As a student and an athlete, I have had many experiences requiring leadership and compassion. In my opinion, the best way in which individuals can demonstrate these traits is to extrapolate their own experiences and apply their knowledge and interests to a variety of diverse situations. In my years playing hockey, I experienced many different team dynamics. This included seasons of pure joy with teammates who would become lifelong friends, and it included a year where I was ignored by most of the other players. While this experience was awful at the time, I was able to learn so much from it. In my last few years playing, when I earned the position of captain, I remember seeing a girl sitting in the corner of the dressing room not talking to anyone. Some of the girls mentioned she was standoffish and rude. However, I remembered how I must have seemed to an onlooker during the time I was on a team where I didn’t feel included. By simply sitting next to her and asking how her day was she completely opened up, started smiling, and telling me all about herself. In high school, I worked as a peer tutor to help younger students with classes I had been successful in. It was easy to help them understand complicated topics that I had previously struggled with by working with them to find analogies or connections to their life as my favourite teachers had done with me. While I had a completely different learning style and life experiences compared to the students I was helping, I learned from them and from my past to find a way that was best for their understanding. When looking at the bigger picture, the skill of applying one's own experiences to life holds even greater weight.

My earliest childhood memory would undoubtedly involve a John Williams score.The only debate would be if that score was playing over an unsuspecting New England town in Jaws or a prehistoric beast dashing through a lush, green island forest in Jurassic Park. Is five years old too young to see these ‘monsters’ terrorizing innocent people? In my case, I would say no. Watching these movies hundreds of times over, I became fascinated, fixated even, on the art of film, music, the cinematography, effects, and writing. All of it coming together to create what, to me, is the ultimate physical manifestation of genius and hard work combined. My experiences in cinema have led me to discover my passions. Everything I love, am intrigued by, and hope to be has stemmed from my experiences with film. Movies and television are a universal language which can convey not only a storyline, but emotion. They can make you feel something .A sense of dread can be injected directly into the stomach of the audience with a simple tilt of the camera, or a quick drag of a bow across a violin string. A deep connection can be formed with concepts born from someone else’s thoughts, all while simply sitting in a theater for one hundred and thirty minutes. All of these feelings can be evoked at the will of the director. They control our emotions and capture our attention. We get lost in their worlds and never want to leave. Movies are often perceived as an escape from real life, however I have found them to bleed into my reality, blur the lines between them, and become a part of them. Rather than pull me from my life, they have become a major part of it, and have influenced it in every possible aspect.