I believe the best way to know someone is to know their aspirations and goals. Our goals come from our most inherent desires, and I see mine as drafts for the story of my life and legacy. A goal that I've had for a long time is to teach. I've always felt a calling toward educational instruction, but I allowed myself to be swayed away from it by doubts about money and stress. Over the past few years, I've worked hard to set aside these doubts and find ways to overcome the real issues they symbolize. I've started budgeting my money in preparation for a career as a teacher. I've researched coping strategies for stressful situations in the classroom and learning strategies for students with exceptionalities. Although I am aware of the drawbacks of a career in teaching, I have never been more excited about my future than I am now, and I am determined to make my dreams work for me. My recent goal has been to finish my Bachelor degree in English this December. Planning and conversation with advisors, friends, and family have made this goal reachable, but a lifelong love of reading and writing fiction novels has made it exciting. I've always had an avid interest in English and exploring the art behind sentence structure, symbolism, and similes. However, I was always told that an English degree would be virtually useless in the real world. I believed that for years until I realized that pursuing my passion would bring me joy that no other pursuit could. My biggest goal is to publish picture books and fiction novels that explore difficult and complex themes in a way kids can easily understand. Among these topics are LGBTQ+ acceptance, children's experiences with divorce, academic burnout, and mental health struggles. My adolescence would have benefitted greatly if I had been exposed to books that explored these topics despite how daunting they might seem for writers to portray and parents to discuss. But I believe that no child should be made to feel like they are abnormal. Literature helped me explore how my perceived abnormalities have shaped me into who I am today. I was never accepted for who I was during my adolescence, and I was never given the space needed to acknowledge my differences from those around me. I was told to hide aspects of myself that made me seem unnatural to my family, especially when it came to my interest in romantic relationships with other women. I hope discussing tough topics like these will benefit kids going through the same experiences my younger self had to confront and overcome alone. I hope to provide children and adolescents with a safe space to explore their thoughts related to these ideas, whether that space be a physical classroom or one they create through reading my work. Like many other people, my most important goal is to be remembered. I want my legacy to be one of kindness and curiosity, and the best way to do that is to encourage these characteristics in the people around me. The desire to be remembered fondly is one that everyone shares, and I am no exception to that rule. I want the memories I make with people to create something in them that they can cherish and use. The plans I have made for myself and listed here will help me to lead a life where I inspire others in a similar way to how my favorite teachers and authors have inspired me: through continuous efforts of compassion, discussion, education, support, and encouragement.

I plan to use my education to teach elementary school students skills that they can use to become good students, good citizens, and good people. I am currently pursuing a Bachelor of Arts in English at the University of South Carolina. I will graduate in December of 2024 and begin pursuing a Master of Arts in Teaching specializing in Elementary Education in 2025. After earning my graduate degree, I plan to return to my hometown of Aiken, SC to help educate children from low-income schools in my school district so they can be given the attention and education that otherwise might not have been available to them otherwise. I have great respect for teachers of all grades, and I want to dedicate my life to children in the same way that my teachers dedicated their lives to me. They inspire me to be the best that I can be, and the best that I can be is a teacher. I am confident that I can provide a comfortable and open space for students of all backgrounds and interests, and I feel like this confidence is intensely necessary for teachers today who are more than likely to face difficulties regarding not only challenging situations with students and parents but also changes in curriculum and laws. As intimidating as these experiences may be, I also know that my career will be filled with students who will make my life more meaningful and interesting for me, and I look forward to having them. In addition to my dedication to elementary education, I also plan to publish picture books and fiction novels that explore difficult themes such as LGBTQ+ acceptance, children's experiences with parental divorce, academic burnout, and mental health struggles. I know that my adolescence would have benefitted greatly if I had been exposed to books that explored these topics despite how daunting they might seem. Because of this, I hope to provide children and adolescents with a safe space to explore their thoughts related to these ideas, whether that space be a physical classroom or one they create through reading my work. I want my legacy to be one of kindness and curiosity, and the best way to do that is to encourage these characteristics in the people around me. The desire to be remembered fondly is one that everyone shares, and I am no exception to that rule. I want the memories I make with people to create something in them that they can take forward in their lives, cherish, and use. The plans that I have made for myself and listed here will help me to lead a life wherein I inspire others in a similar way to how my favorite teachers and authors have inspired me: through continuous efforts of compassion, support, and encouragement.

I aspire to use my education to better my understanding of children and the process of learning so that I can pursue a successful career in teaching. I aim to help elementary school students establish and develop the skills they need to achieve greatness throughout their education as well as in their daily lives. I hope to empower students by providing a nurturing learning environment wherein they are able to grow and thrive. My decision to commit myself to teaching children has been in the making for most of my life. I remember being told for years by members of my family that teachers never made much money, so to seek a career in education would be foolish and difficult. For several years, I believed their words and let myself be discouraged. However, during my little sister's first year of elementary school, she began to demonstrate a struggle in her reading, and it made her less excited about the stories that I would read to her at bedtime. I wanted to help her grow the same love for reading that I had when I was her age, the same love that I still nourish and cultivate even now as I enter my twenties. I attended a seminar at the Richland Library in Columbia on how to better help kids like my sister who struggled with early reading, and I found a community in the faces of the other participants of the seminar. Their stories of their kids and their struggle to find ways to help them learn reminded me of how important it is for children to find engagement in the classroom. During my second year at the University of South Carolina, I discovered the Master of Arts in Teaching degree offered by my school. It is a one-year program that allows students to be fully immersed in the classroom experience. I felt like the stars had aligned, and I had reclaimed my calling once again. As a result of finding out about the program, I let go of the concerns of the people around me and began to plan my future according to what I wanted for myself. I started budgeting as preparation for the low pay that my parents warned me about, and I researched the qualifications and requirements to become a substitute during the semester between my undergraduate graduation and my first semester of graduate school. My life's dream has been to facilitate this kind of environment for children, and I am beyond thrilled that I am on the way to making this dream a reality. If I receive this scholarship, I will use it to pay for my Master of Arts in Teaching degree, which I will be pursuing shortly after I graduate in December with my Bachelor of Arts in English. I will be taking out several personal loans to pay for my degree because I am unable to carry over any of the merit scholarships I used to cover the majority of my undergraduate tuition. Receiving this scholarship would allow me to pay for the summer semester of my graduate school experience in full and finance part of the next semester of the program. This would help me stress less about money and focus more on my goal of becoming the best teacher I can.

I would have everyone in the world read Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do by Dr. Jennifer L. Eberhardt. In my first year at the University of South Carolina, my UNI 101 class was tasked with reading the book, and it changed the way I looked at myself and the people around me. The book combines personal accounts and research to provide extensive detail on how people can acknowledge, understand, and overcome their unconscious racial bias. I especially appreciate this book because Dr. Eberhardt presented it during a campus event I attended. Hearing her discuss issues of racial bias, especially those that surrounded African Americans, fueled me to reflect on myself and the unconscious biases that I had. I would hope that other readers also have a similar reaction to the topics discussed in the book. I feel it is important for people to be introspective, but that introspection should be balanced with a curiosity for others and a willingness to learn about other cultures. We each live our entire lives struggling to find a good balance of feeling for ourselves and others, whether we are trying to become more compassionate, confident, calm, or capable. Throughout that journey, we make mistakes, we learn from them, and we improve; above all, the most important of these is improvement. The only way that we can attempt to make life better for those who come after us is to improve, and often improvement comes from education. Education is a valuable tool whose use should not only be accessible to everyone but also encouraged. I believe that the world would be a better place if people were encouraged to learn the true depth of issues like racism that are often invisible, yet highly pervasive and dangerous. I know that racism is not something that can be eliminated overnight or solved with just one book. I know that racial bias is ingrained in all of us far deeper than can be dug out with just one shovel. But I also know that it's an important issue that deserves – and more than that, demands – our attention and efforts, and I think that reading Biased would be a great way to start digging.

I stay true to myself in my daily life by focusing on my passions and letting them fuel me to continue pursuing happiness. As a writer, I am able to pour myself into the world through my written work, and that ability is one that I have worked to improve while using it as a coping mechanism for stress in my life. The process and rules of writing can be changed depending on the project and the intent of the writer, and that is unequivocally comforting to me. I write primarily queer short stories to keep true to myself and my experiences and express a part of me that cannot often openly be expressed where I live. It has become a way for me to share pieces of myself with the world that I have long been forbidden from showing, and in doing so I have become a more open and positive person. I breathe life into my work, and my work breathes life back into me. In the pursuit of becoming a better writer and writing more evocative, inspiring stories, I recently enrolled in several creative writing courses. Through these courses, I have been able to focus on improving my craft and learning how to be more open to feedback and criticism. My lifelong goal is to spread kindness, encouragement, and inspiration to readers of my stories as well as achieve happiness for myself through writing them. By staying true to myself in my work and my life, I can accomplish both of these goals easily.

My experience with mental health struggles throughout middle and high school has molded me into the person I am today by providing me with a core motivation to help others who have faced or are facing similar hardships in their lives. My ability to continuously overcome mental health issues is one of the strongest parts of me. I view this experience as a motivator for me because it encouraged me to make changes in my school in the pursuit of getting help for younger students. There are currently few ways for the students at my school to truly get help if they are suffering from mental health issues, and my lack of crucial mental health support during my first years of high school has had serious effects on my overall health and attitude over the past several years. As such a large part of me, this experience motivated me to try to help fellow students receive proper resources to properly treat their mental health, which is often easily damaged by the overwhelming weight of stress at my school. With its rigorous schedule and its heavy workload, the school involves a lot of stress and little time to destress. Many of its students would benefit immensely with some help from the school or even outside resources like mental health facilities in the area. I try to spread kindness and genuine care throughout my school's community so that no student goes through what I did due to the school's poor availability of mental health resources. I have also opened myself to students, should they wish to talk about their issues with someone who has been overwhelmed by similar stressors.

Writing has always been my passion. For most of my life, I have found my escape in the craft of creating worlds made of words, and that passion has kept me going through hard times at home and stress in school. The process of working through several layers of rough drafts was cathartic for me. It allowed me to destress by concentrating on something unbound by due dates and deadlines. No one would see my rough drafts but me. I would not be judged for my work unless I wanted to be. My method could be as wild or tame as I desired. These thoughts soothed me into a linear process of writing: I would conduct writing exercises to bolster the seed of an idea while drafting a story; I would expand on my outlines to create more intricate plotlines while composing its parts; I would bring the pieces of it together to flow smoothly while tweaking its sequence; I would get lost in sentence structure, grammatical rules, and notes on setting while editing. It was a refreshing way for me to find an outlet for the creativity I often felt was unable to be stimulated or loosed in school. For me, writing was a freeing act full of creative control. It acted as a way for me to convert the creativity I gained from reading—another love of mine—into a physical product: a story. The movement of fingers against a keyboard or pencil against paper was just that at school—movement. The tools used to write were just tools when being used in a classroom. But when I could write about a world that gave me complete control—something I lacked in my own life—I felt powerful and influential. I could give characters the happy endings they deserved while I worked toward achieving my own, and that made me almost as happy as it made them. One thing was missing, however: feedback. I trusted few people to read my work—the stories over which I labored so hard were like pieces of me; how does one give away pieces of themself? Not easily, I decided. Like any young writer, I was reluctant to request or receive feedback. For a time, my hobby was placed on the backburner to make time and energy for my schoolwork, which seemed to loom larger over me every day. In my final year of high school, I was given the opportunity to merge this hobby with my education through a creative writing course at a local university. The experience helped me ease back into writing regularly, even compelling me to begin writing a series of connected short stories. It taught me to cherish feedback because it generally came from a place of kindness with the intention of improving a story. It exposed me to other writers and their crafts and gave me a beautiful community of people who related to me through our shared creative ambitions and led me to enjoy my craft even more.

I'm proud to be LGBTQ+ because it gives me an opportunity to change the way people think about my community through my actions. My happiness won't be determined by how people who judge me based on my sexuality view me, but hopefully by showing people the good in the people of my community, I can positively impact how LGBTQ+ people are viewed until we are all accepted by the people important to us. -@callmenicplease (Instagram)

Throughout my lifetime, mental health has made a great impact on my decisions and aspirations. When I was in elementary school, I was bullied for my chubby body and gangly height. I was taller than most of the boys and wider than most of the girls, and physical differences like those made me an easy target for other children. Around the same time, I was put into programs for "Gifted & Talented" students. Along with my family's early expectations of success for me, these burdens fell heavy on my younger self. In middle school, I excelled, though the price of my excellence was my social life and my mental health. I put unnecessary pressure on myself to be the best in my classes while declining invitations from the few friends I had to socialize. I equated a lack of socialization with a greater intelligence, and though I was immensely wrong, I know I wouldn't be the person I am today without that experience. Because of the subject of the bullying I had experienced in the years prior, I was insecure of my body and wore baggy clothes that hid my body in order to escape the eyes of my peers, fearing the same harassment that still haunted me from before. I closed myself off to most everyone and barely interacted with people outside of a select number of my peers who were just as depressed and insecure as I was. We fueled the negative feelings inside of us with self-depracating humor and unhealthy thoughts. At the time, I thought it a coping mechanism; in reality, it was the oil to the machine of our self-hatred. There are many things that discouraged me in those short three years, but the most vivid of those occurred on the day of my eighth-grade award ceremony. I had won several awards detailing my success in most of my classes; I received certificates for having the highest averages in almost all of my courses along with a few trophies for my skill in others. I even received a plaque for a school-wide award called the "Rock Star Award," which I felt most honored to receive. The experience was as embarrassing as it was gratifying. At the end of the ceremony, after I stood numbly as my mother congratulated me and took pictures of me with all of my shiny new awards, my grandfather patted me on the back and asked, "Why didn't you get the one for English?" A new opportunity came in the form of high school. I had already planned on becoming more outspoken and positive during high school because I was tired of feeling so bad about myself. However, my school district decided to open a new public school that accepted only fifty of the brightest students in the district; all they need do was apply. This school would spend the students' first two years rushing them through high school courses so that their last two years could be spent on a college campus with them being enrolled in the courses offered by the collaborating university. It was a good plan; however, the leadership in place at the school was severely lacking. I made new friends, better than those I had during middle school, and we supported each other. The first two years of the experience were hell. Each student experienced academic burnout, and by the time those first two years were up, ten of the original fifty had left. I did not, though that is not for lack of wanting. I endured the stress because, although my family lived comfortably enough, my older brother's tuition burdened the funds available for my own, and free two years of college wasn't something I was willing to pass up just for the sake of my mental health. My mother's salary made most financial aid unavailable to me, so I did what I felt I had to do at the time. I am now in my third year at the school and am finishing up my second semester of college courses. I have discovered new interests throughout the experiences in high school and will continue to gain perspective through the rest of my college career.

Praised for his work with figurines, Slinkachu is a British artist based in London. His best-known work involves the Little People Project in which he creates miniature scenes in regularly visited places with tiny replicas of people. After photographing the scenes, Slinkachu leaves the figurines in place so that they may be enjoyed by passersby, their little bodies waiting for random pedestrians to see them and decide whether the dolls are to be kicked away and discarded as trash or admired and appreciated as treasure.