 I remember the moment it hit me. The smell of the gasoline starting, the chatter amongst the teams and the pits, file checks are in place, the drivers are buckling their seatbelt. And then you hear that, the roaring sounds in the engine. Just getting louder and louder and louder. It's the most exciting moment. It's what we all build this for, it's what we have to do this for. We're really about to put on a race. So I joined Grand Prix having driven 800 miles out to Purdue University, and I knew nothing about racing. What I've learned is Grand Prix is so much more expansive than the racing. It's not just about the cart turning on and the carts going around the track. It's a small business for running. We've got sales people, we have marketing people, we've got business people, we have logistics people that help us. And they love what Grand Prix means to Purdue and they love what the tradition symbolizes. I found my fit through the Purdue Grand Prix Foundation by taking that small step. I joined Junior Board, I joined that membership team, and then I joined Senior Board. I was a director of the race and then I joined as the president role. Purdue Grand Prix is the greatest spectacle in college racing. Grand Prix first started in 1958. A bunch of students came together and said, wouldn't it be cool to have a car race on campus? So what students would do is they would take lawnmower engines, they would take engines from leaf blowers or from other random farm equipment or other equipment they sort of had laying around and they would put it on what we would call now as a chassis, right? They would put it on a cart and they would drive it around campus. It's so cool to watch that development over the years of this crazy idea that came out of a bunch of fraternity houses and residence halls and sorority houses develop into this year-long tradition of excitement and really how to cap off the spring semester and it's cool to see it start from this wild idea to a state full of Purdue University. The most rewarding part is definitely the membership development and the people I get to interact with. It's less about the meetings I sit on. It's less about the emails I send. It's the people, it's the community, it's the relationships really that are built through it. Those friendships single-handedly have made my Purdue experience. They have made me feel like me. They have allowed me to grow outside my comfort zone. They've allowed me to become a leader in myself and to fit in at Purdue and really to find my niche is grand prix. This is only my third year. Like in retrospect, there's really not much time at all but in that time I've changed completely and I'm such a better leader and I'm a much better person and it's all started with Grand Prix. There's the green flag drops. I pretty much don't think about anything else other than straightforward, don't look back, just keep going and think about what I need to be doing, hitting my corners right, hitting my breaking points, making my way through traffic. It's really exciting. It's a really weird feeling because you don't really think about anything else. I race for the Purdue Society of Women and Engineering Grand Prix team. I've always been into anything with a motor. I heard about Grand Prix because I race at Whiteland Raceway Park like on the weekends and in my free time. Me and my dad were racing and I was approached by the Society of Women Engineering and they were really excited and asked me if I was alone or if I wanted to be on the team. I'm very shy, so having them approach me and being really excited and really upbeat about me going to Purdue and trying to join the team because I was a biochemistry major so I didn't know you could just join. I need to see me wanted to. My freshman year after the race, it didn't go very well for me. I had some incidents on track but my team coming off was so supportive and trying to fix what happened on the track like the camaraderie you just built within Grand Prix in general is amazing. Getting to know everybody and knowing that everybody supports you. Even people from other teams are rooting for you and everyone's rooting for each other. I've made a lot of friendships in Grand Prix. A lot of them, I don't know what I would do without a lot of people on my team and I think our team is all really close to each other. We all text all the time. We're all in group chats together talking about racing or other stuff. So I think my college experience would have been a lot different without them. Whenever you think Purdue and whenever you think students, you're like students who make things and make things happen. Seeing Grand Prix, I always knew I wanted to do something in there. As a freshman, I would always see the former director of special events always talk about clean program and see what she's working on. And I was just like, oh, this is so cool. It's just women empowering women. They have done so much good. It is mind blowing. One of them did a blood drive. Another one raised money for the Trevor Project. One of them raised more money for Pulmonary Hypertension Association. The stories as to why they do it has just given me so much. And seeing them so passionate and so proud has just been so cool to see. Everyone there has told me multiple times that they've made such meaningful connections, which was my goal. And I always feel in environments like that, they always think it's gonna be a competition. And I never wanted it to feel like that. I wanted it to feel like women having a safe space, having women just have each other, push them up. Being able to have a community just to fall back on, that was my biggest goal. Being a freshman coming to campus is pretty intimidating. And what you have to do is find people, find groups of people that you know you can relate with, even if they're different from you, but you know you can relate with own things. My family connection goes way back to racing. I sat in my first race car probably when I was five months old. My dad works at the University of Minneapolis-Mores Peeway. My brother Connor races cars for a living. So I've been around it forever. And I did my first karting race when I was probably 13, 14, and then got hooked from there. And then I came and the first week I talked to the Honors College racing crew guys and I said, hey, when do we get going? Like I can't wait for this. Grand Prix is really Purdue by the way that the students come together and do it all themselves. We have to build the carts on our own. We get the motors on our own. We run the races on our own. We do the pits on our own. Everything's all together. And sort of that Purdue grit type of thing that we have to work together as a team to achieve our higher goal. So as a backup driver for the Grand Prix, my main driver and I will split practices. We can compare data with how the cart's feeling, what we want to change. It's just sort of a good way to help each other out. It's a good teamwork thing. We work together probably every day of the week during Grand Prix season, outside of Grand Prix season, probably two days a week. Practice together for Grand Prix every day. And then we'll hang out after practices around the weekend, celebrating people's birthdays or just hanging out and having a good time together. So it's been really fun. Every single person I've met on the Grand Prix team has been great. They'll be friends for life. For Grand Prix, I was able to meet so many people I wouldn't have met any other way. The connections that I've made there have been so cool. Grand Prix was a small step to finding my fit in college in general. Finding someone who enjoyed the passion for racing that I did and a group of people who did was just amazing. That helped me build confidence throughout my time here at Purdue. I grew a lot personally. We really put a show on it. And I think all the students appreciated that. And just the magnitude of students that came out here today just shows what Grand Prix means to people. And I love that I can be a part of producing that. The leadership, the development, and then just the moment that we all had together, both myself individually, but myself with the team that we created, is I will look firmly on this day for the rest of my life. It's changed my life.