I waited politely for my roommate to close the door behind her, and immediately broke down crying. I was in Beijing, China, on a National Security Language Initiative for Youth (NSLI-Y) exchange program; I’d never been so far from everything I knew. After a lonely night in Beijing, I was taken to Chengdu, a city of 8 million people that dwarfed everything I’d seen before. My first week there was miserable. Each morning, I woke up to check my...

Brown has classes that I’m really interested in. Bioinformatics is an emerging discipline; few schools have that class, yet Brown has courses in Computational Molecular Biology, which is exactly what I want to pursue. In addition, because of the freedom at Brown in terms of choosing one’s classes, I could learn about other things that are of interest to me-- like epigenetics (which is an amazing new field of study) or even something that’s not necessarily what...

On Christmas two years ago, my brother got a Lego Mindstorms robot and briefly got into computer programming. Seeing how much fun he was having, I gave it a try. I made an account on Scratch (scratch.mit.edu), an introductory programming website, and got hooked. I never thought I’d enjoy it, since I’ve never been “good at” computers. Turns out I couldn’t have been more wrong! I loved how everything was logical, how I could manipulate...