Title: Where I Come From, and Where I’m Going
Finding My Place Among Possibility
The cry of my mother’s sewing machine still echoes in my mind—its sharp needle dancing across fabric long after midnight. Our basement apartment, cradled between rows of snow-covered duplexes, smelled of starch, burnt toast, and the cumin trace of my grandmother’s cooking. I grew up under fluorescent lights and tight budgets in Queens, New York, raised by immigrants who folded dreams into stitched seams and overtime hours. For my parents, education was the luxury they could never afford. For me, it was the only way forward.
My father, a once-aspiring mechanical engineer turned maintenance worker, used to test me on multiplication tables while scrubbing the soles of his work boots. “STEM,” he’d say, eyes gleaming with old ambitions, “is your ticket.” At fifteen, I believed him with all the certainty of someone who has never had reason to doubt what a classroom could promise.
STEM felt like a universe I could enter and belong in—a place where it didn’t matter that English was my second language or that I wore hand-me-downs from my cousin in Kathmandu. But dreams, like equations, rarely unfold in straight lines.
Realizing the Divide
I remember the first time I heard someone whisper I was “just a diversity box checked off.” It was during a regional science fair, where I had presented an AI-powered glucose monitoring system inspired by my diabetic grandmother. A judge glanced over my project, congratulated me half-heartedly, and moved on. Another student leaned over and said, “You’re lucky STEM’s all about inclusion now.” His tone dripped with resentment. I stood frozen, heart pounding. My project, my months of sleepless nights, my data algorithms, the trials—all reduced to a quota.
With every scholarship I received, every lab internship I secured, the comment echoed. Was I truly deserving, or simply the “right kind” of applicant?
Learning to Redefine Worth
I started volunteering at our community center’s Girls in STEM program. Every Saturday, I ran coding workshops for girls like me—brown and quiet, brilliant and unsure. I met Zahra, a refugee from Syria, who taught herself Python by translating tutorials from English to Arabic. I met Gina, whose mother sold flowers on the F train and who built her first app using an old Android phone she repaired.
Through them, I saw that being “the right kind” of applicant wasn’t a weakness—it was a revolution. Every keystroke we made, every lab problem we solved in swapped textbooks and second-hand laptops, was a declaration: We are here. We belong. And we don’t need permission to innovate.
I began to trace the lines between policy and personal experience. When the White House proposed severe budget cuts to STEM funding—particularly those programs focused on equity for women and minorities—I realized just how precarious our opportunities were. It wasn’t always outright exclusion; sometimes it was the quiet dismantling of a ladder we hadn’t even finished climbing.
My journey, once viewed through the narrow lens of impostor syndrome, began to widen. Our efforts were not superficial or favored. They were necessary.
Paving the Way Forward
Now, as I apply to college, I bring with me more than test scores and science fair ribbons. I bring the quiet strength of my ancestors who believed in learning without having the chance to receive it. I carry the stories of every girl in my Saturday classes who refuses to be left behind.
If given the chance to step into your institution, I don't just want to learn; I want to lead. I want to convert every click of my mother’s sewing machine into lines of code that build prosthetics. I want to carry my father’s dusty toolbox into research labs and redesign the way we think about access in medicine, in technology, in education.
I didn’t cross borders just to be a statistic. I crossed them to become the bridge.
Because I am my family’s first engineer. But I promise—I won’t be the last.
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