Sulking, I sat in the corner of my parent’s bedroom and watched my mom straighten my dad’s blue tie. My parents were getting ready for a gala at the Presidential Villa, and I was not allowed to go because children weren't invited.      “Why can’t children go?” I asked my dad, pouting.     “I can’t say. Maybe you should ask the President,” he replied, with a playful wink.     Being six years old, I took what he said literally,...

“Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.” — George Bernard Shaw A little over a year ago, my friend, Helmi, and I were having a pretty heated debate on socialism. She is Finnish, and saw socialism in a good light, and I am American, so I was a little more skeptical of it. I wasn’t socialism’s biggest fan when I left the argument, but I could recognize that my original opinion was very ill-informed. I wondered what...

I discovered Barnard College when I watched President Obama’s 2012 Commencement speech on YouTube. After seeing the video, I pored over Barnard’s website, eager to find out more about this college that I had never heard of before. Hours passed as I looked deeper into Barnard’s history, mission, and culture. Without my noticing, my fascination with Barnard turned into admiration. My admiration turned into love when I visited. During the tour, as I walked through the breathtaking campus,...

If I ever have a daughter, I will name her Kathrine. Not Catherine, or Kathryn, but Kathrine. I am so adamant about the spelling because she will be named after, in my opinion, one of the most hard-core women in history: Kathrine Switzer. Under the name ‘K.V. Switzer’, Kathrine passed through the screening process of the 1967 Boston Marathon, and through an oversight, was able to participate. During the race, an official named Jock Semple tried to physically remove her,...

I am a person who is considered to be faint of heart. I don’t like haunted houses, roller-coasters, scary movies, or anything of that sort. I even get nervous on airplanes. So you can imagine my panic when I found myself hundreds of feet above the ground on one of the many suspended bridges in Kakum National Park’s Canopy Walk, standing over one of Ghana’s largest tropical rainforests. My mind was going a mile a minute as...

“The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete.” —Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.     I am Nigerian-American, and I am very appreciative of this fact. My Nigerian heritage awards me with an exposure to the beautiful country that is Nigeria, and the cultures and traditions that it holds. My American background presents me with liberal ideals that shape the way I look at the world. But the baggage (and blessing) that comes with a dual citizenship...

“You guys are running the mile today.” These words, the worst words a person could say, came from my gym teacher on an uncharacteristically warm winter afternoon. Hearing them, I was not only heartbroken but also immensely confused. I had begged my counselor to schedule my gym class in the winter precisely because the snow usually prevented students from running the mile. But that year, unfortunately, Erie saw one of its warmest winters, and the administration decided that the conditions...

It was a cloudy day on Heritage Hills Golf Course. My teammates and I were practicing for the State Championship that would take place the next day. As expected, we were very nervous, so we were very tense. Our golf swings were not fluid, and consequently, our balls would regularly land out of bounds. As the day went on, we got even more tense and our games worsened. On the last hole of my worst round of golf of the...

Prompted by the college admissions process, I have put a lot of thought into why I want to go to college, and what I hope to gain from my college experience. The exercise of self-reflection was grueling and led to more existential crises than I am willing to admit, but I have come out on the other side, sure of what I want. I don’t want my college experience to solely comprise of the memorization and regurgitation of information....