The Richard P. Mullen Memorial Scholarship will help me pursue my passions in engineering while easing the burden on the rest of my family. I am currently a student at Virginia Commonwealth University as an electrical engineering student and due to the previous scholarship I received from the university for my first two years here, I was able to get immersed into the community within the Electrical and Computer Engineering department among other communities here. That scholarship has since ended, and the assistance from this scholarship would go a very long way to helping me continue and finish my Bachelor's Degree at this university I have built such a sense of community. The primary reason I am passionate about receiving this scholarship is the impact it would have on the rest of my family. I have three younger siblings who are all about to be in school themselves. Additionally, my family lives in the Northern Virginia area bordering DC, an area notorious for its high cost of living, consistently ranking among the top most expensive places to live in across the USA. With my previous scholarship, my parents were able to make up a bit of the cost of tuition left over after my assistance was accounted. Now that that assistance has run out, my parents can't keep up with the costs required to continue with my degree. Having to raise three other children along with their jobs would be a massive load for them to keep up with. This scholarship would greatly lower the amount of work and stress they would have to deal with for them to assist not only me in my progress but also the health and assistance of my two sisters and baby brother as they grow into new stages of their lives. This scholarship will also assist greatly in letting me stay at Virginia Commonwealth University to finish my Electrical Engineering bachelor's degree. Being a VCU student has given me many unique opportunities, especially this summer with my recent research internship, which allowed me to travel across the state to do things such as train and work within a clean room to produce microelectronic devices. This experience helped me realize what was possible with the material I was learning in my courses at VCU, and with the assistance provided by this scholarship, I would be able to pursue this newfound passion of mine and create a career out of what I've been learning here.

The one anime series that I could confidently rewatch the whole way through and be completely recaptured by would be Monster, the 2004 show based on the 1994 crime thriller manga by Naoki Urasawa. The show follows its main character, neurosurgeon Dr. Kenzo Tenma, as he spends months of his life on the run chasing the serial killer Johan Liebert, a former patient on whom he performed life-saving surgery as a child. The show takes place across Germany and Czechia straddling the time before and after the end of the Soviet Union and the following collapses of socialist republics in eastern Europe. What touched me the most about this show is how much it pushes the idea of appreciating simple things that most humans take for granted. Specifically, the show focuses on people who lose their names and identities and the horrifying effects it can have on those people. Johan, the main antagonist of the show, is a victim of eugenics experiments in both Czechoslovakia and East Germany along with his mother and sister, across which they completely lose their identities. While the show leaves Johan's nature as a person from his birth very ambiguous, his time as a subject of multiple inhumane experiments is shown to help him further his growth into a "monster" as many characters in the show describe him. As an adult, Johan is a prolific killer and manipulator who leads people, including children, to horrible situations just to prove the point that anyone is capable of turning into a monster, and one of his ultimate goals is to do such to the main character Tenma. On the other hand, Dr. Tenma is shown to be a very skilled doctor who will do whatever is necessary for the sake of a patient. When he is presented with two patients in need of urgent care, he chooses who he sees as the one who needs it the most, a child with a bullet in his head who he finds out is Johan. Once Tenma sees the true nature of Johan as a killer and manipulator, he sets out on a quest to kill Johan himself. Across the journey he meets many people who need his help as a doctor and due to his nature, he can't refuse and helps these people. Tragically, he always has to end his time with these people and head off to continue on his quest to kill Johan. Across the show, Tenma slowly but surely loses his identity as he quits his hospital and gets more skilled with a gun. Right at the climax of the show, after Tenma has seen so much tragedy and bloodshed, Johan gives Tenma the chance to shoot him in a town that Johan has completely ruined through the manipulation of its citizens. After seeing all that Johan is capable of and after discarding his old way of life long ago, it couldn't be more easy for Tenma to kill Johan, but he refuses, and after a drunkard who hallucinates and sees Johan as a literal monster shoots him, Tenma chooses to save Johan yet again, just as he did in episode one. Monster teaches its viewers to value their identities and what makes them human, and by setting its events within the real-life historical context of post-Soviet Europe, it further stresses how real the dangers of losing one's identity are.