Elizabeth Djajalie by the water in Anchorage, AK. PHOTO COURTESY OF ELIZABETH DJAJALIE

Trailblazing Leadership Week.

There are no better words to describe the time in April that I spent in Washington, D.C., with 24 of the most amazing peers I know from across the country. From playing card games on the first day to walking across the gala stage on the last night, I learned so much from the tremendous authenticity every finalist brought to that weekend. I remember walking down a hallway in the Willard Intercontinental hotel and pointing at the state emblems lining the walls. At the very end of the hallway, I found my state: Alaska. I smiled, wondering how a small-town girl born and raised in Juneau was now among some of the best in our nation.

My NHS journey begins with my hometown and a dedication to using the four pillars of National Honor Society to blaze new trails for others. Leadership. Service. Character. Scholarship. These pillars have laid the foundation for the impacts I’ve made and will continue to pursue in the future.

Finding Home in My Hometown

Salt water filled my rain boots, which seemed better at keeping water in than out. My SpongeBob socks were so soaked they squelched with every step, but my class wasn’t leaving the shore for another three hours. It was beach day—the day when Juneau’s elementary schools let loose their students on the sea creatures of the tide pools. Year after year, my school visited those tide pools until I felt like we had touched every starfish and poked every anemone.

As I grew bigger, my town grew smaller. Juneau felt like a tide pool—a small and isolated ecosystem set into the Alaskan coast. The same highway traveled from the hospital where I was born to the valley where I’d lived my whole life. The same glacier stood a mile from my house. The same people I’d gone to beach day with in first grade became my high school classmates. I grew up, but my tide pool seemed not to change.

Then I found plastic on the beach.

As I searched for a solution to plastic pollution, I stumbled upon a familiar tangle of brown and green littering the shores: bull kelp. For the first time, I saw this seaweed as not just a natural fixture or a soupy dinner but as a solution. Creating biodegradable plastic cups from seaweed was my first time dipping my toes into research. The home kitchen smelled like kelp for days, and the cups didn’t taste that good, but I was hooked. With every mini discovery, the tide came in an inch, and as the water rose, my tide pool grew larger.

The water kept rising. I started asking more questions about my environment and turned to local scientists for answers. In doing so, I met countless new people from my community. I learned their names alongside the names of various salmon, plankton, and shellfish species. I talked to tribal groups and found that not all seaweed was helpful and that some were causing harmful algal blooms that threatened seafood harvests. On one memorable field day on an oyster farm, the farm owner told me her farm had been shut down for 41 days due to harmful algal blooms. On another field expedition onto a glacier, my instructors explained how the glaciers were receding and changing the very chemistry of our oceans. These interactions opened my eyes to the problems facing my own ecosystem, which was anything but static. My town was changing every day. Each interaction showed me how much I still had to discover about my hometown, which I began to view in the context of the broader world. This realization motivated me to continue researching solutions to solve local issues. As my world expanded, so did my love for my environment and its unique inhabitants.

Curiosity was a tide. Tenacity was a tide. Collaboration was a tide. At high tide, these swelled into a wave that washed over my tide pool, connecting it to the ocean. My research took me to new shores in Alaska and beyond where I presented my findings to students, teachers, and the public. In every new place the tides took me—Atlanta, GA; Golden, CO; Fairbanks, AK; Virginia Beach, VA; Dallas, TX—I immersed myself in the local culture and community. I absorbed the lessons of each locale just as my socks had soaked in the salt water on that first beach day.

At the very end of the hallway, I found my state: Alaska. I smiled, wondering how a small-town girl born and raised in Juneau was now among some of the best in our nation. 

Most importantly, though, the tides always brought me back home—back to shorelines strewn with seaweed, back to lifelong family, friends, and mentors, back to this tide pool that was never small. With each ebb and flow, my world both in and out of town expanded. I know Juneau now for what it has always been—a dynamic ecosystem full of vibrant people and places, each with a story to tell those who ask.

Finding the rhythm of my own tides was like tracing a new path in a dense forest. Realizing that I was the first to walk this path from my town, I knew I could not be the last. Soon, I would make this path visible to others in my hometown and throughout my state.

Blazing New Trails for Others

What happens when you put a few hundred teenage scientists and a DJ in a room?

I learned the answer to this at the International Science and Engineering Fair two years ago. There, I was blown away by the projects, people, and, of course, the dance moves. But there was something missing. I made friends from team Arizona, team North Carolina, team Australia, and so on, but there was no team Alaska. I was the only one.

Afterward, my mentor explained that the Alaska Science and Engineering Fair (ASEF) lacked the funding to send more students to the international fair. Founding and leading the ASEF Student Board has been my way of changing that.

For the past 68 years, ASEF has been run completely by adult volunteers all in one city. With the Student Board, ASEF has gained another generation’s voice, speaking up to support fellow students all across the state. Leading this group has meant spending hours after school driving around town to fundraise from businesses. It’s meant hosting a new STEM webinar series. It’s meant encouraging more girls, Indigenous students, and rural Alaskan students to participate in science fair. It’s meant the world to me because I’ve been able to give back to the nonprofit that ignited my passion for science in the first place. This activity has had the biggest impact on me and where I create some of my biggest impacts.

The ASEF Student Board is a trail still being blazed. My board members and I are still discovering how best to fundraise effectively, inspire broadly, and educate creatively. For our communities all over Alaska, we throw every ounce of our ingenuity, leadership, energy, and passion into making a lasting impact. So, next year, I won’t be the only Alaskan on the dance floor.

Every trail has a starting point, and mine begins in Juneau. I could not be more grateful and surprised that this path took me through Washington, D.C., where I met lifelong mentors, scholars, and friends. Now, I continue to learn from the paths others have walked while blazing my own trail forward. In the near future, I will continue to study the environment and ways to conserve our world through biotechnology and policy. With the pillars of NHS as my constant guide, I will pursue making an impact in every step I take along this new and exciting path.

At my high school graduation party, a local legislator gave me a journal with the words “Enjoy the Journey.” That’s exactly what I intend to do as I see where this trail leads in the end. To other students reading this now, I say this: Apply for the NHS Scholarship, enjoy the journey, and never forget where your trail started.

Elizabeth Djajalie is a freshman at Harvard University and a graduate of Thunder Mountain High School in Juneau, AK. She is a 2024 NHS Scholarship winner and the recipient of the NHS Scholarship Pillar award.