I started playing rugby about two years ago when a good friend of mine came up to me in the hallway, "hey Zoe, do you play a spring sport?" At that time I was considering doing outdoor track but I had nothing on my agenda. He told me to come out to a captain's practice, it was intermixed with our boy's team just to get a feel for the sport and I immediately felt welcomed. Throughout my career as a student-athlete, I have played many different sports. My most prominent was basketball which followed me into high school but I always found myself in drama. The sport made me upset. I ended up quitting basketball because I just never felt welcomed and just a few months later I found rugby. Rugby was and is a breath of fresh air. Rugby, like a family, is a very close-knit community that has values like respect, and teamwork intermixed with a little bit of camaraderie. Rugby values having fun and trying rather than focusing on winning (even though winning is a great perk). Instead of being a sport that showcases your athletic abilities, you work as one. The sense of unity is shared throughout your team and even your coaches which is something that I had never been exposed to before. It was very empowering as a woman to be able to dominate in a sport that was built for men but our male counterparts even shared the same values as us and gave us the same respect that we gave them. We were able to learn from each other and just become the best versions of ourselves. Our girls and boys' team would conjoin for dinners and scrimmages. After every game, we would eat with the other team and celebrate a good game whether the outcome was in our favor or not. These values of respect and loyalty are so reinforced through the traditions of the sport that I would consider it a culture. We are each other's support system on and off the field. I would consider my teammates close enough to be a second family. Someone could be there to ruck for a tackled player to even throwing a sleepover to get the team closer together. The love and support that we have for each other is endless. I joined our school's team in the first year that it was created, the "inaugural" year. At that time, none of our girls had ever touched a rugby ball nonetheless know how to do anything else on the field. We worked together to build our skills from the ground up and we supported our flaws and accomplishments as a team. By the end of the season, we became the division two state champions. We have since moved up a division because we were able to include and work with each other, trust each other and respect each other. I do not think any other sport could have accomplished what we did in just one season. On top of our accomplishments, we were able to share the wonderful experiences of scoring our first try's, winning our first games, winning our championship games and many more achievements that we made throughout just that first season. We are still building these experiences to this day and teaching new players our style of game which just adds to the inclusivity of the sport. Although rugby is considered a gentleman's sport, I could not imagine a better sport to play with my girls. They are my family.

Advocating for climate change is one of the most important things that we can do as a human population. The only thing more important than advocating for change is taking action and doing your best to reverse the almost irreversible effects of climate change. I am only seventeen. I am at the awkward age where I am politically educated enough to make my own decisions but I cannot vote to change policies that have such big effects on climate change. Because of my age, some of the only ways I can help are small scale like using public transportation, reducing my waste, reusing more items instead of overconsumption, eating less meat, etc. However, just those few things are more than many people around the world participate in. People need to wake up. As I am writing this essay, the temperatures are fluctuating, the sea levels are rising, we are losing biodiversity, humans are dying and on top of that all, our economy is crashing. Even though the big picture should not even care about the economy, I have noticed that the economy is all that governments seem to care for as we are losing infrastructure, losing crop yields and overall losing financial stability. Even though I become enraged by the thought of major politicians only caring about the economic side of things, if that is the reason that we will start reversing such a daunting task, I will oblige. The most impactful way of combating climate change in my opinion is reducing your carbon footprint. We need to all be on the same page and work together to start reversing this curse of climate change. Saying that is just a giant umbrella as basically, everything you do falls under your carbon footprint but if everyone around the world supports policies that reduce emissions, regulate clean energy, and even just take shorter showers, our world will be a much healthier planet. We need to support conservation efforts and give them all of the funding required to do what is right. We need to protect natural habitats and ecosystems and bring back the biodiversity of what used to be such a bountiful world. Doing this will allow for keystone species that we may be losing to climate change to make their way back into the world. This would also create healthier water systems and allow for more available water and other important resources. We need to reduce our carbon footprint together because if we are not all in, it will mean nothing.

The world needs sustainable agriculture to survive. Throughout my life, I have been a very science-oriented person who has always been extremely curious and wanted to help the general public. My first "invention" was for an invention convention in the fifth grade where I coded an automatic plant waterer which on a large scale would be a better way of irrigation. I plan on going into environmental sciences and I currently am enrolled in the agriscience program at Trumbull High School. When I applied and got into Trumbull High School, I decided to major in Biotechnology. Biotechnology is the science of taking biology and adding different forms of technology to solve worldwide issues. These issues span anywhere from cancer research to agricultural techniques. Biotechnology and my background of being a part of a very "outdoorsy" family made my choice of an environmental science major very easy. Over the summer, I created a new breed of tomato. It is a crossbreed of a red beefsteak tomato and a yellow cherry tomato with different phenotypes and we witnessed the tomatoes flourish. This honestly brought me back to my plant-watering invention which in my mind correlates to environmental science. Better irrigation techniques can have many different positive impacts on the environment. Irrigation is essential for agriculture and food production however currently, traditional agricultural practices lead to tons of environmental impacts like soil degradation, pollution and water scarcity. Traditional irrigation practices can produce more than enough food for the human population but with talks of water scarcity, we need to stray away. We need to work on things like water conservation, energy efficiency and soil health. An irrigation system that is coded to go off at a certain time and maximize the amount of water used to penetrate the soils instead of just mist over the plants and wastewater would be beneficial for everything. The Earth is quickly running out of fresh water which is necessary for many human activities, especially food production. The majority of the world depends on farms to produce food healthily but without water, we face droughts and soil degradation. Our current irrigation techniques are not even close to energy efficient enough. With my coding method, I would use solar panels which would not only make the energy quicker but would greatly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The agriculture industry is going to face a much harder time if things do not change now. With climate change going into full fledge, severe droughts will greatly impact the output of food reliability. This new irrigation technique will help the environment along with the human population.

Growing up on Duxbury beach in the summers was an experience that shaped my love for the natural world in ways that I will never take for granted and still appreciate to this day. The ocean quickly became my playground but even as a young child, I understood that it was home to other creatures and I had to respect the locals. This deepened my curiosity about the ocean. I would spend hours each day exploring the rocky shores, swimming by myself, watching the tide sweep through bringing in pretty shells and marine animals. Over time, my connection to the ocean deepened and I came to understand the importance of protecting this incredible ecosystem. As I got into environmental sciences, my relationship with the oceans became much more complex. I learned about tides and currents and began to understand how the ocean truly shapes our climate and environment. I learned about the threats that the ocean faces from pollution to overfishing to climate change and even ocean acidification. I saw the thing that I loved so dearly start to get taken away. I still try my best to spend as much time as I can by the ocean, it always can draw me back in. The ocean became one of the biggest reasons that I decided to stay on the East Coast for college. For a long time, I only wanted to study climate change as it is such an important topic in today's day in age until I realized that I could focus on marine biology and how the ocean is being affected by climate change and other corrupt systems. I make sure to avoid activities that could harm the ocean such as using plastic bags or leaving trash on the beach. I even venture out with my mom to pick up leftover trash on the beach and snorkel to find remanence in the water to keep the oceans clean. It is so important to take care of an ecosystem so wide. A body of water that takes up seventy-one percent of the Earth should be more protected. Growing up by the ocean gave me a deep appreciation for the natural world and a sense of responsibility to protect it. Although I was lucky enough to have a childhood filled with sunny beach days and clear night skies I understand that I was blessed. I hope that sharing my love for the ocean can inspire others to appreciate and protect it as well. With my scholarship, I will be double majoring in marine biology and environmental science most likely at the College of Charleston on the ocean. I hope to use this to help the world because our oceans and everything that fills them up truly need it. Thank you for your consideration.