PERSEVERANCE
Scholarship Application Essay
D ISCIPLINE FOCUS
ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING
R ESEARCH AREA
ECOLOGICAL REMEDIATION
THE SKYLINE OF MY HOMETOWN
is defined by the skeletal remains of an abandoned
coal breaker. Growing up in a former mining community in West Virginia,
"perseverance" was not a corporate buzzword; it was the baseline requirement for
survival. When the primary coal company declared bankruptcy during my freshman
year of high school, our local economy imploded overnight. I watched my parents and
neighbors lose not only their pensions but their community identity. For many of my
peers, the response was a devastating resignation. For me, it was a profound catalyst. I
realized that surviving the economic collapse of Appalachia required building an
entirely new skill set, one rooted in reclamation rather than extraction.
The path forward was geographically and financially grueling. Because our county
lacks a four-year university, I spent the first two years of my undergraduate degree
commuting ninety miles round-trip every day to a state community college in a ten-year-
old sedan. To afford the gas and tuition, I worked thirty hours a week as a short-order
cook at a highway diner. I frequently did my calculus homework in the diner parking lot
under a streetlamp before my morning commute. Perseverance, in my experience, is
rarely elegant; it is the quiet, exhausting refusal to let your zip code dictate your future.
I am currently a junior at the state university, pursuing a Bachelor of Science in
Environmental Engineering. My professional objective is to specialize in ecological
remediation and acid mine drainage treatment. I want to engineer biological and
chemical filtration systems that restore the poisoned watersheds of former industrial
towns, transforming barren, toxic land into viable agricultural or renewable energy
sites. I want to be the engineer who helps rewrite the legacy of regions like mine.
