Ever since I was in third grade, I knew I was being called to become a lawyer. Our nation's law simply spoke to me - founded in justice, structured with integrious organization - it was exactly what I wanted to do with my life. As I got older and my education began to take more of a direction, I drew closer and closer to the idea of constitutional law: because I grew up classically educated, the stories of history were eternally dancing in my mind, and writing for this purpose for our country was something I felt that I was well-equipped to do. However, as I matured even more in my academic experience and excitedly approached the brink of college decision-making, I realized that this also had one other major implication for my life: I would be spending a lot of money on my cherished future education. Not only would I be going to get my bachelor's degree - a double major, in fact - but I would from there get to go on to law school, hopefully a prestigious one, with very minimal paid work experience (read: only unpaid internships) in between. This was huge. I was looking at debt that registered in the hundreds of thousands by the time I was done, and this was before I even had a car, or a house, or an interest rate. I knew in my heart that my dream school was the only one to get me where I wanted to go, and I wasn't willing to hold myself to a lower standard, but the dream came with a crushing price tag. Why, then? The answer, again, traces back to my third-grade co-op classroom, with two lawyers from Philadelphia coming out to watch my first mock trial in a Pittsburgh courthouse. My career - what I feel like I am being called to do, what would make my heart sing, where I know I can best serve our country - is as a justice on our Supreme Court. And if that is truly where I am going, I am willing to work to get there - whether that means working four to five hours a day at my local law firm, spending my spare time promoting my writing initiative and two completed novels to publishers, or applying relentlessly for scholarships which I have not yet received, I will work for this dream until it comes true.

Since as long as I can remember, my life has been spent using the talents that I have been blessed with in a plethora of activities and events, each coming and going in a flurry of busyness as I went from one year of my life to the next - serving my community, trying new activities, and generally seeing everything that God has blessed me with extend out into my family, friends, church, and beyond. It has always been the standard - my education was primary to my parents since I was born, and I have grown up in an environment rich with opportunity for growth. Whether it was the growth from being in elementary school and devouring books to being in high school and writing and publishing two novels of my own, or the blossoming of racing from sport to sport when I was younger to instructing as a second degree black belt in Tang Soo Do now, I have always been used to using the talents I have been given to the best of my ability. And yet as I got older, the activities that I was involved in started growing from simply a way to develop myself to a way that I could invest in the development in others. In middle school, when I was a green belt in my martial arts, I began coming to junior ranks' classes at my studio to help out younger students - sometimes attending classes for a few hours in an evening, several days a week. As I grew older and moved up in rank, my tasks and the time that I could spend investing in my students grew - so that now, as a black belt of almost three years, it gives me so much joy when I step out onto the floor to run a class, enjoy camaraderie with my students, or invest in the younger ones or the ones that need some extra help. Each evening is unique, but some things I have learned to expect: a student with Down syndrome breaking into a huge smile when they see I'm on the mat, perhaps, or a student trying a little harder after I quietly correct them on the side, and the respect that I have been blessed with from my students replicating itself in the respect I have for my own instructor. It is these types of experiences - instructing martial arts, for instance, or the always welcome surprises when I learn that my published works have inspired my students to begin writing their own stories - that drive me to step into other peoples' lives and try to reflect that beacon of light into them as well. Within my goals to graduate with majors in Christian philosophy and political science, go onto earn my juris doctorate degree, and serve our country on our Supreme Court, I would love to set up a charity for the growth of the students of our country into strong Christians, patriots, and members of their communities. Any children could join - it would be their support, their place to come and learn, to play games with friends, to learn from teachers who have earned their trust, and a place that grows within them strength they could bring to their nation and beyond.

My whole childhood and education, I have been blessed to grow up in an environment where work - good work, with a strong work ethic to back it up - is the rule, not the exception. In a world where technology and the promise of new innovations are making it increasingly easy to delegate work or put it off indefinitely, a community, or even a family, who has a durable sense of what it means to put in work for a goal, to invest time and true effort to improve our character, is of inestimable value. And like Kalia, this commitment has impacted not only my character but, by extension, the accomplishments that I have been able to achieve: putting in the work, for instance, not only to complete two full-length upper middle grade novels, but to design, format, and self-publish one; or expending the effort over a seven year journey to earn my second degree black belt; or committing myself over the past four years of my high school experience to earning As on courses that will count toward my college credits next year. This is how I know that students with this sense of commitment to work would have similar values - like Kalia, I have known good effort both mentally and physically, and I have seen it pay off. As much as hard work is a value to be treasured, however, I know that it does not always, in fact, come to fruition. Earlier this school year, I had applied for a prestigious scholarship at my top choice school that, if I was to be awarded it, would mean no student debt, unique relationships with faculty, and academic excellence in cohorts that I would not have access to otherwise. I polished my application to a bulletproof shine, studying endlessly for standardized tests so that my scores could reflect my academics, working and reworking my beloved application essay, clarifying my resume and extracurricular explanations, and practicing interviewing for the on-campus interview event in early December. It was the hard work that I have always appreciated and that Kalia stands as a beacon of. And yet, in this instance, it didn't turn out. Despite how confident I had been in my application, despite how jubilant I had been at my interview, I opened up my email inbox one day to see the customary 'I regret to inform you...'. In regards to planning for my future, it was devastating. It meant that the funds that I had counted on to receive this strong education that the school offered were no longer available. And yet, thanks to God and this dependable work ethic of mine and Kalia's, I was far from despondent. As I told my parents, this just meant one thing - that I would have to work harder for it than I originally thought I would; I was not willing to hold myself to a lower standard now because it is not as simple as I thought it would be. In this journey, people like Kalia are the people who I would want to have at my side: people who have seen these things and have still committed to working through them. In this way, Kalia was, truly, a cornerstone of dedication in everything she did, and it is that kind of person that I strive to be: a person of fidelity, a person of kindness, and, more than anything, a person of unquenchable joy.

There are not many sports, or many sporting facilities, that give their coaches the opportunity both to train a young competitor who will win medals in tournament circuits around their area and to invest in a dedicated student with Down syndrome on the same training mats, or to let their instructors shape the social, intellectual, and physical skills of a 2-year-old and then, in the next half-hour, explain the intricacies of the same sport to an adult student. I was blessed, however, to find a place where all of these and more are not only possible but are common, and it has shown me, more than anything else, just how much impact one coach - one teacher - can make. I started martial arts when I was nine years old, unsure of what exactly it consisted of but glad that I knew a friend there who I could work with. It wasn't until I earned my black belt five years later, however, that my journey in instructing really began - now, I was in the world of planning lessons, leading classes, approaching students, and assuming the responsibility of passing on the curriculum to the younger belt ranks. And in any other sport - any other studio, really - this might have been more or less of a cookie-cutter task, but my studio was no cookie-cutter studio, and my head instructor was no cookie-cutter teacher. If you met Miss Tiff, you would know it: she knew how to command the respect of the kids, investing so much into not only their martial arts journey but their character as well. Her way represented the right way to do things - the things that made sense - and she made a point to talk to the students not as means to an end but as kids who would learn a valuable life skill every class, even if the object lesson was only a front punch. This was not just for the special needs students, either; it was for every kid, be it the ten-year-old who couldn't stand still for more than ten seconds, the five-year-old who could already count to thirty in Korean and kick above his head, or the two-year-old who only wanted to hide behind the bags. Needless to say, but more importantly than anything to me, this atmosphere and this style of instructing impacted me - and, by extension, my teaching style - irrevocably. It was one thing to live with the conviction that every child, every student, was worth talking to with the same seriousness that one would converse with an adult, because that is how they would learn in a situation - and, indeed, too few people take the time to realize this. And yet it is another thing entirely to realize that each individual encounter with a student can impact how they think about their life, giving them structure that they may have not had otherwise or steering their perspective on their own behavior and self-discipline to one that will invariably set them up for success. When a child comes to my studio, I know that they are going to walk out in five years a stronger person physically - but even more than that, I know that they are going to be changed forever in how they view themselves and their actions. And so I work toward this, not only in my studio, but with every child I see - to not let any child believe in their own irresponsibility, but to help them grow themselves in structure and in truth, in martial arts and beyond.

I truly never thought I would do it. All my life, I had written snippets - short stories about flying horses and poems about talking train cars, for instance - but I never really thought that I would finish my first full-length middle grade novel, all 32,000 words of it, and I certainly didn't think that I would get to the point where I would self-publish it. But that was exactly what happened. Fourteen years old, right before the school year started, I found myself pressing the big gray button and watching the yellow 'In Progress' turn to 'Live'. It was a journey, certainly; I had been working on the novel for over a year, and self-publishing a book, it turns out, is a lot of work: designing the cover and title, sizing the cover art, formatting the interior, compiling a synopsis and logline, and doing everything else that needed to be done in order for my book to become, well, a book. Writing was a joy to me, however, and it was only three months after the official publication of The Wisher's Granddaughter that I began working on my second novel. This one, over twice as long and with a plot and setting that I absolutely relish even the thought of writing about, excites me tens upon tens of times more than the first one ever did - this book is my pride and joy, as far as authorship goes. And yet, almost six months after the final draft was completed, I have not yet published it. Why? This one, the one that I have put so much effort into, is the one that I have hopes - however faint and distant, or however utopian - of traditionally publishing. I have poured a lot of time and work into the creation of this world, these characters, and my plot, and it would make my heart sing to see it in the hands of a traditional, or even an independent, publisher, putting it out into the world on their terms. Even for an author who is already self-published, this dream can seem, at times, like little more than a cloud with silver lining, however. Thousands upon thousands of submissions are seen by editors at one publishing company alone, whose inboxes and mailboxes are more often closed than not, and many of these solicited by highly vetted, professional agents who have done nothing but promote these books for the past thirty years. Even if a submission were to get in, then, it would take being, somehow, at the right place at the right time so that an editor might see it, a logline bright enough to catch their attention, and a cover letter accurate enough to make them stay. Sheer chance is the puppeteer behind many of these works, unfortunately, as well as a twisty publishing industry that moves so quickly that one blink is all it would take for an opportunity to be gone forever. Nevertheless, I have hardly stopped preparing my cover letter since the moment my novel was finished. I have worked and reworked my biography, synopses, genre tags, and marketing plans so much that it is a wonder I can think straight about it at all, and this time of waiting until the company opens submissions back up in 'spring of 2026' seems like it will never end. Even when the time comes, as I try to grasp for this goal of publication, it does seem just out of reach - but inspiring enough yet that I will - I must - keep aspiring to it.

As any church-going teen might agree, even beginning to describe God - and, by extension, my relationship with Him - is so multifaceted that even the most scintillating and brilliantly-cut diamond would be put to shame. I am no exception: His role as Father, Friend, King, Protector, Savior, Shepherd, Lord, and Helper has found its way into every aspect of my life, and especially since I started high school, has been my foundation. As I continue in my high school journey, however, and start to put one foot into the world of college admissions, it is His role of navigator that has been more prominent than ever in my life, whether it is in clarity in determining my future vocation and majors, finding which college He is calling me to, or something as small as knowing whether I should join this club or apply for this job. It is hard, needless to say, to relinquish that control over what will become my pride and joy for the rest of my career, but I know this is the time that I truly acknowledge that His way is better and that these plans will be what enables me to work for His glory and for the good of myself and my neighbors. It started, surprisingly enough, when I was in third grade, participating in the mock trial that my mom had organized for me and fellow members of my homeschool co-op. It was then and there that I knew a lawyer was what I wanted to be - and I know now, although I couldn't realize then, that this was more than just desire, it was the passion of a calling that could only come from God, my Navigator. Since then - another mock trial, the completion and publication of two full novels, a second-degree black belt, and countless essays later - my resolve to serve in our country's judicial system has only strengthened, and with it has come the specificity of ambition to go into constitutional law and serve on our Supreme Court. What better way, I ask myself whenever I am excited about college, to spread the Gospel than to be spreading it from where our society starts? Government, as much as many people may complain, is a gift of justice and of organization from God - not in that He gives power of few over many, and not that He desires the conflict that many people associate with government, but that he would bless some of the citizens of His kingdom on earth with the talents and passions necessary to lead and direct their brothers and sisters in Christ. As a consequence, with this goal in mind, my education both now and moving forward cannot be otherwise than steeped in faith and innocently trusting God's - my Navigator's - plan. I have been blessed to know since a young age what I wanted to become, and this has always directed my education to an extent - going into college and choosing my major, I cannot help but look forward to more of what I have done in the past, still trusting and following. And my faith is more important than ever now, with my choice of career not only requiring a strong and intentional education but also an even stronger and more intentional faith (and, by extension, set of biblical values). I know, therefore, that my faith will not wane from here - it will just be built stronger and stronger, by His grace - so that I may take it with me now, in college, and beyond.

If I were lucky enough to be put in a situation where I was writing a biography of myself, I would, without a doubt, title it 'Wordsmith'. Writing - and reading, for that matter - is an experience as integral to who I am as it is integral to the life of the mind; an act of using the talents and passions that God has given me – just for fun! It is, really and truly, honorable to be utilizing these interests and giving them out into the world for other people to enjoy, just so that other people can read these new stories and be introduced to these new characters that I wanted to put out to my audience. Writers, as a category, are meant to create with words, not simply absorb them - it is that feeling of knowing that these characters belong to the author and the author only when they visit your imagination in hopes that you might bring them to life for the rest of the world, yet also that act of bringing these characters alive for the readers so that the characters can be their friends too - because until they read our words, they never existed. As much as I might wax poetic about words themselves, it is just as thrilling to put them into action - like I did first when I was fourteen with the authorship and self-publication of a 31,000-word upper middle grade fantasy, The Wisher's Granddaughter, and again only a few months ago with the completion of a 64,000-word fantasy titled The Secrets of Knusaijax. I have spent hours upon hours taking words and turning them into not only worlds but characters, settings, magic, ships and swords, books and bookstores, antagonists and protagonists, and everything else from A to Z because this is what writing means to me. And if this is what it means to me, there is no chance that I am going to simply stop when I get to college - there will always be that spark of creating new worlds, and, in my spare time, that joy of writing simply for fun. Moreover, as I pursue my intended double major of political science and Christian philosophy, writing will continue to be an integral part not just of my extracurricular life but of my academic life as well, even more so as I continue on into my dream career of serving as a justice on the Supreme Court - writing, of course, all the while. Writing and reading are a fundamental part of what I have done and who I am (see www.abbyramaley.wixsite.com/author), and I will take that with me through the last semester of high school, into college, and beyond.

I have always known - or, almost always; since the third grade - that I wanted to become a constitutional lawyer, going on to serve as a justice on our country's Supreme Court, interpreting our beloved Constitution and upholding its structure and tradition. To my delight, my path has been paved as a road to that career - I have always been homeschooled and classically educated, growing up with books as my friends, words as my trade, and the passion for finding any place to improve my disciplined sense of morality (founded, of course, on the most beloved document of all - the Bible). As a student, I was learning about the ancient Mesopotamian societies in the Fertile Crescent and the rise and fall of the Babylonian, Assyrian, Persian, Ottoman, Greek, and Roman empires (among many others) before I knew that it was unusual to love to delve into, much less know, many of these - and that has made a lasting mark on who I am and who I will become. Multiple mock trials, the authorship and publication of two upper-middle-grade novels, a seven-year second-degree black belt, and many, many persuasive essays later, I find myself on the brink of what will be, God willing, the first step forward in a career in political science as I find myself being accepted to colleges whose programs, I'm sure, will give me the foundation to grow and blossom into a compelling leader and interpreter of our Constitution. These lessons that I have learned - the classes that I have taken, the stories that I have been told, the research that I have done, the challenges that I have participated in - not only cultured me, but are now a fundamental part of who I am. Everybody knows the saying that history repeats itself - with the eternal stories of history dancing in my mind, it is as if I am learning from it every day, and I know that it will provide me with a wonderful place to start and stop in any career, especially one in political science. I find that it is not enough, however, for me to be well-founded in an establishment of history and culture; in a career like one in political science, especially with the aim of the Supreme Court in working with our Constitution, I must be willing to speak persuasively in defense of the disciplined values, both politically and morally, that I have developed and must necessarily continue to develop. Fortunately for me, however, nothing sets my soul on fire more than to be the person to act, firstly as a beacon of God, and secondly for the purpose of leaving a positive mark on our judicial system and the people it represents. It is this, more than anything else, that gives me my fuel to make a lasting impact on history for our country and for, by extension, the world. I would love for our Constitution to be my life's work, and, by extension, the preservation of this country so that it will shine for another two hundred and fifty years. The best part? Given these lessons that I have, I know that I will be able to do it to my fullest extent, in high school, college, and beyond.

For the past several years, I have been blessed to act as an active part of instructing at my local martial arts studio. From the first time that I stepped on the mat to now, as a black belt testing for my second degree this weekend, I have always felt at home there, and it has grown even since then into an absolutely incredible culture and atmosphere that I am simply proud to be a part of. This is easily understood; after all, we are one of the only martial arts studios around that creates an atmosphere where students with special needs can come and thrive, even alongside other students. Some of my favorite students to work with are those who take a little bit of extra time and help to get where they need to go physically and mentally - the students with Down syndrome, Aspergers, autism, or similar special needs. Although they can see the other students surrounding them, as likely as not, catching on to the concept of the curriculum or material quicker or more easily than they do, it is so inspiring to see their joy and how much they themselves persevere - and when they eventually do understand, it makes me so proud as an instructor to see how proud they are. Even with students who come in just as younger kids and who are trying to understand these concepts that we are presenting to them, it is beautiful to watch them grow from a timid 4-year-old to a focused 10-year-old testing for his or her black belt. Watching the students' lives be impacted not only by martial arts but by the discipline, confidence, and sense of community that it garners as well is something priceless. However, this is not to say that it is easy to present this material to these students. More often than not, it takes months of continuous repetition by the same people in the same way and the same context for something to be changed, or for something to be learned, or for some concept to be fully understood by my students - both the special needs students and the ones who learn more typically. And that is only to be expected - most of the students are kids, and they are having fun at karate just as much as they are being productive, and that is a good thing. For that reason, as much as it can be tedious to keep working with them toward their next goal, that makes it all the more special to see that happen while they are enjoying themselves as well.