With someone else’s hair on my head, I stepped out into an overcast Wednesday that went by as normal for every other fourth grader. For me, the experience was alien. My wig protected my newly bald head from prying eyes, as indispensable as a spacesuit when on the surface of Mars. In the eyes of the law (and most insurance companies), alopecia areata, the condition that spurred my total hair loss, is a cosmetic one. So, unfortunately, humanity seems closer to realizing my dream of stepping into the Martian desert, 40 million miles away at perigee, than ensuring that the alopecia community can have their treatments covered by insurance. In fact, fighting to do so has been one of the primary focuses of my life, besides joining the first piloted missions to the red planet. In truth, long before alopecia areata robbed me of all my hair, I set my sights on Mars. After the past few years, I’ve grown confident I’ll be able to tackle the journey. It wouldn’t be the first time that I was compelled to be a pioneer. When the National Alopecia Areata Foundation approached me in middle school with an offer to join the Legislative Mentors program, I couldn’t resist giving back to those still running the gauntlet of hair loss. NAAF’s legislative volunteers are a unique bunch, devoted to the Sisyphean task of passing a bill through both houses of Congress. Our bill reclassifies wigs for insurance. To many in the alopecia community, losing hair is like losing an arm—it’s something you need to go out in public, function properly, and rebuild your self-esteem, so why do insurance companies assume a wig is simply cosmetic? Like my hair, their reasoning is pretty thin: it’s not worth the money. Only through revising Medicare, then, can we get other insurance companies to change. NAAF began to advocate for this bill before I was born and will likely continue to do so long after I begin college. The process behind passing the Medicare revision bill is as strategic as it is slow: we’re always looking for other developments in Congress that could change our present efforts while monitoring our parallel state legislature. In that respect, the process is not unlike a space program itself, always in danger of death by atrophy. However, even as I fight to maintain the strength of NAAF and the Legislative Mentors, I always maintain sight of my original dream: to expand the boundary of human space exploration by joining the first crew to Mars. Like my work with alopecia, the journey to Mars is arduous yet worthy, filled with any number of technological issues and crew disputes. Keeping one’s head, bald or otherwise, while the ship seems to fall apart requires a mix of engineering knowledge and mental fortitude, both of which I’ve developed tirelessly since that fateful last semester of fourth grade. Even back then, only two months after I’d sealed my hairless head underneath a wig, I orchestrated an assembly for my elementary school to explain my appearance when I took it off. As I educated my peers on alopecia areata, I gained the agency to control how I presented myself to the world, wig or not. During my first few days on the Martian surface, that same initiative will help me survive as I work with my crew to set up a hospitable habitat on a hostile world. As we work through physical and psychological challenges, it’ll be the tenacity I showed throughout my alopecia and advocacy journeys that will keep me on the cutting edge of human exploration.

Down the street from my high school is the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where aerospace engineering has evolved from the humble jet engine to humanity’s latest study of distant Europa. On that campus for a field trip nine years ago, I began to seriously dream of turning my passion for design to the stars, inspired by the Perseverance rover coming together below me in the clean room. For the first time, I had a real example of the engineering I wanted to do: I could design and build interplanetary spacecraft. Since then, the scope of my drive has narrowed, but never wavered. Since that fateful afternoon, I've faced some unorthodox challenges. One doesn't realize how essential their hair is to their wellbeing until they wake up one morning with half of it on their pillow. A year after my eyes were opened to the wonders of aerospace engineering, I was living that reality. After a year of keeping it in check, the autoimmune condition had outstripped the capabilities of my topical hair regrowth foam, and my only respite from now total baldness was a wig that shielded me from prying eyes. The wig wasn’t perfect, but it helped me come to terms with my hair loss and primed me to take my first steps into alopecia advocacy. These days, I value the lessons my alopecia and engineering journeys have taught me about confidence, social interaction and problem-solving. On a whim, I joined my school's robotics club in my freshman year, hoping to build the robot behind the scenes. Four seasons later, I'll be exiting the program as club captain. I’ve always been an advocate for interdivision collaboration: engineers, programmers, and outreach personnel should all be able to understand the rationale behind each other’s decisions. To mentor other students in the art of talking to people, I first had to learn it—a tall order given my place high up, but firmly on the spectrum. Over the years I've channeled the confidence I'd gained from my alopecia experiences, applying it to my social life using methods that adapted to me. The final piece to the puzzle in my mind is my goal within the aerospace engineering community. I believe a complete program system of launchers, habitats, and transit vehicles for a piloted Mars program can be finished by 2040, and that I can directly contribute to its design, construction, and integration. Engineering such a mission is a game of tradeoffs, pitting thousands of variables against each other. I wouldn't say I have a perfectly intuitive sense of these factors, but my autism has given me a secret weapon: an intricate web of mental flowcharts used to describe and modify the world around me. Like a quantum computer, I don't perceive the world in binary. Instead, the charts come to me as concepts with moving, intertwined arrows, barely describable to another person. This non-quantized approach to human thought works well with aerospace engineering, where the complexities of fluid dynamics and orbital mechanics are tended to by nets of equations and matrices. Aside from my tangible impact on humanity's collective push towards Mars, I hope to bring a new perspective to a world defined by doubles, not booleans.

From my perspective, success looks like creating a net positive impact on my community and myself. As I've learned over time, you don't need to win to consider your efforts a success. Instead, it helps to focus on the people served, the knowledge gained, and how this outcome could be leveraged to create success. This year's FIRST Tech Challenge season defied prediction, driving me to adapt to this new definition of success. As a senior, I was promoted to club captain and mentored and organized all three of my school's robotics teams. Throughout the year, I managed disputes between teammates on every level and hoped to ready our varsity team for the interleague tournament. If we made it through the interleagues, we could punch a ticket to regionals. Unfortunately, our three-week sprint through a final upgrade package was derailed by the Eaton fire. Instead of vying for a spot among top teams, our low functionality left us floundering at the bottom of the grid. The junior varsity and middle school teams did a bit better, but ultimately no part of the club could reach the regional stage. That night, I joined my dad at a Mexican restaurant. The bus ride back to school had taken so long that my enchiladas were cold, but I shoveled them down and turned my focus to his questions. Between tortilla chips he asked, "Do you think you accomplished all you set out to do this season?" I took a while to process. My experience that day had been a series of stinging blows. Our interview in front of a panel was nearly flawless, so no less than three teams of interviewers had come by our table to ask follow-up questions. Between matches, I was talking nonstop about what our robot *could* have been, what it *might* have been able to do with a few extra weeks. In the end, our robot could barely drive, much less score. During alliance selection for the semifinals, I sat in front with the other team captains, knowing I would have to decline any invitations if the asking team wanted a chance at winning. Still, though, I had to consider the rest of the year. From the first meet to now, I'd seen my middle school team especially rise to the challenge. The kids that knew how to build and program a robot took center stage, but even those with zero experience were willing to learn and listen. Some teammates were brilliant with a computer, but took a few months to learn the art of collaboration. In the upper levels I saw the same thing: new skills learned, new confidence found, and both robots and roboticists being iterated on after every meet. "Yeah," I answered. Even though the playoff run had been a disaster, we did so much for the program before then that I couldn't honestly say no. Although the robots didn't win much, the club did. Despite the abject chaos that marked the end to my final season, I'd still consider my captaincy a success. The goals my dad suggested weren't to reach regionals, get a high score or emerge as a top team; they were to help teammates evolve into better collaborators, engineers, and programmers. Better yet, the roboticists I helped could pay it forward next year, teaching new teammates the ropes. My actions created a net positive effect on my school's robotics and STEM community, and that counts as victory in my book. On my next leg of my engineering and leadership journey, I want to experience the same quality of mentorship that I've both given and received during my time in robotics. With that in mind, I'm looking to make a bid for a highly-rated aerospace engineering program (MIT, Purdue, and the University of Michigan come to mind) without breaking the bank. Thanks to the Redefining Victory Scholarship, I can continue to create success in education, engineering programs and my future career.

On a foggy February morning, I awoke to a tangle of hair on my pillow. The brunette mess marked a grim milestone: at just the age of nine, half my bob was now gone, stolen by alopecia areata. After a year of keeping it in check, the autoimmune condition had outstripped the capabilities of my topical hair regrowth foam, and my only respite from now total baldness was a wig that shielded me from prying eyes. The wig wasn’t perfect, but it helped me come to terms with my hair loss and primed me to take my first steps into alopecia advocacy. Aided by educational packets from the National Alopecia Areata Foundation, I put together a Q&A awareness event at a lower school assembly, revealing my bald head to the world. That assembly marked a turning point for my self-confidence. When the National Alopecia Areata Foundation approached me in middle school with an offer to join the Legislative Mentors program, I couldn’t resist giving back to those still running the gauntlet of hair loss. NAAF’s legislative volunteers are a unique bunch, devoted to the Sisyphean task of passing a bill through both houses of Congress. The point of our bill is to reclassify wigs for insurance. To many in the alopecia community, losing hair is like losing an arm—it’s something you need to go out in public, function properly, and rebuild your self-esteem, so why do insurance companies assume a wig is simply cosmetic? Like my hair, their reasoning is pretty thin: it’s not worth the money. Only through revising Medicare, then, can we get other insurance companies to change. NAAF began to advocate for this bill before I was born and will likely continue to do so long after I begin college. Since middle school, I’ve given back to the alopecia community through lobbying efforts: as a legislative mentor, I share my story through meetings with congressional offices both locally and on Capitol Hill. This will permanently swing health insurance in favor of alopecia patients by covering wigs under Medicare, boosting the self-esteem of many patients without the resources to buy a wig that ensures their comfort in public. After wearing a wig myself in the first stages of my total hair loss journey—and experiencing its psychological benefits—I can testify that this cause is worth the fight. On a less hairy note, I'd love to join the Inspire11 team in the future. I'm well aware that it's a windy path from where I'm standing to my ultimate goal of directly contributing to the design, construction and integration of the first piloted missions to Mars. To get there, I'll need to learn a ton—not just about the ins and outs of engineering, but also how to grow a career and talk to professionals. With Inspire11's help, I can keep gunning for more experience and exposure through college.

Down the street from my high school is the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where aerospace engineering has evolved from the humble jet engine to humanity’s latest study of distant Europa. On that campus for a field trip nine years ago, I began to seriously dream of turning my passion for design to the stars, inspired by the Perseverance rover coming together below me in the clean room. For the first time, I had a real example of the engineering I wanted to do: I could design and build interplanetary spacecraft. Since then, the scope of my drive has narrowed, but never wavered. As a fifth grader, I picked up a book that would forever change my outlook on the aerospace industry. "The Case for Mars", a roadmap to the red planet by the visionary Robert Zubrin, was my first experience with the ins and outs of designing a space program. Andy Weir's "The Martian" is still my favorite book, but "The Case for Mars" has driven how I think about space travel, efficient design and the opportunities I've sought since then. As a rising freshman, I competed in a summer research competition hosted by Zubrin and the Mars Society, applying my interest to a paper detailing the surface portion of a piloted Mars mission. Our international team won first place in engineering, and I returned as a rising senior to mentor the 2024 season's winning team. As a FIRST Tech Challenge robotics captain, I know what it's like to be on the giving and receiving end of quality mentorship. We prioritize collaboration among our varsity, junior varsity, and middle school teams and celebrate the courage required to ask for help. When I cross into the next era of my journey as an engineer, I hope to do so with a similar support structure—one I can only get at top schools in the country. With that in mind, I'm looking to make a bid for a highly-rated aerospace engineering program (MIT, Purdue, and the University of Michigan come to mind) without breaking the bank. This scholarship won't just be funding my bachelor's degree, either. It'll keep me on track to achieve my ultimate goal. I believe a complete program system of launchers, habitats, and transit vehicles for a piloted Mars program can be completed by 2040. I can directly contribute to its design, construction, and integration, but first I'll tackle the fundamentals of aerospace systems. That knowledge can only be gained at a quality university with research, internships, and classroom guidance. Just like the complex world of education, engineering a mission to Mars involves tradeoffs, pitting thousands of variables against each other. Aided by the Code Breakers & Changemakers Scholarship, I want to be part of the worldwide effort to solve this cosmic system of equations.

Down the street from my high school is the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where aerospace engineering has evolved from the humble jet engine to humanity’s latest study of distant Europa. On that campus for a field trip nine years ago, I began to seriously dream of turning my passion for design to the stars, inspired by the Perseverance rover coming together below me in the clean room. For the first time, I had a real example of the engineering I wanted to do: I could design and build interplanetary spacecraft. Since then, the scope of my drive has narrowed, but never wavered. Since that fateful afternoon, I've faced some unorthodox challenges. One doesn't realize how essential their hair is to their wellbeing until they wake up one morning with half of it on their pillow. A year after my eyes were opened to the wonders of aerospace engineering, I was living that reality. After a year of keeping it in check, the autoimmune condition had outstripped the capabilities of my topical hair regrowth foam, and my only respite from now total baldness was a wig that shielded me from prying eyes. The wig wasn’t perfect, but it helped me come to terms with my hair loss and primed me to take my first steps into alopecia advocacy. These days, I value the lessons my alopecia and engineering journeys have taught me about confidence, social interaction and problem-solving. On a whim, I joined my school's robotics club in my freshman year, hoping to build the robot behind the scenes. Four seasons later, I'll be exiting the program as club captain. I’ve always been an advocate for interdivision collaboration: engineers, programmers, and outreach personnel should all be able to understand the rationale behind each other’s decisions. To mentor other students in the art of talking to people, I first had to learn it—a tall order given my place high up, but firmly on the spectrum. Over the years I've channeled the confidence I'd gained from my alopecia experiences, applying it to my social life using methods that adapted to me. The final piece to the puzzle in my mind is my goal within the aerospace engineering community. I believe a complete program system of launchers, habitats, and transit vehicles for a piloted Mars program can be finished by 2040, and that I can directly contribute to its design, construction, and integration. Engineering such a mission is a game of tradeoffs, pitting thousands of variables against each other. I wouldn't say I have a perfectly intuitive sense of these factors, but my autism has given me a secret weapon: an intricate web of mental flowcharts used to describe and modify the world around me. Like a quantum computer, I don't perceive the world in binary. Instead, the charts come to me as concepts with moving, intertwined arrows, barely describable to another person. This non-quantized approach to human thought works well with aerospace engineering, where the complexities of fluid dynamics and orbital mechanics are tended to by nets of equations and matrices. Aside from my tangible impact on humanity's collective push towards Mars, I hope to bring a new perspective to a world defined by doubles, not booleans.

Down the street from my high school is the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where aerospace engineering has evolved from the humble jet engine to humanity’s latest study of distant Europa. On that campus for a field trip nine years ago, I began to seriously dream of turning my passion for design to the stars, inspired by the Perseverance rover coming together below me in the clean room. For the first time, I had a real example of the engineering I wanted to do: I could design and build interplanetary spacecraft. Since then, the scope of my drive has narrowed, but never wavered. Since that fateful afternoon, I've faced some unorthodox challenges. One doesn't realize how essential their hair is to their wellbeing until they wake up one morning with half of it on their pillow. A year after my eyes were opened to the wonders of aerospace engineering, I was living that reality. After a year of keeping it in check, the autoimmune condition had outstripped the capabilities of my topical hair regrowth foam, and my only respite from now total baldness was a wig that shielded me from prying eyes. The wig wasn’t perfect, but it helped me come to terms with my hair loss and primed me to take my first steps into alopecia advocacy. These days, I value the lessons my alopecia and engineering journeys have taught me about confidence, social interaction and problem-solving. On a whim, I joined my school's robotics club in my freshman year, hoping to build the robot behind the scenes. Four seasons later, I'll be exiting the program as club captain. I’ve always been an advocate for interdivision collaboration: engineers, programmers and outreach personnel should all be able to understand the rationale behind each other’s decisions. To mentor other students in the art of talking to people, I first had to learn it—a tall order given my place high up, but firmly on the spectrum. Over the years I've channeled the confidence I'd gained from my alopecia experiences, applying it to my social life using methods that adapted to me. The final piece to the puzzle in my mind is my goal within the aerospace engineering community. I believe a complete program system of launchers, habitats, and transit vehicles for a piloted Mars program can be finished by 2040, and that I can directly contribute to its design, construction and integration. Engineering such a mission is a game of tradeoffs, pitting thousands of variables against each other. I wouldn't say I have a perfectly intuitive sense of these factors, but my autism has given me a secret weapon: an intricate web of mental flowcharts used to describe and modify the world around me. Like a quantum computer, I don't perceive the world in binary. Instead, the charts come to me as concepts with moving, intertwined arrows, barely describable to another person. This non-quantized approach to human thought works well with aerospace engineering, where the complexities of fluid dynamics and orbital mechanics are tended to by nets of equations and matrices. Aside from my tangible impact on humanity's collective push towards Mars, I hope to bring a new perspective to a world defined by doubles, not booleans.

Down the street from my high school is the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where aerospace engineering has evolved from the humble jet engine to humanity’s latest study of distant Europa. On that campus for a field trip nine years ago, I began to seriously dream of turning my passion for design to the stars, inspired by the Perseverance rover coming together below me in the clean room. For the first time, I had a real example of the engineering I wanted to do: I could design and build interplanetary spacecraft. Since then, the scope of my drive has narrowed, but never wavered. Even through my laser focus on this field, I've necessarily taken detours through advocacy and mentorship. As a fourth grader I lost my hair to alopecia areata, an autoimmune condition that outpaced topical ointments and defied my attempts to conceal it under a wig. While that wig wasn't perfect, it helped me understand my hair loss and primed me to take my first steps towards confidence. In the years since, I’ve done my best to uplift other alopecia patients. I serve the NAAF community in an unlikely way as a Legislative Mentor, lobbying for medical legislation locally and on Capitol Hill. At conference panels, I offer hope to those with uncertain futures. After my own journey with hair loss, I’ve learned to help empower those in the same situation as my panicked, shedding, nine-year-old self. As a FIRST Tech Challenge robotics captain, I know what it's like to be on the giving and receiving end of quality mentorship. We prioritize collaboration among our varsity, junior varsity, and middle school teams and celebrate the courage required to ask for help. When I cross into the next era of my journey as an engineer, I hope to do so with a similar support structure—one I can only get at top schools in the country. With that in mind, I'm looking to make a bid for a highly-rated aerospace engineering program (MIT, Purdue, and the University of Michigan come to mind) without breaking the bank. This scholarship won't just be funding my bachelor's degree, either. It'll keep me on track to achieve my ultimate goal. I believe a complete program system of launchers, habitats, and transit vehicles for a piloted Mars program can be completed by 2040. I can directly contribute to its design, construction, and integration. Engineering such a mission involves tradeoffs, pitting thousands of variables against each other. Aided by the Stitt Family Aeronautics and Space Scholarship, I want to be part of the worldwide effort to solve this cosmic system of equations.