A Plan to Change the World

Madison Askins says her parents once told her that if she were ever shot, she should play dead because it might increase her chance of survival. It was advice Askins tucked away in her mind but hoped she’d never need. Then came April 17, 2025, when Askins walked across the Florida State University campus, heard gunshots, and felt a bullet pierce her back. Sprawled on the ground, she remembered what her parents once told her and lay motionless, eyes closed, until emergency teams arrived and rushed her to the hospital.

Two people were killed that day, and Askins was among the six wounded. Since then, she has been taking it day by day, her eye on healing and receiving her master’s degree in urban and regional planning in May 2026.

“I am so done with school,” she says with a big, tired smile. “I’ve enjoyed the program and loved the people, but I am ready
to graduate.”

The oldest of three girls born to retired Marines, Askins and her siblings had an itinerant upbringing due to her parents’ deployments, the most memorable of which was to Japan, she says. Other than that, she says she had a normal childhood full of sibling squabbles (“We fought, we got along, we all loved each other, we fought again,” she jokes) and the usual youthful musings on becoming a doctor, or a veterinarian, or an astronaut.

In high school, she spent summers participating in Youth Conservation Corps projects, which allowed her to get her hands dirty by working on conservation projects on public lands. Good grades landed her a Bright Futures scholarship, and she enrolled in FSU as an undergraduate because “it was the furthest north I could go while still getting in-state tuition,” she says.

“For the life of me, I never thought I’d go into planning or even public health,” she adds. “I started out exploratory. At first, I went into biology, and then I went into nursing, and then I took the introduction to public health class.”

Photo courtesy of Madison Askins

The more classes she took, the more she became interested in top-down methods of helping the general population rather than individual patients. During her senior year, she worked on updating the Geographic Information System (GIS) story map for Leon County’s Office of Sustainability, which included adding all the green spaces and farmers markets in the area.

“I fell in love with it, and it showed me that I was on the right track,” she says.

After earning her degree in public health, she enrolled in graduate school. Her curiosity led her toward the urban and regional planning program, where she focused on how the built environment causes issues that people don’t always see. She spent the summer working remotely as an intern for KCI Technologies, a Nashville-based firm focused on providing custom infrastructure design and implementation for a variety of clients.

“The amazingness of urban planning is that there are so many different types of planners,” she says. “You could be a transportation planner, environmental planner, economic planner, so many types. Especially since my internship this summer, I have been leaning more into sustainable transportation and how to move people, not cars, to minimize environmental impact.”

Askins isn’t committed to staying in-state for a job after she graduates. She wants to go where the jobs are. However, she has said that the shooting this past April got her thinking about planning through the lens of public safety. She says she will be researching anti-gun violence nonprofits to work with as well.

Though her injury remains, she pushes forward, day by day, trying to find her new normal. She credits her parents with giving her the resilience to keep going.

“My mom likes to joke that I’m resilient because she and my dad were such hard-asses on me when I was a kid,” she says. “But I have been strong because they’ve also been in my corner. They’ve had my back. They’re pushing me forward when I hit a low point. When I call and say, ‘This [bad thing] happened today,’ they’re like, ‘You’ve got this. Keep going. You’re doing great. Just breathe. You’re safe. You’re capable.’”

And she’s going to take over the world.