My name is Katelyn Gross and I have struggled with my mental health since I was ten years old. I have also seen people that I love very much struggle with mental health. When I was ten years old, I would always get in trouble with my parents and sometimes in school. It would seem like at times, I was not doing anything and I would still get in trouble. At this point in my life, I was in a lot of pain and I just wanted the pain to stop. I wanted to stop feeling like I was a failure and a problem to everyone around me and to myself. I completely gave up on everything and everyone and felt very alone. This was when I decided that I did not want to be in the world anymore. I tried to end my life when I was screamed at and sent to my room for something very minor. I tried to end my life and die when I was all alone. This all ended when my mom found me and realized what I was trying to do. This was the moment when I went to counseling and got the help that I so desperately needed. Since that day, my mental health was doing way better. This was until I started dating a boy in my freshman year of high school. While dating him, I learned about all of the difficult things that he was going through that no one should. I tried to help him by telling him things that my therapist told me to do. The main thing was going on walks. There was one time, that I still remember to this day when he was going on a walk and it was pitch black outside. I had a very uneasy feeling so I told my sister and we went to go and check on him. We found him outside of his community pool trying to cut himself with a knife and the cuts on his chest from him already successfully doing so. This was one of the most traumatizing things that I have ever experienced. We took him home and did everything that we could and that he would allow. After this, he tried to end his life and to this day I still blame myself for this attempt. I ended up breaking up with him after only dating him for three months because I felt trapped. I knew that if I stayed with him then I would get physically hurt and if I left him then he would try and kill himself. This was the first time that I thought of myself and broke up with him. A week later I got a strange text from him that said, "I love you, bye." I thought this was so weird but just saw it as him not wanting contact with me anymore. The next day, I spoke with his friend on the phone and asked his friend how he was doing and his friend broke the news to me about him trying to jump off of a tall building to end his life. Knowing this broke me. I started to blame myself for this and just wanted to talk to him. I gained contact with his mom and she told me what happened in detail and kept assuring me that it was not my fault. She kept talking about how other things were going on in his life that resulted in him wanting to end his life. A year after it happened, we talked and I got closure that it was not my fault and that his mental health was finally starting to get better. We still talk about once a month and I am so happy that he is doing so much better. These experiences did and do open my eyes to the fact that you do not know what other people are going through and the battles that they have to fight every day.

I am Katelyn Gross and I was born and raised in Chattanooga, Tennessee. I just graduated from Chattanooga Christian School and I am so excited to attend The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. I plan to make a positive impact on the world through my career of by just being a light to everyone that I interact with. I plan on majoring in Elementary Education and getting my masters in Special Education. I love children and have a desire to make an impact in children’s lives especially because I honestly never really got that, mainly in elementary school. My true desire is to work in a public school because I love to interact in different backgrounds. I know from experience of growing up in a public school that kids have seen and heard things that they should not and sometimes those kids do not have anyone they can run to and feel like they can be safe with. That is who I want to be. I want to be the person that they can run to and feel safe with. I also want to work in a public school because I want to help all different types of people, even special needs people. When I was growing up in public school, the kids with special needs would get put into classrooms where the teachers did not have any training with how to interact or teach a kid with special needs and so they did not know what to do. We had two girls in my grade with autism and my best friend and I would basically do what the teacher should have doing for them. We did not just teach them what we were learning but we interacted with them and taught them basic skills that you do not just learn in the classroom. This is the exact reason I want to get my masters in Special Education. I want to be prepared for when special needs kids put in my class. I also have a feeling that I probably with really like it and maybe even end up in a special needs classroom. I am currently already trying to reach my goal to be a light in kids’ lives by working with kids who have young single mothers. We have a business in Chattanooga and it is called the MOMentum network. During the week I help with childcare because the kids do get free childcare during the week. Then, on Tuesday nights the moms drop the kids off with us for childcare and the moms go to our main building to have a class. These classes range anywhere from budgeting to parenting. Every single time I go into the building to help with the kids or set up the meeting room for the moms, I try to just be a light with how I talk and interact with everyone. This is who I am and these are my goals that I want to achieve but I honestly do need a little more financial help in order to achieve my goals and dreams.

My name is Katelyn Gross. I am currently a senior at Chattanooga Christian School and will graduate in May of 2024. Ever since I was about ten years old, I have loved helping with kids. Whether it was in the nursery at my church or babysitting every weekend. I discovered the love that I had for helping children when I was in elementary school. My two primary friends were two girls with autism. I absolutely loved being their friend, learning how their minds worked, and being there when they needed someone. Ever since then, I have wanted to teach at the elementary school level. I did not know if I wanted to be a teacher in the classroom or a special education teacher. My only goal in life was to teach children and make an impact on at least one child's life. I finally decided that I wanted to teach in the classroom when I helped with a children’s soccer camp at my high school over the summer. There was one little girl that came into my group and she was crying. She kept saying that she was not going to have fun and she just wanted to go home. At that moment I promised her that it was going to be the best week of her life and she was going to have fun. At the end of the day, she had a smile on her face and told me that she had so much fun and could not wait to come back the next day. I knew that I made an impact in her life and it was not just because I made the camp fun. It was because it seemed fun to the kids while we taught them soccer and incorporated God into their learning. I then started thinking about what grade I wanted to teach. I decided that fifth grade was the grade that I had a big desire to teach because it was one of my hardest years in elementary school. It was so hard because I did not have a lot of friends and my teacher went through the steps of teaching us, instead of getting to know us as true people. When I become a teacher my biggest goal is to make an impact in at least one person’s life. I also want every kid in my class to feel special and feel like I am actually making an effort to know them as real people and not just students. I will strive to make sure every person in my class knows the material and will not move on until everyone does. I was always the student that was the last person in the class to understand something and by the time I did understand it, my teacher had moved onto a different lesson. I hope to make at least one kid’s day different every day and want to make a change in the education system by how teachers act and treat every kid. I hope to inspire not only other teachers but the kids that I teach and in other classes.