“Be a man,” I told myself as I gulped back tears, “don’t you dare cry.” When I was younger, my idea of manhood consisted of strutting around with my chin in the air and with my chest pushed out. Being a man meant “catch me if you can,” it meant “me against the world,” but it also meant never letting anyone see my weaknesses. To put this in perspective, I am the only child of a father who is...

I had just finished Anna Karenina when I first visited Yale. My heightened interest in Russian literature led me to Dr. Vladimir Alexandrov's mind-blowing lecture on Dostoevsky. Dr. Alexandrov spent nearly the entire class on the first page of Crime and Punishment, conducting a character analysis of Raskolnikov. I was taken with the class because I was pushed to think about concepts in totally new ways, and because I saw Yalies delighting in doing the same. This spirit of intellectualism,...

"What is a community to which you belong? Reflect on the footprint that you have left. (You may define community and footprint in any way you like.)" Last summer, I went alone to the city of Trieste. While there, I worked helping refugees from the Middle East. I both entered into the community of Italian service workers who were helping refugees, and I experienced a fractured community of people who were isolated in a culture that was completely foreign to...

"Write about something that you love to do." I learned what “catharsis” meant after hearing an interview of Scarlett Johansson on The Daily Show. I saw what a catharsis was after watching DeNiro in Raging Bull. And I felt what a catharsis was after my first theatre performance. Being an only child, I never knew what being part of a large family was like. This is partly what spawned such a deep love of theatre in me. The theatre family...