History – enchanting study of our world, the way of understanding our present through knowing our past and using this information to develop our future. In school and outside I have always been an imaginative thinker and explorer, ever since I remember myself I was in love with the stories of the past, ancient cultures that shaped history and even the world's present state. Although when I was a child I never seriously thought about who I want to be in the future and I liked to gain my knowledge from all available subjects, in my heart I have always been deeply concerned with history and related studies, their interconnection and deep influence on human actions were fascinating even to my young mind. Only later I will understand that it wasn't just a hobby but a lifelong passion. I came to the U.S. from Ukraine – a country with a long and complex history. I was growing up listening to my parents’ and elders’ stories of our past, the way people lived, their hardships. From imperial serfdom to the fall of the communist state, struggle for freedom and better future has always been part of my nation’s identity and growing up in a family where the past is still carried on, it became a part of me as well. As I saw the war coming to my country, I started to think seriously about social and geopolitical interactions and all the issues that could lead to such conflicts as well as the ways we could use the knowledge of their sources to resolve them and bring peace. My personal love for exploration and learning, as well as my ever-present questions about life and how our world works, led me to my decision of going further in studying social sciences. The story of Ryan T. Herich helped me understand that I am not alone on this path and that passion for history can be a lot bigger than just a hobby. My target degree program is International Relations, it is a boundless field of study and exploration that opens doors to understanding the world through many perspectives ranging from politics and economy to history and linguistics. I want my education to not only fulfill my personal interests but to give me possibilities to become a useful global citizen. I hope to have an opportunity to make this world a better place for everyone and I see no better way for myself of doing so than by understanding the reasons and backgrounds of cultures and the world itself in order to try making this world a more friendly and suitable place for all its inhabitants. I really think that our past has all the answers for our present and future. What was present for me has now become history: there are written books on the war in Ukraine and my homeland Donbas. While I was walking the streets of my war-torn city there were people who were already studying it as a ruined memorial of the past, but I still believe it will live on. I still see history as I did as a child - beautiful and sometimes heartbreaking stories of our past - but now more than ever I can see its power in our lives. I am very grateful for my life and all those who shared with me the love of history and world cultures as they made me who I am today. I will proudly carry in my heart childhood stories and memories as I walk the path of exploration of our world’s biography.

When I was a child I never seriously thought about who I want to be in the future. I have always been a deep thinker and explorer and as a school student I have always been concerned mostly about humanities, its interconnection and deep influence on human actions, it wasn’t just a hobby but a lifelong passion. History - enchanting study of our world, the way of understanding our present through knowing our past and using this information to develop our future. Ever since I remember myself I was in love with the stories of our past. I came from a country with a long but complex history, where every old man and woman went through World War II and every family has lost someone to it. In our family history was always something more than just a topic for discussion, it was a way of communication. As children we were told stories of our ancestors and of our nation’s past from the mouths and hearts of people who carried their heritage through hardships of imperial serfdom, constant wars, and soviet era modifications of people's identities. If as a child I saw history mostly as meaningful stories and memories, now it is part of me. Being on the brink of finishing school means having to choose your life path from what you love and what you need. History is what I love and studying it is what I need. My childhood passion for knowing the past grew into a lifelong passion for understanding it and its effects on our present and future. On my own experience I saw how manipulation of historical facts and people’s pride in their heritage can play a crucial role in a whole country’s existence. I myself am a child of Russian and Ukrainian parents; I had to leave both of my “ancestral lands” for the reason of them not being able to resolve their past problems as well as being confused in their present roles. Growing up there, between two fires, and seeing my own past now from here led me to this choice of studying History and Global Studies. I really think that our past has the answers for our present and future. What was present for me few years ago has now become history: there are written books on the war in Ukraine and my homeland Donetsk. While I was walking the streets of my war-torn city there were people who were already studying it as a ruined memorial of the past. I still see history as I did as a child - beautiful and sometimes heartbreaking stories of our past - but now more than ever I can see its power in our lives. I am very grateful for my life and all those who shared with me the love of history and world cultures as they made me who I am today. I will proudly carry in my heart childhood stories and memories as I walk the path of exploration of our world’s biography.

It was already late at night. Everyone went to their beds but me. I couldn’t fall asleep under the sound of exploding bombs, I knew it was far but it didn’t feel like it in our shabby house. It was during this time in my life when I met my best friend - literature. I found in it my own world for it was one of the few things that could actually take my mind off the fearful thoughts about war. I would stay up until midnight with a book and fill my brain up with puzzling over its life-riddles. Another big contributor to my becoming a thoughtful reader was coronavirus. We stopped having school almost at the time as we moved back to my war-torn hometown. Generally speaking, I didn’t have any other teachers than books for almost a half of the year. Of course they couldn’t teach me science or mathematics, unless I read a school’s subject book, but they did a great job in teaching me thinking and understanding. From the books I’ve read - mostly classics and non-fictional stories - I learned to be thoughtful, compassionate, and astute, which was a good addition to my natural vigilance acquired during my life at war and constant instability. Books to me are not just stories - whether fiction or non-fiction - but lifelong mentors guiding me through life's incredible and enigmatic path. My first, and one of the favorite, classical authors I read was Nikolai Gogol - Ukrainian born novelist from the 19th century. His novels - where he managed to highlight my nation's social and political issues as well as drawing plots from as deep as to Ukraine's ancient beliefs and mythology - gave me a foundation for father literary exploration as well as a deeper understanding of myself and the culture I grew up within. Now, as then, I still love to stay up late reading books that make me think about life and the nature of people. And while I agree that those things are impossible to be fully understood, it is very much possible and important to keep exploring them. As we say, “Life cannot be taught, but experienced”, we cannot experience it all but, maybe for that very reason, we are given millions of books from millions of people with different experiences to gain insight into other lives and build up our own experience. My favorite place in American high school is the library, it is much bigger and more diverse than those in schools in Ukraine, so I became a library aide to spend more time with my lifelong friends puzzling with them over life's mysteries. My lifelong dream is to explore and preserve ancient history and the art of writing that above all of the others gives us the biggest view on the world’s past as well as understanding of present issues. I want to thank everyone who ever wrote a book and worked to preserve those already written for sharing with the world their piece of a big puzzle of life and for giving us, readers, a chance to take a glimpse at a bigger picture than our own lives.

I came to America in the winter of 2023. The moment I set my foot out of the airport on the land of dreams I was struck by a heat. We arrived in Arizona. Compared to the places I’ve been before it was Mars to me. I was fascinated: tree-height cactuses, I had a small one back in Ukraine - to keep it alive we kept it right above the heater; all year long summer; bunnies running around like cats in my hometown; parakeets free from cages. It seemed like a paradise after spending the last year in fear and cold in my country occupied by our neighbor. I learned from my own experience how fast we adjust to such horrid conditions like war and then forget it so fast when getting away from it. The next day I turned sixteen, but I had to become more mature than that. With such an improvement in our lives came a great responsibility to keep this improvement going. From all of my family there were only my mom and younger sister who fled. My mom is a very strong woman, but not as much to financially support us on her own. Even before starting to learn English and going to school I got my first job. Since I was already sixteen I could work full shifts together with my mother, my sister could be given only a half. Only in a few months we were enrolled in schools. That’s when it started to get even harder. I did learn English before but I’ve never been taught in it. I always loved to study, it was itself my favorite hobby, and now I had a good way to exercise my brain. But it was a tough challenge, not in math by the way - fortunately, it was mostly in “universal language”. I loved to read, and here it wasn’t that simple. As my mom always says, I always had an elastic tongue - I started to understand English on a general level by the end of my short first year in American High School. Two things that were exhausting me the most, actually helped me to become bilingual by the middle of my second year: I was learning in school and practicing it in the workplace. It wasn’t just school and work that I had to balance with, but also documentation. A big part of what is called the legalization process fell on me, the rest on my mom and our sponsor. By the time I turned seventeen I was a worker, translator, family lawyer, and student. My everyday schedule was crazy: school, then work up until night, then home to do some of my homework or deal with documents. Sometimes I felt like a zombie, but I always knew that I had to stay strong not just for myself, the remains of my family still needed me. Moreover, I knew it was much harder for my mom, besides all the other problems she had to find where to get free insulin to stay alive for us. Two years ago we moved to Texas. I stopped working by that time to dedicate all of my time to my education. This year is my last in school. My first years in America as well as the last year in Ukraine did break me in a certain way but more importantly, it gave me an understanding of price and importance of life and family. I thank a lot this life for challenging me in the way that made me who I am now.

I was born in one of the best cities in Eastern Ukraine. We had a family business - a rose farm. During the year we would all work together to grow them beautiful and healthy. When the season would come my mom would make bouquets for the market. I was getting ready for my first year of school while my younger sister had a few more years of kindergarten. What could have been better than being in a good place among loved ones? My city was among the first to face the horrible catastrophe. As our parents were finishing building a new house in the area near the airport, life was preparing for us the biggest challenge anyone could have imagined - a war. The first impact was that hospitals were cut off from medical supplies, including insulin - substance vitally important for the life of my mother. By the summer of 2014 everything was clear: life will never be the same again and there is no way we are staying for any longer. Like many refugees from an occupied territory we were forcefully evacuated to Kamchatka - the peninsula on a very northeastern edge of Russia. The ones who took our home took us as far away from it as it was possible. We were broken, but we had to stay strong! We all had dreams: my parents dreamed that we would move to the house they’ve been building on their own for eight years. It was a sturdy two-story building with a lot of land for growing even more roses than we had before. Now we had to be growing up in a strange, cold place on the far edge of the globe where we all were seen as outcasts. Everyone hoped it would be short, that in a year or two we would all be back to our homes, but with every year of ongoing conflict the hopes were fading. Were we all doomed to be afraid of who we are, to be away from our homeland? In 2020 we heard that the situation there is getting better: there was no more intense fighting, at least not in the city itself. Finally we had a chance to see our home again. We came back as soon as it was safe enough to travel. After more than six years I was standing again in the house of my childhood. Later we went to see the neighborhood where the new one was built - it wasn’t a place I would wish anyone to visit. There was no single house, wall, or surface without holes in it, everything within a mile from the airport looked like a sieve. Our home was among the very few still standing: big, white, with a big hole from an explosion, and windows blown out by the blast wave. It wasn’t just a house to us, it was a dream, a hope, the biggest step to a better life made by my parents. I am now here, and I still hope that my country has a chance for happiness. I have a dream that no one else will suffer from military conflicts. I want to major in Global Studies - studying world cultures and relations will help me gain the best understanding of what is happening around the world. This field of study relates the most to my lifelong passions, my experiences, and the possibilities I wish to achieve. I really wish to have a chance to make a good impact on the lives of my family, my nation, and humanity itself.

I am a high school tennis player. Tennis became a part of my life when I was starting my 5th grade in Ukraine, and since then, I cannot imagine my life without it. I remember the first moment when I took a tennis racket in my hands: it was a hot summer day when we learned that our local School of Olympic Reserve, a sports school that recruited young children for specific sports to be prepared for a professional sports career, opened free tryouts for the children’s tennis team. My mom brought me there with my younger sister. I wasn’t very motivated back then to be an athlete, but it was very fun to compete with the others. By the end of the tryouts me and my sister were among those who got accepted to the youngest team in the school. It wasn’t hard for me to balance sport with my schoolwork, for me always being kind of fast in academics, I wanted more pressure and I got it. It was the war that gave me the obstacles to being an athlete. When I turned 14, it was the end of my free education at the sports school, and my family had no choice but to discontinue my lessons. I was stopped from continuing my professional sports career, but I wasn’t stopped from playing. Though it wasn’t the same for keeping my skills up to the same level I had, I kept playing when there was a safe moment and a safe place to do that, but with every year, there were fewer and fewer of those moments. Finally, in 2023, we got a chance to come to the United States due to the full-scale invasion of my country. For the first year, I had to give all of myself to helping my mom support us in a new country. I became a student in an American high school where I barely understood a single word, and I had to balance it with work to gain us financial resources. It was only in 11th grade when I finally got a good chance to get back to athletic life and take the racket in my hands again. Now I am at the start of my senior year and going to try for the varsity team, which I think will suit me better than being a senior in JV. It would be wrong for me to say that it was as easy to stay good in both sports and academics for a junior as it was for a middle school student, but I always enjoyed challenges. Sometimes, especially when I had a test on the same day as a tennis match, I thought that maybe now it is time for me to choose between those two my only path, but with every victory, with every 100 on a test, I understood that I am able to follow both paths to my overall success.