Halfway through collecting data for my eighth grade science fair project, I realized my findings would produce no meaningful results. A fourteen-year-old middle school student embarking on my first attempt at science research, I could have given up, and nearly did, but I decided to make adjustments and include more data. That single decision changed the course of my high school career and has steered me toward a future of further research. By altering my procedure, I found real results...

To me, Columbia’s diversity is its most attractive attribute. This diversity, internal among students and professors, and external in the City of New York, enables each budding intellectual to be surrounded by a vast range of academic perspectives. As a Columbia student, I would look forward to the conversations in the dormitory with possibly an international student from Istanbul, perhaps a first-generation college student from Arkansas, maybe an African American student from Oregon, and myself, a white, Jewish-American student...

List the books you read for pleasure in the past year:: Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, Elie Wiesel’s Night, Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, Rene Descartes’s Meditations List the required readings you enjoyed most in the past year:: Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Harry Mulisch’s The Assault, T.H. White’s The Once and Future King List the print and/or electronic publications you read regularly::...

Additional Information (Abstract of research paper written in 2009): Carbon Sinks to Carbon Sources: A Soil Analysis of the Colorado Mountain Pine Beetle Infestation Research Abstract As the Mountain Pine Beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae) infestation progresses eastward across the continental divide, it threatens Ponderosa Pine trees on the eastern side of the divide. This study aims to understand the effect the impending infestation could have in the future on a soil-carbon level. The analysis began by taking soils from Lodgepole Pine Trees...