When I started high school, my parents and peers encouraged me to join any and every club that seemed to interest me. The first one I set my eyes on was Midtown’s Earth and Sustainability Club. When joining this organization, I was hopeful to learn about promoting sustainable life practices but was disappointed to realize that it was a poorly run organization that did little to fulfill its goal of keeping the student body environmentally conscious and active. After two years of being in the club and not getting any opportunities to meet this goal, I tried to get involved to make this change myself. During my junior year, I ran the club’s social media to increase our membership. By my senior year, me and a friend were elected as the club's co-presidents, which we used as an opportunity to turn the club around and make an active effort to reduce our school's carbon footprint. We started by giving the students in the club fun opportunities to help our school and community. To do this, I connected with staff at Hands on Atlanta to find large service projects focused on environmental protection and sustainability. Though I did the first few volunteer opportunities alone or with a friend, by October, we had a project where over 10 students helped set up a community garden for the nearby Toomer Elementary School. While finally making an impact on the community around us, the club members and I realized that we had obvious improvements to make in order to better our own school's sustainability. We set our sites towards our school's utter lack of a recycling system. To do this, my peers and I raised money to get recycling bins, which we distributed around the school. Every Wednesday since then, we have gone around the school to pick up the recycling of every classroom. To this day, we have collected over 15,000 pounds of recyclable materials that would have otherwise wound up in the trash. While weekly recycling is a start, the club and I have made efforts to contact our school’s administration and the City of Atlanta to get the school a recycling dumpster and daily pickup and disposal of our recycling. With this, we could make a lasting impact on our school and ensure a more sustainable future for generations of students to come. After high school, I plan on going to Georgia Tech to study Industrial Engineering. This discipline, contrary to popular belief, isn’t about designing industrial machinery but instead focuses on optimizing an enterprise's everyday operations. This includes the efficient use and disposal of materials, something essential to environmental efficiency. While studying this major, I hope to be able to integrate my study with Environmental Engineering classes to expand my knowledge of sustainable practices and make the Georgia Institute of Technology as environmentally friendly as possible. To do this, I have a specific project in mind. While visiting Emory University earlier this year, I realized that on campus, they don't have any trash bins, they simply have composting and recycling bins. They can do this because all the materials they use in their food halls, classrooms, and many of their medical facilities are compostable/recyclable. With this program, they diverted almost 2,800 tons of waste from going into landfills or incinerators. I hope to bring this same composting initiative to Georgia Tech, as they have a robust environmental engineering program that would be able to foster my desire to better the college's waste management system.