Here I stood; in the gymnasium hundreds of middle schoolers stared down on me, their gaze slicing into me as if by a thousand daggers. The room spun. Agonizingly, the question: “Using your map provided, locate the state with the largest soybean crop in 2009.” What was this? Crop yields are not geography. My mouth went dry, my vision blurred. The map’s lines dissolved into a gray morass. “Iowa?” Ahnt! Wrong. “No, the answer is Illinois.” Down I sat. Defeated....

By treating the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence as constantly evolving documents, individual rights and liberties grow seriously threatened. The only true way for these documents to remain relevant and protect individual freedom is a return to these documents’ original intent, as suggested by Associate Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. The Constitution lays out a perfectly clear form of government: three branches of equal power, designed to be small enough to preserve individual freedom...

I wish I would have applied early action to...

I really advise high school students...

Seek out teachers you have had for multiple years and...