When Rachel Heimke was seven, she realized what she wanted to do for the rest of her life. Little did she know a $40,000 BigFuture Scholarship would help her pursue her dreams.
Heimke and her parents were living an unconventional lifestyle, to say the least. The summer after she completed first grade, she and her parents boarded a sailboat and sailed from their hometown in Alaska down the Pacific Coast. The family would spend the next two years traveling on the water, passing Mexico and then sailing across the world to Australia before returning home. It was on the sailboat, watching whales and dolphins breach the water under their boat, that Heimke realized her life’s purpose.
“I was really obsessed with these little porpoises called Vaquitta, who only live in one tiny area of water off the coast of Mexico,” she recalled. “When I learned about them as a kid, there were only 22 left in the wild. Now, there are only ten.” Despite her interest, Heimke was never able to actually see any Vaquitta on her trip, both because of their inherent shyness and because they were so critically endangered due to detrimental fishing policies in the area. “That was my wakeup call,” she says. “I’ll probably never be able to see this porpoise, and I don’t want that to be true of other species.”
Now a young woman of 23, Heimke is realizing her childhood dream of ocean conservation by recently graduating with a Bachelor’s degree in ocean sciences and enrolling in a grad program in Canada to study science communication. Heimke is well on her way to achieving her childhood dream—but she acknowledges that none of this would have been possible without her ocean adventures as a child, the support of her parents, and significant financial support.
At 18, when Heimke was deciding where to study ocean sciences, she stumbled upon an opportunity from BigFuture, College Board's free college and career planning site. The opportunity was the BigFuture Scholarship, which provided students the chance to win a $40,000 scholarship by completing six action items on the website. Heimke was intrigued, since she didn’t need to provide an essay, her GPA, or any test scores to enter. Her eligibility was also not tied to citizenship status or family income, so she decided to give it a shot.
“One of the action items was just going on the BigFuture site and creating a list of colleges I was interested in,” said Heimke. Another item required her to apply for financial aid through FAFSA—something Heimke was planning to do anyway. Every completed action item gave students more chances to win the scholarship, so Heimke completed all six action items quickly.
Months later, Heimke’s parents ushered her over to a call over Zoom, where she met a BigFuture representative who had some surprising news: She was one of 25 students who had won the $40,000 BigFuture college scholarship. Each year she would receive $10,000 in scholarship funding, which would cover her entire tuition bill for all four years of schooling.
“That experience taught me that it’s really important to not give up on your goals and just go for opportunities,” said Heimke. “I never thought I would win anything, but I’ve learned it's worth applying anyway. Even a small scholarship of $1,000 can pay your rent for a month,” she said. “And If you write an essay that takes an hour and you win $5,000, that’s probably the most money per hour you’ll ever make in your life.”
The tuition money made it possible for her to attend college, and for her to apply to graduate school immediately afterward without any financial burdens.
“Now that I’m in graduate school and paying for rent and a phone bill and graduate school tuition, it’s truly a blessing to not have student loan debt on top of that,” Heimke said. Because of the BigFuture scholarship, Heimke doesn’t need to pay for her graduate program either—she’s able to fund her education with the money her parents saved by not having to pay for her undergraduate degree.
One of the biggest blessings, Heimke said, was not needing to delay graduate school to work or find extra funds. With climate change worsening, entering the workforce becomes increasingly important over time.
“I’m not sure exactly what I’ll do with my degrees, but I hope to have a lot of different jobs that ultimately will work toward saving our ocean,” she said.
As a child, witnessing marine life up close and personal was life-changing. Heimke’s goal is for future generations to have that experience, as she did.
To learn more and get started, visit bigfuture.org/scholarships.A woman with her eye mask on in bed.
Do you often wake up at 3 or 4 a.m. with an intense feeling of anxiety? Do you get stressed that you’re awake and begin making a mental laundry list of everything you need to do the next day? Do you start thinking about fights you once had with your spouse or ponder how you have let yourself down in the past?
If so, you’re not alone. It’s common for people to wake up at 3 or 4 a.m. regularly and there’s a reason why we choose this time to catastrophize and worry. The good news is that there are some steps we can take to get through that awkward phase of the night so we can wake up refreshed.
Many of us reliably wake up in the middle of the night because after we’ve had a good chunk of sleep, our bodies start to slowly prepare us for the day by reducing melatonin, the hormone that puts us to sleep and increasing levels of cortisol, the stress hormone.
That biological phase of sleep is why we start to feel stressed.
A woman wakes up in the middle of the nightvia Oscar Calstrom/Pexels
After the big hormone release at 3 or 4 in the morning, if you are dealing with stress in your life, you are more likely to wake up. If your life is calmer and you don’t already have a stress baseline, you will probably wake up, fall asleep quickly and forget that it happened.
If you’re already experiencing stress in your life, that extra cortisol kick is going to cause you to wake up with a feeling of anxiety. The problem is that when we’re lying in bed in the middle of the night, we are in a vulnerable position. “Around this time in the sleep cycle, we’re at our lowest ebb physically and cognitively. From nature’s viewpoint, this is meant to be a time of physical and emotional recovery, so it’s understandable that our internal resources are low,” Greg Murray, a psychology researcher with expertise in mood, sleep, and the circadian system, writes in The Conversation.
“But we also lack other resources in the middle of the night – social connections, cultural assets, all the coping skills of an adult are unavailable at this time,” Murray continues. “With none of our human skills and capital, we are left alone in the dark with our thoughts. So the mind is partly right when it concludes the problems it’s generated are unsolvable – at 3 a.m., most problems literally would be.”
At this moment, when we’re stressed and feeling vulnerable, stuck in bed with no way out, we can begin to spiral. This is when we ruminate on why we forgot to feed the dog that one day in 1994 or contemplate why things went bad with your first significant other at 21. It’s when we start recalling a disagreement with a friend and plotting out what we’ll say the next time the issue arises.
At this point, if we don’t stop spiraling, we’ll be up until 5 a.m. and will feel like garbage when it’s time to go to work.
The good news is that there are ways to get back to sleep and stop the downward anxiety spiral.
Make a list
Dr. Jade Wu says that if you wake up and feel stressed about things you need to take care of, walk out of your room (so you don’t associate it with stressors) and make a list to read in the morning. This will free you of your worries, because you know you can care for them when you are awake.
Pay attention to your breath
Murray says you should redirect your attention from your thoughts to your breath, which is a form of meditation. “I bring my attention to my senses, specifically the sound of my breath. When I notice thoughts arising, I gently bring my attention back to the sound of breathing,” Murray writes in The Conversation. This works in 2 ways: first, it takes your attention away from your spiraling thoughts and second, the breathing exercise helps you relax.
Have a bite to eat
Sometimes, we wake up in the middle of the night because we’re hungry and our blood sugar is dropping. “The first question I ask [my patients] is, ‘When was the last time you ate?’” Michael Breus, Ph.D. psychologist specializing in sleep disorders, told Sleep.com. “Often, they’ve finished their last meal at 7 p.m.; now it’s 3 in the morning — that’s eight hours later — so guess what? They’re out of fuel.” If you’ve woken up because of a drop in blood sugar, experts recommend eating a small snack that includes protein and fat, like peanut butter.
No, it was not through organized crime.
It’s a question that’s plagued us since November 10th, 1990: how the heck did the parents from Home Alone afford their massive, luxurious house nestled in the picturesque suburbs of Chicago? (Not to mention a Christmas vacation to Paris for nine people) Seriously, what impressive job title could Kate and Peter McCallister possibly have to make all this happen? In a recession, no less.
There have been several memes dedicated to this headscratcher, along with a few theories—including one arguing that Peter McCallister must have been involved in organized crime—but finally, we now have a definitive answer.
While appearing on a recent episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast, prolific filmmaker Chris Columbus (who directed both Home Alone and Home Alone 2: Lost in New York) revealed what Kevin’s parents did for a living.
“Back then, [screenwriter] John [Hughes] and I had a conversation about it, and we decided on what the jobs were,” Columbus shared.
Kate, everyone’s favorite neglectful mom, made iconic by Catherine O’Hara, “was a very successful fashion designer." In fact, we see clues to her profession in the film, when Kevin places mannequins in the windows to trick the Wet Bandits into thinking there was a holiday party afoot.
Filmmakers weaving hints into the story via set design, color scheme, costume choices, etc., otherwise known as “Easter eggs,” is a storytelling technique that’s been around since the art form began, essentially. But it’s a concept that’s taken on a life of its own with the introduction of social media. After all, there are entire Youtube channels dedicated to finding and breaking down these hidden clues mere days after a show or movie’s release—especially with comic books or fantasy series, which are franchises with a ton of lore to excavate.
Corporations that churn out these pop culture behemoths, like Disney, have undoubtedly caught on to this, and infuse Easter eggs into a lot of their movies, hoping to make bank off of the intrigue it incites. Does actual substance get sacrificed for this marketing ploy? Sure. But is it effective? Often, yes.
- YouTubewww.youtube.com
Point being: perhaps if Home Alone had premiered today, in the digital age, we might have never wondered so much about the McAllister’s jobs in the first place.
As for the late great John Heard’s Peter—Columbus’ memory is a little foggy. “The father could have, based on John Hughes’ own experience, worked in advertising, but I don’t remember what the father did,” he told THR. Still, we can definitely put one fan theory to rest, as Columbus said Peter’s income did NOT come from “organized crime, even though there was, at the time, a lot of organized crime in Chicago.”
While that settles one quandary involving this legendary house, since it was recently sold for around $5 million, we are left once again wondering who might possibly be able to afford living there…and if their place of employment is currently hiring.
Again, living in the age of Google, it’s easy to find at-length breakdowns behind virtually every piece of modern day pop culture out there. Whether you’re hunting down origin stories to alternative endings to meanings behind obscure references, the answers are fairly easy to find. Which is what makes these little reveals about older pop culture mainstays so satisfying. Often they come after years of dedicated fans relentlessly asking questions.
Take for instance the ultra viral “mystery song” that played during an episode of The X-Files, which took a whopping 25 years to solve, and involved hunting down the original call sheet that listed every person who participated in said episode. That simply would not happen with a show today. Not likely, anyway.
Just saying, when thought is carefully put into it, a story becomes enduring. That’s the reason why we are still captivated by these shows even years after.
