Determination is key by Sarah

Determination is key by Sarah - July 2025 Scholarship Essay

The best advice I would give to my younger self is to keep going. I have lived in Memphis, Tennessee for most of my life and while there are some perks about living here, the deep-rooted homophobia is not one of them. This aspect of living in Tennessee has caused me a lot of stress over my safety when I should have been worried about normal things like schoolwork and learning how to drive. It was due to this that I decided to join the LGBTQ+ club to find that community that I was so desperate to have, instead I found an unfriendly, friend group that was masquerading as a club. I decided the club needed to change.

It was very difficult when I first started to change the LGBTQ+ club that was previous just a social club, I turned it into a community to find ways to make our queer students feel safer on campus. This included adding structure to the club like meeting on specific days and times and having club events like the annual club picnic. I set up officers that would protect the LGBTQ+ club. I started making polls on how Germantown High School could be better at supporting its queer students. To my shock, people responded and were excited by the fact that they now had a voice in the club. By the end of my junior year, I found myself fully running a club that I had only joined so I could make friends and build a community.

Unfortunately, during my senior year, I had to make the executive decision to conceal the club to keep the members safe from adults who may be less than excepting of how they identified. It was around this time that our sponsor left the school, so I had two gargantuan tasks, finding a new sponsor and figure out how to legally conceal the LGBTQ+ club. It felt like everything I had managed to build in the last few years was going to be destroyed just because of a law. The stress started piling on, I had college applications, I.B. exams to prepare for and now this. I wanted to just hand this club that had been nothing but a problem for me to someone else. But I didn’t, instead I found solutions.

The solution was to add it to The Guild, which is another club that I oversee. That way when the permission slips were given to the parents, they would see The Guild instead of the LGBTQ+ club. I also found a new sponsor after trying three separate times. A few weeks ago, the LGBTQ+ club was forced to come out of hiding and a new permission slip had to be issued that explicitly stated our mission due to another law that was enacted. I refused to give up, thought there were many times that I wanted to. If someone had told me that, everything would work out. It would have saved me lots of stress.