When I was little, I believed books had souls. I remember standing at the Scholastic Book Fair in our school gym. The books were stacked like little prize towers, and I felt guilty that I couldn't take every single one home. It was the Toy Story problem. What if the books knew nobody picked them? What if they were sad? Not on my watch. Obviously, the only reasonable solution was to buy as many as my parents would allow. That usually meant two or three. One year, I was drawn to the drawings and comedy of Diary of a Wimpy Kid. Embarrassing confession: I think Greg Heffley may have been my first crush. I became obsessed. Bad day? Diary of a Wimpy Kid. Something to read before bed? Diary of a Wimpy Kid. I would find parts I thought were hysterical and read them out loud to my parents, who were probably less entertained than I was. After I had practically read Greg Heffley to pieces, I would beg for the next book and start all over again. I even read them in the shower. I would stand under the water holding the book outside the stream, turning a fifteen-minute shower into thirty and probably making my parents regret ever taking me to that book fair. Books weren't only something I brought home. I grew up exploring public libraries in Tarzana, Studio City, Burbank, Northridge, and eventually Simi Valley. I especially loved the staff-pick shelves. They felt like treasure maps. Out of thousands of books, someone who spent all day surrounded by them had chosen one and said, Start here. When I was eight, I worried about one lonely book sitting unchosen. Now I think about a library and my brain practically glitches at the choices. Thousands of stories, thousands of little pieces of people waiting for somebody to find them. As I got older, I understood more of what was happening when I read. Someone I had never met had made something, put it into the world, and somehow it had ended up in my hands. Their characters became part of my childhood. Their jokes became jokes I repeated at the dinner table. Something that began in someone else's imagination became part of mine. Books taught me stories can change how you see yourself and others. They sneak into the way you think, the jokes you tell, even the life you picture for yourself. They follow you around. Maybe that was what eight-year-old me was trying to figure out. I started as a reader, but eventually I wanted to make stories too. I began writing, acting, creating plays, and choreographing. Now I'm studying creative writing and Integrated Arts at Oberlin, exploring how stories reach people. I want storytelling to be what I do. Maybe that's what I've always loved about libraries: thousands of voices waiting for someone to find them. I don't know yet whether the stories I create will become novels, plays, films, or something I haven't discovered yet. I want to spend my life finding new ways to make someone laugh, think, feel understood, or just forget about a terrible day for a little while. And one of my quiet dreams is ridiculously specific: someday, somewhere, I want a librarian to put something I wrote on a staff-pick shelf. Maybe a kid will stumble across it, carry it around until the pages start falling apart, and annoy their parents by reading the funny parts out loud. I don't worry anymore about the books left behind at the book fair. But I still think books have souls.

When I was sixteen, I realized I wanted to run a movie studio in Hollywood. I was obsessed with Walt Disney, then Sherry Lansing, then Bob Iger. They were entertainment titans, and I wanted to stand up there on that Mount Olympus. There was just one problem: ENTERTAINMENT MOGUL is not a college major. So I started reverse-engineering the people who had already made the climb. I started with Bob Iger, but not the Bob Iger who ran Disney. I went backward until I found him at eighteen, studying television and radio at Ithaca College, then traced his path through ABC, production, management, and increasingly larger responsibilities. Sherry Lansing's roadmap was different. She studied English and mathematics, taught high school, acted, became a script reader, and worked through development and production until she became the first woman to head a major Hollywood studio. The job titles changed, but certain skills kept appearing: storytelling, production, money, leadership, and understanding how an idea gets to an audience. Iger broke open the machine and showed me the guts. Lansing proved there is no single starting point. So I’m digging deep into the creative side first, then I’ll add production, business, and leadership experience. This fall, I begin Oberlin College's five-year BA/BFA Integrated Arts program. During my first two years, I will strengthen my writing, acting, film, and production skills. This semester, I plan to write a screenplay and apply to Oberlin's Columbia Pictures-sponsored Screenwriters Intensive, where students develop scripts with professional writers and mentors. Years two through four, I plan to use Oberlin's Obiewood Entertainment Network to pursue internships in development and production and build relationships with industry alumni and mentors. I want to learn how scripts are evaluated, projects financed, productions budgeted, and work distributed. I will produce my own projects, where I’ll have to manage the money, the people, the schedule, and the creative decisions myself. Before I ask someone to trust me with millions of dollars and hundreds of employees, I should prove I can be responsible for hundreds of dollars and a handful of people. In my final year in Cleveland, I will use Park Arts' 24-hour studio and production facilities, an internship, and my public-facing capstone to take a project from concept through execution while managing collaborators, deadlines, and resources. Money is another part of my plan. My first year at Oberlin costs $92,162. Oberlin grants and scholarships reduce that by $59,358, including a $24,000 annual merit scholarship renewable throughout my five-year program. I have earned another $1,250 in outside scholarships, leaving $31,554 to fund. My family will contribute as much as circumstances allow, but I don't want to assume they can carry that burden for five years. I plan to get a campus job and continue pursuing outside scholarships before borrowing whatever remains. Each semester, I will recalculate the gap and borrow only what is uncovered. My goal is to graduate owing as little as possible. Every dollar I don't have to repay is a dollar I can invest in my future: moving for the right opportunity, creating work, saving, or eventually building a company. After graduation, I will look for the job that teaches me the most in development, production, or as an assistant. If a studio path does not open immediately, I can build the same skills through independent film, theatre, or projects I produce myself while pursuing studio work. I cannot predict which path up the mountain will be mine. But I can reverse-engineer what I need for the climb, plan my work, and work my plan.

Before Sabrina Carpenter was selling out arenas and topping music charts, she was Maya Hart. Like a lot of girls my age, I grew up watching Girl Meets World with my mom. At first, I loved Maya because she was funny. Then I realized there was something deeper about her character. While so many shows focus on romance and drama, what I remember most is the friendship between Maya and Riley. No matter what happened, their friendship mattered more than fighting over a boy. As a kid, that message stuck with me. As I got older, I followed Sabrina Carpenter beyond Disney Channel. Songs like "Espresso" are fun, but what really drew me in was her sense of humor. I still laugh every time I watch her perform "House Tour." The song is clever, absurd, full of innuendo, and completely committed to the bit. Sabrina understands something that every performer hopes to learn: if you're going to tell a story, tell it with confidence. One thing I never expected to learn from Sabrina Carpenter had nothing to do with music at all. Growing up, I was often self-conscious about my height. At 5'2", I sometimes felt small in a world that seemed to reward people for taking up more space. As a dancer and actor, I spent years standing in audition rooms comparing myself to everyone around me. Then I learned that Sabrina Carpenter is barely five feet tall. It sounds silly, but it genuinely mattered to me. Here was someone who wasn't trying to make herself seem bigger. She wasn't apologizing for who she was. She was simply walking into every room with confidence and talent. Seeing that helped me realize that success has nothing to do with height and everything to do with believing that your voice deserves to be heard. That realization hit me again while watching Sabrina's Coachella performance on YouTube. At first, I was watching Sabrina. Then I started watching the crowd. Thousands of people were singing every word and laughing at every joke, as if she were a friend they had known for years. Nobody in that crowd was there because she had tried to become someone else. They were there because she trusted exactly who she already was. As a dancer, actor, writer, and future theatre student, that is the lesson I hope to carry with me. Sabrina Carpenter never taught me how to be taller. She taught me that I didn't need to be.

By the time rehearsal ends, my knees are bruised, my feet ache, and my arms are sore from throwing myself onto the stage floor for the same eight counts again and again. Most people do not picture that when they hear "student-athlete." They picture a field, a court, a track, or a scoreboard. I picture a rehearsal room with fogged mirrors, music cutting in and out, and someone's water bottle rolling across the floor while we start over from the top. Dance has been my sport for as long as I can remember. I started as a toddler and do not remember learning how to dance. I just remember always knowing that my body was expected to work hard. During a normal week, I balance dance class, rehearsal, homework, and a full AP schedule. During tech weeks, rehearsal can stretch to six hours a day. By the end of high school, I had spent months inside ten different shows. The audience sees the final three-minute number. They do not see the hundred failed run-throughs before it, the late nights finishing assignments after rehearsal, or the mornings when I had to show up to school sore and tired anyway. For a long time, I thought being good at dance meant being the strongest person in the room. Then I started choreographing. Choreographing forced me to stop thinking only about my own performance. I had to teach movement count by count, notice who was falling behind, adjust steps without embarrassing anyone, and keep the room moving when everyone was tired. In high school, I fully choreographed three shows, including a full production of Pippin. During one rehearsal, I taught the same eight counts so many times that I felt my patience slipping. One performer kept apologizing before she even tried, as if failure had already been decided. So we slowed it down. We marked it. We tried it without music. We tried it badly. Then we tried it again. Eventually, she got it. More than that, she performed it like she belonged there. That moment changed how I understood teamwork. A strong dancer can make herself look good. A strong teammate helps everyone else step onstage with confidence. I have practiced that same discipline in the classroom. Maintaining a 4.37 GPA with a full AP schedule has meant doing homework late at night after rehearsal, studying when I was exhausted, and learning not to use being busy as an excuse. Dance has also taught me resilience. I have missed roles I wanted. I have watched choreography fail after I was sure it would work. I have had performances go wrong no matter how much I prepared. I used to take those moments as proof that I was not good enough. Now I see them as part of the training. I cannot control every outcome. I can only control whether I come back to the room. That is why I chose Oberlin College. Through its Integrated Arts program, I will continue challenging myself as a dancer, choreographer, and collaborator rather than treating high school as the end of that journey. My background as a student-athlete does not look like a uniform or a stadium. It looks like bruised knees, repeated counts, late homework, missed roles, and a cast learning to trust each other. Dance has taught me dedication because I keep showing up when I am tired. It has taught me teamwork because the performance only works if everyone succeeds. It has taught me resilience because every failure still asks the same question: are you coming back tomorrow?

The most moving Taylor Swift performance I have ever witnessed was the moment I stopped watching Taylor Swift. At SoFi Stadium, I expected to see one woman command seventy thousand people. From my seat, slightly above the floor, I could see almost everything: the white runway, the screens, the open roof, and every level of the stadium glowing with phones. It looked less like a concert than a city that had suddenly learned the same prayer. The moment came after “Champagne Problems.” When the song ended, the applause did not. It kept rising, somehow getting louder instead of fading away. At first, I clapped with everyone else. Then I realized I was crying. Not because Taylor had hit a note or crossed the stage in a perfect piece of choreography. I was crying because I had stopped clapping. I had stopped clapping because I had started looking around. Everywhere, people had their hands in the air. Some were laughing, some were crying, some were holding onto the person next to them. A few couldn't even keep their phones steady. Taylor Swift was still onstage, but for those eight minutes, the spotlight broke apart. It scattered into seventy thousand pieces. It landed on strangers. As an actor and writer, I have always been taught that performance begins onstage. The artist speaks. The audience listens. But that night, I saw something more powerful: an audience answering back. Taylor had written the song, but the crowd finished the scene. They took a private heartbreak and turned it into a public ritual. That is what moved me most. Not celebrity. Not spectacle. Not even applause, exactly. It was the realization that the song no longer belonged only to the person who wrote it. It belonged to everyone around me. For eight minutes, no one was alone with whatever they had carried into that stadium. Taylor Swift stood in the light. But the performance I remember most was the crowd looking back at her. That night changed how I understand art. I do not want to act or write just to be watched. I want to create something that makes people look around and realize they are part of it too. The crowd became the stage. And for a few impossible minutes, seventy thousand people became the spotlight.

Dance saved my life. In the spring of 2023, I was sitting in literature class reading Animal Farm when a panic attack hit me out of nowhere. One moment I was fine. The next, my heart was pounding so hard that I couldn't focus on anything else. Everyone around me kept reading. I was trying to convince myself I wasn't dying. But anxiety doesn't care about logic. My body was convinced something terrible was happening. I stared at the page, realizing I hadn't absorbed a single word. The hardest part wasn't the panic itself. It was pretending. Pretending I was paying attention. Pretending I was okay. Pretending I wasn't exhausted from carrying the same fear around every day. I remember thinking, "I can't keep doing this." What changed my life wasn't the disappearance of anxiety.It was discovering that there were ways to live with it. For me, that discovery began with dance. My anxiety didn't disappear. The difference was that I finally had somewhere to put it. The anxiety had to go somewhere. So I danced. I threw myself into choreography, rehearsals, and performances. Instead of sitting still while my thoughts spiraled, I could move. I could create. I could take all the energy anxiety demanded from me and turn it into something else. For the first time, I felt like I was doing more than surviving. Then I found theater. If dance helped me move through anxiety, theater helped me understand it. Playing Emily Webb in Our Town forced me to confront one of my deepest fears: death. Yet what I found wasn't fear at all. It was gratitude. As Emily looks back on her life, she doesn't long for extraordinary achievements. She longs for breakfasts with her family and conversations she once took for granted. Emily taught me to appreciate ordinary moments instead of constantly worrying about losing them. Playing Juliet taught me vulnerability, passion, and the courage to care deeply about something even when it might hurt. The characters were fictional. The emotions were not. Looking back, I realize something I couldn't see at the time. Long before I knew what art therapy was, art was already doing the work of therapy in my life. As a choreographer, performer, playwright, and student leader, I began noticing the same thing in other people. I watched students who barely spoke during early rehearsals step onto a stage and command a room. I watched friendships form between people who might never have spoken otherwise. Again and again, I saw what happened when people were given a way to express things they couldn't always explain. That realization is what led me to art therapy. This fall, I'll begin Oberlin College's five-year BA+BFA in Integrated Arts program. I don't know exactly where all of my studies will lead yet. What I do know is that every form of art that has mattered most in my life has spoken a different language. Dance gave me somewhere to put my anxiety. Theater helped me understand parts of myself I didn't have words for. Writing helped me untangle thoughts that felt impossible to explain out loud. I want to spend the next several years exploring why those things matter so much and how they can help other people, too. Before I ever understood the field of art therapy, I experienced its power firsthand. Now I want to learn how to create that same kind of space for others.