Nothing is impossible.

For a person that’s afraid of heights you might say that bungee jumping in Beijing would be impossible. For a Singer in Chicago, you could also say that performing with Beyonce, let alone meeting her, would never happen. And, if you’re a New Yorker, you have a better chance of winning the mega million than $10 Hamilton tickets. Lucky for me, all of those things have been possible.

Impossibility, as I’ve come to define it, is determined by the level of fearlessness in a person. It’s manifested in ways both seen and unseen. It can be as overt as conquering a fear of heights in one dramatic swoop, as implicit as an underlying confidence in your talent, or it can be a straight up willingness to accept loss when the odds aren’t in your favor (or so you might think).

The mentality to embrace the impossible is not something I was born with. It was something I have witnessed.

In 1939, my 16 year old Abuela moved to Caracas with her second cousin. The next day, that same cousin stole everything she had except for a single pair of shoes. For her, impossibility wasn’t an a option, survival was. My Abuela worked her way through the city and eventually built a home to clothe and feed her 12 kids. My mother, number 11 of 12, was born with the same dream of leaving a city barren of opportunities behind her. It was an impossibility that she made possible just like my grandmother only a year older at 17.

And then, there’s me.

While I haven’t faced such odds as the women before me have, I have grown up listening to their stories and internalizing their strength as my own. If impossibility existed for these women then I wouldn’t be writing this application today or even be living in the United States. If impossibility existed, I might not even have been born.

Some may still argue that scientifically there are things in this world that are in fact impossible. For me, I see impossibility as a challenge. I think my mom, Abuela, and Neil Degrasse Tyson would agree.