My name is Malkia Duncan! I am 22 years old, I was born and raised in Baltimore Maryland and grew up for half of my life as an only child and then the other half of my growing up with siblings. I am the oldest out of 3 and as you can imagine that came with a lot of pressure to succeed in everything that I do. This type of philosophy comes from societal pressures that are often projected onto the black community. We have been labeled as “lazy” or “underqualified” throughout history so my parents have instilled this need to be good at many things so that I would never be able to be labeled in this way. Along with this, I was taught to always get good grades and I have always done that. I graduated high school with a GPA of over 4.0 and an unweighted GPA of 3.6. I also have always loved math which seems to be unheard of when it comes to being involved with the arts. As a child of an immigrant parent, sometimes there is an expectation that you should go into fields that are guaranteed to make you lucrative. If you couldn’t tell by now, I have very much gone against that expectation.