near my home, and I'm planning to study Mechanical Engineering in college. That's the basic version. Here's what it actually looks like. Freshman year our football team went 1 and 9. I had never played tackle football before that season, not a single snap. I was behind every day, making mistakes, learning the hard way. It would have been easy to quit. Instead I kept showing up. Every offseason workout, every extra rep, every film session. Senior year we went undefeated and won the first county championship in our school's history. Basketball this year, we're the 2026 state champions. I'm not saying that to list my accomplishments. I'm saying it because those things happened because a group of guys refused to give up on something, year after year. That same mentality follows me everywhere else. The Special Forces Memorial Garden isn't a cemetery. It's a garden built to honor special forces soldiers who gave everything. My grandfather is Lt. Colonel William Smith, retired Army. I started volunteering there because of him, because I wanted to understand what service actually means. I kept going because it matters. Every week, maintaining that space, being part of honoring those men. Not something I do to put on a resume. Something I do because it's right. I also volunteer at a women's shelter and help run food drives through school. I'm in Speech and Debate. I play music. I try to be someone who contributes instead of just taking up space. I want to study Mechanical Engineering. I've always been the kind of person who wants to know how things work, physically, structurally, what holds something together and what causes it to fail. I want to build things that solve real problems. That's what I'm working toward. This scholarship would help me get there without starting behind. My family does everything they can, but the cost of college is real and financial aid only covers part of it. Every scholarship I earn means less debt at graduation, which means I can focus on doing the actual work instead of spending my twenties trying to get back to zero. That's not a small thing. Reading about Kalia, what stood out to me was that she didn't just achieve things. She showed up for the people around her. She pushed herself and pulled others with her. That's the kind of person I want to be. I think we probably would have understood each other.

"Boldly, Unapologetically Me" My freshman year of high school, our football team went 1-9. I had never played tackle football before, and I was not good. I didn't know the plays, I wasn't the right size, and I looked like someone who had no business being on that field. People noticed. A few times along the way, someone suggested maybe football wasn't for me. I kept going anyway. Not because I had some big speech ready about pushing through adversity. It was simpler than that. I wanted to play, I wasn't ready to stop, and I didn't want to look back in two years and wonder what would have happened if I had just quit. So I showed up every single day. I watched the older guys. I worked harder at practice than I ever had at anything. Eventually, I started getting better. The team did too. Senior year, we won the county championship, the first one in school history. And that year I was also part of the basketball team that won the 2026 Maryland State Championship. Choosing to be myself in that situation meant being okay with failing in front of other people while I figured it out. That part is uncomfortable. But it was the most important thing I did in four years of high school. "Creating Connection" The football championship didn't happen because of me. It happened because of us. That's the thing I'm actually most proud of. I've been on that team since freshman year, when we went 1-9 and barely anyone showed up to games. Every year after that, we worked on the same thing: trust. You can have talented players and still fall apart if the team doesn't have it. We talked about that in the locker room. We held each other accountable. We checked in on guys who were struggling, on and off the field. Outside football, I volunteer every week at the Special Forces Memorial Garden near Annapolis, a living memorial honoring Army Special Forces soldiers who gave their lives. I've gotten to know the other volunteers and the families who visit. It's a small community, but it's real. I also help at a women's shelter and organize food drives. In those spaces, creating connection means showing up every week, not just once. People notice consistency. They notice when you're gone too. What I've learned from all of it is that belonging isn't something you announce. It's something you build, one week at a time, by actually showing up.

I'm a senior at South River High School in Edgewater, Maryland. Football and basketball take up most of my time outside of class, but academics matter too. My GPA is a 3.8 and I'm planning to study mechanical engineering in college. I've always liked figuring out how things work and building things that actually function, so engineering made sense when I started thinking about what comes next. The sports side of my life has been a lot. I play varsity football and varsity basketball. This year, our football team won the county championship for the first time in school history. Our basketball team won the 2026 Maryland State Championship. Those wins didn't come easy. My freshman year, our football team went 1-9. I had never played tackle football before high school and I felt completely out of place. I didn't quit. I showed up every day. Four years later I was holding a trophy on a field where we used to lose by thirty points. That experience shaped how I think about everything. Community service has been a big part of high school too. My grandfather is Lt. Col. William Smith, retired U.S. Army. Because of him I grew up understanding what service really means. I volunteer every week at the Special Forces Memorial Garden, a living memorial near Annapolis honoring Army Special Forces soldiers who gave their lives. It's not a cemetery, it's a garden, and maintaining it feels like something I'm supposed to do. I also help at a women's shelter and organize food drives in the community. These experiences changed how I see the people right around me. If I could start a charity, it would focus on veterans from special operations units when they come home. These are people who spent years doing work most civilians will never hear about. When the mission ends, the quiet doesn't go away. A lot of them struggle and don't ask for help because that's not what the culture teaches. My charity would work on closing that gap. The mission would be peer support and real transition help, job training, family counseling, financial planning, things that address the day-to-day of coming home. Volunteers wouldn't tell veterans what to do. They'd connect them to people who understand the specific weight of special operations service, without judgment. We'd also do community outreach to help civilians understand what these veterans actually went through, because most people have no idea. I came to this idea through my grandfather and through the garden I volunteer at every week. Those soldiers honored there gave everything they had. The least I can do is show up on Saturday mornings and keep that place clean. Maybe eventually, I can build something that helps the ones who made it home.

My grandfather doesn't talk about himself. That's the first thing you notice. Lieutenant Colonel William Smith spent over two decades in the U.S. Army, and if you ask him about it, he'll change the subject. He'd rather ask what you're working on. What you're reading. What you want to do with your life. That's the thing that stuck with me. Here's a man who did more in his career than most people could imagine, and the thing he cared about most was whether the people around him were growing. He used to say that the only thing that outlasts a person is what they teach. I didn't understand that when I was younger. I think I do now. I got into debate junior year, partly because a coach suggested it and partly because I figured I could argue so I might as well get credit for it. What I didn't expect was how much harder it actually is. You don't get to just make your point. You have to anticipate what the other side will say. You have to understand their argument as well as your own, sometimes better. And you have to stay calm doing all of it, even when you're not calm. My grandfather did that for a living. Not debate, obviously, but the same core thing — making a case under pressure, reading a room, adjusting when things aren't going the way you planned. He told me once that the best leaders he served with weren't the loudest ones. They were the ones who listened first. I think about that a lot when I'm preparing for a round. He never pushed me toward any specific path. But watching how he carried himself — the discipline, the way he took education seriously even after he'd already done so much — that's what made college feel like something I actually wanted, not just something I was supposed to do. He went back to school multiple times over his career. He always had a book going. He believed that stopping learning was something you chose, and it was the wrong choice. I want to study mechanical engineering. Part of that is just how my brain works — I like figuring out how things work, I always have. But part of it is wanting to do something real with it. Contribute something. My grandfather's whole career was about service and I think that shaped what I want my life to look like too, even if I'm doing it in a lab or a design room instead of uniform. Debate helped me see that having a good idea isn't enough. You have to be able to explain it, defend it, make someone else believe in it. That skill matters whether you're an engineer, a leader, or just someone trying to make a difference. My grandfather understood that. It took me a while to catch up, but I'm getting there.

My grandfather served as a Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Army. Growing up, I watched how he carried himself and how seriously he took responsibility to other people. I think that's where a lot of who I am comes from. For the past several years I've volunteered every week at a local military memorial in Edgewater. We clean headstones, maintain the grounds, and help with ceremonies. Nobody grades me on it. There's no club credit. I just show up because it matters. Those men and women gave everything, and the least I can do is make sure the place that honors them doesn't fall apart. That work has shaped how I approach pretty much everything else in my life. Sports have been a huge part of my high school experience. I've played varsity football and basketball at South River all four years. This past winter our basketball team won the 2026 Maryland State Championship, and football has taken us deep into the regional playoffs. The thing about being on a team like that is you realize fast that your attitude affects everyone around you. You can't phone it in during a Tuesday practice and then expect to perform when it counts. I learned to work hard when it's inconvenient, and I learned that the people next to you are counting on you whether you feel like showing up or not. That same mentality is what got me out to volunteer at the women's shelter and food drives in Anne Arundel County. Those trips weren't always easy to fit into my schedule with school and sports, but I never regretted going. You see a family that needed help, and you helped them. That's it. It's simple in a way that a lot of things in high school aren't. I also competed in speech and debate and have played music throughout high school. Debate taught me to actually listen before I respond, which sounds basic but is harder than it sounds. You can't argue a side you don't understand. That discipline has carried over into how I handle conflict with teammates, how I talk to coaches, and honestly how I handle a lot of conversations in general. I'm planning to study Mechanical Engineering next year. When I think about what I want to bring into that, it's not just the academic side. It's the work ethic I built on the field, the service mindset I learned from my grandfather and from showing up every week at that memorial, and the ability to actually listen that debate gave me. Those things don't expire when high school ends. I plan to keep building on them wherever I go next.