An essay for a scholarship

Hello everyone! I’m writing an essay for a scholarship and I would love any feedback or critiques you have.

Prompt: Please tell us about your personal background, the adversity you've faced, particularly as it pertains to your financial circumstances, and how you've overcome it. Why are you passionate about your particular (STEM) field and what type of impact would you like to make in the future through your work?

Everyone’s life is different. Some are born with a supportive family, a strong financial background, and many different opportunities. Others are born with less supportive family, a challenging financial background, and fewer opportunities. I was born somewhere in the middle. I have a good family, good opportunities, and now a decent financial background. But it was not always that way.

My parents married when they were 18, right out of high school, and they started a family before they had even figured out what they wanted to do with their lives. They had my sister when they were 21, and they had me nine months later. Life was not easy. My parents have memories of living in a house with almost no furniture, all they had was beds for the kids, and a mattress on the floor for them. They always made sure that we were taken care of, even if it meant they had nothing. After my dad graduated high school, he went into construction and commercial painting, while my mom stayed at home with us. He worked long and crazy hours. He would wake up at 6 AM and get home close to midnight, he would be out of state, sometimes for days. He never liked being away from us, but it was his only choice. It was hard on him, but he never quit. Watching him provide for my family, seeing him put in the hard work, it has instilled in me the same hard work and passion for work that he had at 21. 

In 2009, my dad made the tough decision to quit his job and pursue a higher education. He attended Utica College, now Utica University and he graduated at the top of his class. While my dad was in college, he decided to major in pre-med, and after graduating, he applied and was accepted into Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. The move to Baltimore was challenging. We moved to a whole new state, we had no family close by, and we had piles of student loan debt. We stayed in a small three bedroom apartment, it wasn’t much, but we were safe. My dad financed his schooling through student loans, which he is still trying to pay off years later. I have memories of being young at the store, using a calculator to track how much we had left of our monthly grocery budget. I remember making a shopping list and only getting what we truly needed. My two siblings and I never asked for non-essential items, because we knew we couldn’t afford them. I remember always making my parents homemade Christmas gifts out of whatever items lay around our home, because I didn’t want to take away from what they were working so hard to achieve. It was hard on everyone, but through hard work we made it to where we are now. My dad completed medical school and residency, and is now an emergency medical doctor in our local emergency department. I am incredibly proud of where we came from and how far we have come since then. I am immensely proud of how far my parents have come. Getting married at 18, starting a family at 21, and doing it all by themselves. They have an incredible amount of trust in each other, and they raised three kids to be kind, passionate, and to work hard.

It was these experiences that made my siblings and I make a promise to ourselves and to each other. One that we will never forget. We promised each other that we would never allow money stress to divide us. As we were growing up, we saw the stress it put on our parents. We watched and helped our parents keep to a budget. We learned how to adapt to challenges and how to be creative with what we had. Living through these challenges didn’t just teach me resilience; it shaped me into a relentless hard worker with a deep drive to learn and understand. It shaped me into someone who can be creative and think outside the box. It shaped me into who I am today.

I dreamed of being a lawyer when I was a kid, but as I grew up, I knew that being a lawyer was not the right fit for me. I knew I wanted to stick to some type of law enforcement, I was never sure what exactly I wanted to do with my life. But after taking that forensics class, I knew. That is what I want to do. Learning about all that forensic science entails, experiencing some hands-on learning—such as a fun class activity where we became detectives, dusting items for latent prints and matching them to samples—cemented in my mind what I wanted to do. While taking the forensic science class, I realized that forensic science is essentially a life-like puzzle, where every piece has to be just the right fit to get the finished puzzle. You could have a million different fingerprints, but there are small details that separate one person's print from another, and if you match it correctly, you may have contributed a big part in solving a case. From taking fingerprints and looking at the different arches and marks used to identify whose print belongs to whom, to analyzing blood spatter patterns caused by different weapons, there always seems to be a puzzle to solve.

My long term goal is to work for the FBI. I would love to have the opportunity to work with a large group of people who are making a difference in the world. Maybe not through a conventional sense of the phrase, but are making a difference by using our skills and what we know to help give closure to those who have been hurt.