“When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.” -Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching She says something to me. I don’t understand her in the slightest. “Repeat, please?” I stumble over my words - basic, heavily-accented Russian. I am nervous. She says it again, slower this time. Her voice drapes over the vowels like satin, effortlessly shifting to accommodate the harsh consonant combinations - zhd, scht, gdh - with such grace that I forget she...

“When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.” -Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching She says something to me. I don’t understand her in the slightest. “Repeat, please?” I stumble over my words - basic, heavily-accented Russian. I am nervous. She says it again, slower this time. Her voice drapes over the vowels like satin, effortlessly shifting to accommodate the harsh consonant combinations - zhd, scht, gdh - with such grace that I forget she...

The New Jersey Scholars Program was an honor of indescribable magnitude and challenged me as I had never been challenged prior, and I will be forever grateful for the experience. However, more meaningful to me than the academics (for which I still thirst every day) were the other scholars with whom I share an unbreakable bond bred through long hours at the library, complex and wide-ranging discussions, backyard water balloon fights, late-night conversations, kindred struggles and stresses, hunger for knowledge,...

I spent five weeks during the summer of 2015 at the Lawrenceville School studying climate change through an interdisciplinary lens (including anthropology, film and literature, science and engineering, and philosophy and ethics) at the New Jersey Scholars Program. The summer of 2014, I spent nine days in Moscow as a United States representative at the Thirteenth International Olympiada of Spoken Russian. The International Olympiada occurs once every four years and I was selected as one of six high school students to participate...