11:30 P.M., July 5, 2007: Four hundred teenagers stand in a courtyard at the Timothy Dwight dorms on the Yale campus in New Haven, shivering and attempting to ignore the cold raindrops pelting down on their shoulders and faces. They link arms, staring up at the curtained windows shielding the faces of authority. These teenagers are making a statement. They are standing up for their beliefs and fighting on behalf of someone else’s. They are proving the JSA (Junior Statesman of America) camp slogan: “Democracy is not a spectator sport”...
Every summer, for as long as I can remember, I have spent time at my grandmother’s house in the Adirondacks. The summer before my sixteenth birthday was no different from past summers but I felt unnaturally listless. Something about the Adirondacks had always filled me with a vigor I could not quite place, but that particular summer my adolescent disinterest in the ‘simple things’ kicked into high gear. Everything about my grandmother’s quaint home felt boring...
I was surrounded by big, bad seniors.These were not your average bullies -- none extorted lunch money, most wore glasses, and all could name more E.M. Forster novels than members of the football team.
No, these were quizbowl bullies. The A team. And for two hours after school, they laid waste to all in their path...
I bent the glowsticks sharply--snapsnapsnap--and brilliant rushes of orange, yellow, and blue flowed through the tubes. I raised the phosphorescent bundle over my head and walked into the surging crowd of kids streaming into the Dickinson College auditorium for the last dance of that session of CTY—and my final dance of my ten years with the program. “Glowsticks!” I bellowed...
Looking back, I feel pretty bad for Wendy.
All she’d done was play dodgeball with me at camp—but she had talked to me (at least briefly) and had cute freckles. Based solely on this, I determined that I was uncompromisingly, head-over-heels in love, and that my ten-year-old soul had found its perfect match...
I had always viewed my passion for economics and psychology as star-crossed lovers because I never thought that the rigid, math-oriented form of economics would allow for the free, thought-driven nature of psychology. But now I believe that Cornell University’s economics major, especially behavioral economics, could be the perfect course to help me align these two lovers and foster these interests simultaneously...
My dad always teased, “You are a creation of your own. Limits could never stop my little girl. When you were three, you became a bird, soaring on the swings. When you were seven, you became a world-class cook, helping your mother with Thanksgiving dinner. When you were thirteen, you became a teacher, drawing and scribbling on the whiteboard while teaching your little brother Pre-Algebra. I wonder what my little girl will become next.”
His little girl is now eighteen and has become her own GPS...
Where I’m from, if you speak even close to proper English, you “speak white.” If you correctly put a sentence together, use a subject, a predicate, and all its modifiers, you have transgressed a cultural boundary. If you elaborate on an issue using diction so colorful that it manages to raise the eyebrows of every person in the room, you have lost immediate racial connection to those around you and joined the ranks of the Caucasian majority...
I glance across my room and see the remnants of past hobbies...
Framed on the wall is a picture of a pale lotus that, from afar, looks like it was drawn by hand but was really the final product of an entire summer's worth of embroidery. Placed cozily between a bookshelf and a little arrangement of paper cutouts is an oil painting of my favorite baby cousin tumbling in the snow...
{Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences}
I hear the buzz of chitchat around me as I pause my tour at the Norris University Center. I realize that this day has left me oddly surprised. I had expected Northwestern and its mysterious Victorian Gothic structures to exude a lofty sort of feel, but with its brick walls and stained glass amid the hurly-burly of daily life, Northwestern doesn’t feel remote; it feels alive...
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