#UMassDBelieves | Class of 2028 Provost Writing Contest Winners

Anna L Sturdahl | 2024, UMassD Believes 1ST PLACE WINNER

A World of Success

I believe that hard work is the key to success. Diligence, ambition, and engagement push individuals to the finish line, allowing them to tear the ribbon that separated them from their goals. Achievement has never been a mere gift from the world, but the beholder’s utilization of their skills. 

Yet, I have not always held this belief. 

Growing up, I had the universal experience of the teachers and figures from my life telling me that the stepping stones to success began with the effort I emitted. Unfortunately, this was hard to believe. As a young girl—particularly in the years of primary education—my perception of success was fed to me through the media. Child actors getting their big break in their music career, politicians producing political successors through their bloodline, generations worth of wealth being handed to one heir, a video producing fame after appearing on the social feeds of other young girls like me. From the perspective that I was tube-fed from an earphone jack, success was either handed to you with your birth certificate—as if an extension of your last name—or it was a completely random, statistically unbiased chance, as if the universe rolled an eight-billion sided die that just so happened to land on your name. 

Even in my experiences that didn’t require a Wi-Fi connection, the trends of success were consistent. If you’ve ever been to a public middle school, there is a good chance you’re familiar with someone who just so happened to be the blood-born protege of one (or two) of the faculty or staff. I’ve learned side by side with several of these students, and from my authentic experience, everything (according to my past perspective) was handed to them. Every honors or AP class had their name on the roster before they stepped foot in the institution, the captain titles of all sports teams were placed on hold before they could pick up a bat, and their student government positions were assigned before they even enrolled. From the outside perspective, it seemed as though the entire educational system was kneeling for them. 

Those walls also housed special cases of chance, manifesting in the form of so-called “gifted” students. These scholars molded the bulk of my belief, as I was one of them. During my primary schooling, I excelled educationally. I received perfect marks for years, all while putting in little to no effort; it just came naturally. I was reading at a high school level by the fourth grade, in the fifth grade I was one of few selected for an advanced English course at my school, and within my seventh year I had completed all of my middle school’s offered math classes, forcing the school to put me in the same class two years in a row, as there was nowhere else for me to be placed. Expectedly, I finished that year with a perfect grade. School came so easily to me that I had to indulge in other things to keep myself stimulated. For several years I went to chess club and science Olympiad, read three books a week, and taught myself five instruments. Yet, this still wasn’t enough to keep me challenged, as everything came so easily for me. I accepted that this was just how my mind worked; I settled into the comfort that this universe had chosen me to bear these gifts, that the eight-billion-sided die landed on my name. 

However, no story goes on without a conflict, right? Entering my secondary education, I enrolled in only honors and AP courses, as per the recommendation of my previous educators. After years and years of not having to study, finishing all of my homework within twenty minutes of it being assigned, and being the first person to make the glorious walk to the “turn-in bin” after each assessment, the syllabus and course load of my college-level curriculum hit me like a double-decker bus, fully equipped with a titanium battering ram and the speed of a formula one race car. Not only was the material much more difficult than I was accustomed to; the class pace was like nothing I had experienced. Nonetheless, I maintained the same mindset. I was a product of chance, after all. I was confident that success would come to me just as easily as before. I mean, the die doesn’t lie, right? 

Wrong. Within my first two weeks of high school, I received a failing grade. The assessment I took on the topic of cell biology reflected my studying efforts. I assumed that the class lecture presented to me and my peers would be sufficient preparation for my examination, just as it always had been. Yet the mere utilization of my memory wasn’t enough. Maybe this was an anomaly, an off day, it will be better next time, surely it will. Wrong… again. I couldn’t grasp the concept of my failure. Had the die been thrown again, passing my success to another? I had not attempted to turn inward and evaluate what I was doing incorrectly until the release of my first-quarter grades. My placings read out everything other than the “A” I was accustomed to. Within the jungle of words and letters, one phrase obtruded the page: “could benefit from more studying.” A note from my biology teacher. Having no prior experience with the effort of studying, I turned towards the finest source of inspiration and influence I could think of, the original fuel to the fire of my belief: the internet. 

Within my deep dive into the world of “How to Study” videos, I came to assimilate the concept and techniques of studying. I even found myself studying the videos teaching me to study. I utilized this newly acquired skill in my classes, and to the surprise of no one other than me, I did amazing in all of them. Making an effort made A’s. Within another turn of events, at least to my young and arrogant mind, the child of one of the school’s educators asked me to study alongside her. 

Within an exceptionally short period, the beliefs that were fed to me from a young age were rewired. Not only was engagement and ambition required for my own success, but it was also mandatory for the people who seemingly, as per my previous uneducated assumption, had success handed to them.

While it took me an exceptionally long time to come to this realization, I learned that hard work is truly the stepping stone and backbone of success. It doesn’t matter what your strong suits are, or what your last name is. It doesn’t even matter if you grew up as a so-called “gifted student,” In the end, hard work and ambition are the deciding factors of success. Not a birth certificate, and not an eight-billion-sided die. 

Grace Kelley | 2024, UMASSD BELIEVES 2nd PLACE WINNER

Guilt and Religion 

I believe that God doesn’t want me to hate myself. 

It wasn’t because I was gay that I was going to hell when I was 12. It was because I was unfriendly, because I was selfish, and because I listened to Melanie Martinez.  

These are the things that you tell yourself you’ll go to hell for when you’re 12. 

Contrary to what they say in Sunday school, the Ten Commandments are not the detailed outline of how to live the perfect life. If they were, there wouldn’t be a twelve-hundred-page book about Christianity. There are a lot of additions that are forbidden later. Leviticus 17, verse 12, for example, bans people from drinking blood. 

So don’t do that. 

For this reason, it becomes easy to blur the lines between what God approves of and He doesn’t, and throughout history religious groups have used this loophole to control people. For example, in the 1630s, when Anne Hutchinson challenged the puritan leaders in the Massachusetts Bay colony, she was banished to Rhode Island for defying gender roles, which was considered heresy, since leading her bible study group technically meant she was assuming authority over men. 

In another example, it wasn’t until the 1800s that the “fire and brimstone” guilty-mongering preaching style became popular in America. This shift took place as a result of dwindling church attendance at the time, which just shows how Christianity has been altered over time to give church leaders more influence. 

I didn’t realize how much of my faith had been built on guilt until I was 15 and I read “The Cult of Cthulhu.”  

First of all, awful story. Legitimately bad. Reads like a car manual, the author’s super racist, and my teacher only gave us two days to read it. Triple whammy. 

But the concept of the Cult of Cthulhu is insane, because the members of the cult don’t actually think that anything god will come of the religion. They know that Cthulhu will destroy everything, and they’re OK with that. It made me think: if there was no God, would I be upset?  

Or is my God just as evil in my eyes as Cthulhu? 

This train of thought almost made me leave the church for good. At that point, I decided to take a deeper look into my own religion and what I believed. 

One thing that Christians all have to come to terms with at some point is how our own religion has been bastardized for hundreds of years so that people can use it to gain power.  

When people live in guilt, not only do they destroy their own lives a little at a time, but they also continue the stupid game of telephone that Christianity has become subject to. Religion isn’t supposed to hurt, and I’m done putting myself through hell to become worthy of heaven.  

No one is “worthy.” We all have flaws, and I choose to believe God loves me, and doesn’t want me to hate myself anymore. 

Shae-Ann Millett   | 2024, UMASSD BELIEVES 3rd Place Winner

Foster Care – Beneath the Surface 

When you hear the phrase “foster kid,” what is your initial thought? 

Unfortunately, upon hearing this, most people will assume the child in question is troubled. In most cases, they are, but people often equate “troubled” with rebellious. They make the assumption that foster children are poor students, most of whom will amount to nothing due to their lack of a support system. The truth of the matter is that not all foster kids are BAD kids. While this perception may simply be an implicit bias, it continues to negatively affect the lives of foster care youth as, once their status becomes known to others, it tends to become the predominant way they are viewed. I know this to be true because I myself made these assumptions. I held this bias at one point myself.

When I was in eighth grade, there was a transfer student. I remember him sharing that he was a foster child and found that I formed a negative opinion of him based solely off of that information. I avoided interacting with him, as I wrongly assumed he was a bad kid. It was his fault he was no longer living with his family, right? Wrong. Everyone seems to have a poor reason for carrying the biases they hold, if they even have them. I believe I formed this bias due to the fact that whenever I would do something wrong as a child, my parents would threaten to “get rid” of me. Well, here I am now.

As a result of actions that were not my own, here I am now, having been placed in foster care for the past three years, since I was fifteen years old. It is unlikely that a child has been displaced from their home due to their own behavior. This experience has opened my eyes to not only my own bias, but the bias of others around me once I was the one receiving this title. As a result of this, I have made it a point to prove the stereotypes, and the implicit biases that people carry, wrong. Like every foster child does, I struggled in the beginning, but I didn’t let that stop me. I became THE good student. I surpassed my own expectations. I became determined to stay away from what I knew could ruin the progress I’ve made and focused on the possible outcomes. I met other struggling foster youth and found that it wasn’t just myself; a majority of us struggle to be better but we are NOT bad kids. Regardless of grades and academic ability, we are not bad kids.  

I want to share and hopefully change this belief that foster care youth are bad, because most of us are not. Help us thrive among others, and encourage us to be the best version of ourselves that we can be, even under the extenuating circumstances we didn’t ask to be placed upon us. Help reduce the negative effects these opinions cause, because there are already enough struggles that come with the title as is. Please don’t be the person that adds to that list.