When You Grow Up As a semi-professional teenager, I've had a lot of experience over the years observing adults in their natural habitats. And though I have found that, for the most part, adults are just larger adolescents with more stable incomes, they possess one peculiarity that never fails to perplex me: they only ever want to know about teenagers' futures. They want to know where we're going and when we'll get there and, quite frankly, it's a little exhausting...

So I was waitlisted at both Cornell and Rice, and in the meantime committed to Carnegie Mellon. I wasn't sure if I wanted to pursue both Cornell and Rice and feel honest/put my whole effort into both, so I focused on Cornell. After being waitlisted there, I emailed the admissions office twice with updates on my life/achievements since I had applied, and...

I feel like Cornell gets the reputation a lot of the time of being in the middle of nowhere, being really isolated, and being cold. And while these are all kind of valid, it really isn't lifeless or boring at all, probably because of how big the campus/student body is. There really is something for everyone here (I know it sounds cliche, but I met so many people here just during the first week whom...

It really was a tough decision for me between Carnegie Mellon after I had committed there and Cornell. At CMU, I had been accepted into a pretty prestigious program in a field I thought I wanted to go into, and I had already grown attached to my vision of the future that had me there. However, obviously I also felt strongly about Cornell, and having the opportunity to study there, and I was absolutely...

I had three recommendation letters which I sent to every school: one from my guidance counselor, one from my 11th grade chemistry teacher, and one from my 11th grade honors English teacher. I made sure to pick teachers that both taught different subject matters (as opposed to two humanities or two science/math teachers) that I knew on a personal level and in whose classes I had done...