 When I was in high school, I wanted to get away from my hometown, which is Berkeley, more than anything. I applied to a whole bunch of colleges, and I got rejected from pretty much all of them, or at least Berkeley was by far the best college that I got into. I was like, oh no, I got into Berkeley, guess I got to go to Berkeley. So I went to Berkeley, and it ended up being absolutely perfect for me. I knew I wanted to help people, and so I decided I wanted to be a doctor and I decided to study public health. That really changed when I went to Niger to study women's empowerment. A lot of them live in rural villages where they grow their own food, where they rely on rainfall. There's a lot of environmental factors that really affect their health, like malaria is super prevalent. And it just became very clear to me how climate change and the environment was really probably the biggest factor that affected their health. And coming back to California, I realized that the same was true in California, it's just less obvious. My research focuses on prescribed burns, which are fires that you light on purpose, so that later there aren't fires that get really out of control, kill people, and cause enormous plumes of smoke that cover urban areas. Also they're really important for making sure that we have a healthy ecosystem. I actually love and hate statistics. A lot of it is really boring, crunching numbers, but what's really, really beautiful and wonderful about it is understanding how these insane simulations or tests work. What is the math behind it? And how can you take these numbers and turn them into something useful? And I think that is just so exciting. I take data sets on where and when prescribed burns and wildfires have happened in California, and I combine those with drone or satellite imagery on where the smoke plumes are. With another data set, which tells me the levels of pollutants that are in the air. And I mix them all together in my laptop and out comes this wonderful result. You can answer so many great questions. Doing public health work and now also environmental science work is something that's really fulfilling to me because I'm not only doing something that I really love to do, but I also know that it's having a positive impact. I started playing the harp when I was eight years old. It's been really a wonderful companion all throughout my life. I play in a duo called CrossHarp. It's really meditative for me. If ever there is something that was bothering me, a hard test that I just felt I didn't do well on or anything like that. Just playing harp music was always there for me. There is everything at Berkeley. You can find absolutely everything. There's every kind of person, every interest. Everything you could possibly imagine wanting to do or wanting to learn about. In pretty much every class you can find a friend and you just go through the journey of that class together. And that's been really special. I've made so many really really close friends doing that. I joined the Berkeley Medical Reserve Corps when I was a sophomore. I volunteered at a shelter for those displaced by the Paradise Fires. And that was one of the ways that I realized that California is also super dependent on its environment. Berkeley is the place where I found my purpose. I found what I want to contribute to the world and how I want to do it. So I ended up just loving it here and I'm so glad that everywhere rejected me.