I met Caleb, one camper in my fourth-grade troop, while volunteering as a teaching assistant for Impact Summer Camp. Despite being a veteran of wild elementary schooler antics, I was completely unprepared for the unpredictability of Caleb’s severe ADHD. By the end of day two, Caleb’s immunity to my tried and true ways of connecting with kids left me defeated. I walked into camp the following morning unsure, having surrendered my prior confidence in what to expect. Noticing his attention wandering from the lesson that afternoon, I began sketching a T-rex in the corner of his worksheet. Immediately, this piqued his interest and he remained riveted as the drawing took shape. At his eager command, an army of dinosaurs soon marched across the page. A door had swung open between us. He challenged me to tic-tac-toe on the sidelines of dreaded dodgeball tournaments and sat perched on the bench beside me during lunchtime. I began recognizing the warning signs of his agitation. I jogged laps around the playground with him, translating his energy into active movement, and just remained beside him when his restlessness drove others away. Navigating this new field exposed my initial attitude in stark contrast. Communication had seemed simple as I’d been blessed with its uncomplicated facilitation in my life: a safety net of close childhood friends, new tennis teammates I found after moving schools, and leadership positions I’d been granted. These were the comfortable spheres I remained in where communication came easily: communication on the basis of pre-existing connection. Like attracts like. I’d run roll-call that first day of camp, not only attaching names to faces, but also unwittingly assigning my assumptions about who was most similar to myself and would be easiest to communicate with. This filter only reinforced my gravitation to general homogeneity and confined my network to a bubble of sameness. My growing relationship with Caleb shattered this paradigm and the outcome shone brightly when, bouncing up and down, he introduced me to his personal caretaker, Anna. “He’s talked non stop about camp!” she told me, smiling. “I was worried because people usually struggle to communicate with him.” A burst of joy filled my heart and her words brought to life the value in releasing my subconscious avoidance of dissimilarity. Each day I had risen to new challenges and created new ways to engage Caleb in the hopes of ensuring his sense of belonging in camp. Connection on the basis of persistent communication. Like moving beyond just like. Long after camp has drawn to a close, Caleb reminds me to keep intentionally seeking the beauty of the dissimilar and to approach others with eager expectation. This passion inspires my interest in studying communication. We live in an era of mass communication where media influences not only our methods of communication, but also those we choose to communicate with. I observe different types of media’s role in preserving our spheres of likeness and feeding an appetite for kindred rhetoric. At the same time, I find myself moved by media’s fostering of diverse communication through connections experienced via different art forms, wide global range, and accessibility. I aspire to study the processes behind media in communication to understand human cognition and the behaviors that follow thereafter. The future excites me as I aim to deepen my toolbox of communication skills and analysis in the hopes of facilitating greater interpersonal exchange in an evolving world of mass media and global reach.