I have a form of madness. A sickness. A virus. I have to have a story pouring out of me at all times. If I’m not acting, I’m writing. If I’m not writing, I’m dancing. Do you think I like this? I love it. Would life be easier if I were a mathlete or a STEM scholar? Probably. Quieter, certainly. But I am a proud thespian. Roll your eyes at us if you must. We will still be delighted to entertain you. I blame my parents. They have the sickness too. My mother concocts little stories. My dad tells tales about growing up in North Pole, Alaska. I believe approximately half of them, but I am entertained by all of them. Apparently, both halves of my DNA came carrying stories. I never had a chance. In fourth grade, we had Ms. Mordine. She was brutal. Class was rigid: no laughing, no acting silly, and absolutely no horseplay. Recess was my time to take over. I told stories, performed every voice, and made my friends and even my frenemies laugh. For thirty minutes, I could make a crowd forget about Ms. Mordine. By eighth grade, I needed something more than recess laughs. I auditioned for a performing arts high school, terrified but certain that not auditioning would feel worse. Once I stepped onto a stage, acting became another symptom. I wanted to crawl inside another person’s mind and understand what made them tick. Nothing affected me more than performing Emily’s final moments in Our Town. Night after night, I stood onstage and understood the same terrible thing she does: life is precious, fragile, and incredibly easy to take for granted. I could feel the audience connecting with her realization. For a few minutes, we were all being told the same thing: pay attention while you are here. Before playing Emily, I thought acting was mostly about entertaining people. She taught me that it was also about paying closer attention to them. Every night, I had to understand her grief well enough to carry an audience into it with me. Acting taught me that empathy is not just feeling sorry for someone. It is working hard enough to understand a life that is not your own. Then choreography took over. During freshman year, I started seeing stories in movement. A pause could become a turn. An argument could become a dance. When my teacher trusted my best friend and me to choreograph SpongeBob during junior year, I realized I did not just want to perform inside a world. I wanted to create that world. By senior year, I was choreographing the entire three-hour marathon of Pippin. I think I have been trying to do the same thing my whole life. In fourth grade, I wanted my classmates to forget about Ms. Mordine for thirty minutes. As Emily, I wanted an audience to leave remembering how precious ordinary life is. As a choreographer, I wanted performers and audiences to believe in a world that did not exist until we built it together. Stories can make us laugh, make us hurt, make us pay attention, and hopefully make us feel less alone. That is why I keep telling them. This fall, I will join Oberlin’s first incoming class of BA+BFA Integrated Arts students. For once, no one is asking me to choose between acting, writing, choreography, film, music, or art. They are telling me to bring all of it. It feels less like choosing a college and more like finally finding my species.

My parents are from Alaska, which is beautiful, but also frozen, dark, and cold. There is art there, of course, but there are only so many times you can admire an ice sculpture in thirty-below weather before you start dreaming of color. So they did what any art-loving, frostbitten family would do: they moved to California. And then, as if on cue, I arrived. From the beginning, my parents filled my life with art: museums, theatre, music, dance, books, anything they could find. It worked. I grew up believing art was not just a subject in school. It was part of everyday life. I was ten when we flew to New York City. Already a dancer, I remember practicing pliés and sautés through Times Square, leaping through Central Park, and dancing through the doors of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Temple of Dendur stopped me cold. I could not believe an ancient Egyptian temple was sitting inside a museum in Manhattan. Then I stood before Washington Crossing the Delaware. The enormous canvas, full of dark water and men who might not survive the crossing, loomed over me like a bad dream. I kept walking until I turned a corner and saw something I understood immediately. There she was: Little Dancer of Fourteen Years by Edgar Degas. She was bronze. She was still. She was me. She looked like everything I was and wanted to become: a girl who had not figured it all out yet but was standing up straight anyway. What fascinated me most was that she was not entirely cold, hard bronze. She had a real ribbon in her hair and slightly off-pink tulle at her waist. Those details made her feel almost alive. After that, I started looking for Degas everywhere. At the library, I searched art books for more dancers, rehearsal rooms, and moments that felt familiar. In La Classe de Danse, I found dancers waiting, stretching, being corrected, looking bored, looking nervous. I knew those girls. I had been those girls. In Four Dancers, I saw performers huddled backstage in tulle, leaning into one another the way dancers do before the curtain rises, when no one is sure they are ready. That is why Degas became my favorite artist. He did not show dancers only at their most graceful. He showed the waiting, effort, awkwardness, repetition, and exhaustion behind the performance. He understood that the parts nobody applauds are still part of the art. I have been chasing that same honesty through my writing, dancing, and choreography. While choreographing nearly three hours for my school’s production of Pippin, I started thinking less about whether every step looked impressive and more about what the movement revealed about the characters. Choreography was not just arranging bodies onstage. It was another way of telling the story. This fall, I will attend Oberlin College, studying dance, theatre, writing, and visual storytelling through its Integrated Arts program. Even after substantial financial aid, my family still has a large amount to cover. This scholarship would help pay for books, supplies, and the cost of building an artistic life at Oberlin while living across the country from my family. I am still figuring out what kind of artist I will become. Degas taught me that an artist can find truth in a tired dancer, a nervous rehearsal room, or a girl standing still and trying to be brave. I want to create work that helps someone else feel recognized, the way that little dancer once made me feel seen.

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.

A NEW BOMBSHELL HAS ENTERED THE VILLA... And she's ready to spill the tea. If I could create a new Love Island challenge, it would be called Spill the Tea: Goblin Mode. The goal is simple: expose the secrets everyone is pretending not to have. Before the challenge starts, every islander anonymously answers a few questions: Which islander would you couple up with if you were single? Which couple is the weakest? Whose head is most likely to turn? Who's playing the biggest game? Which islander do you trust the least? Which couple isn't surviving outside the villa? Then the villa transforms into the messiest tea party imaginable. Giant teacups. Heart-shaped desserts. Pink lounges everywhere. Enough awkward eye contact to power an entire season. One by one, the anonymous answers are read aloud. "I think Jake's head would turn in five minutes." "If I were single, I'd choose Emma." "I don't think this couple survives the flight home." The islanders have one job: Guess who spilled the tea. Guess right, and you earn a point. Guess wrong, and the person who actually wrote it is revealed immediately. No hiding, no backtracking, and no pretending it was taken out of context. The tea's spilled, and now everyone has to sit in it. Secret crushes get exposed, couples start side-eyeing each other, and best friends suddenly have questions. Just when everyone thinks the challenge is over, a text comes in: "Islanders, you've heard the gossip. You've learned the secrets. Now it's time to get messy." #GoblinMode Now the islanders have to do something with everything they've learned. One at a time, each islander chooses another contestant for one of three options. Sip: share a private drink and a flirty one-on-one conversation. Steal: pull someone away from their partner for a private chat. Snog: kiss someone, as long as both islanders are interested. This is where the challenge goes from gossip to chaos. Someone discovers they were another islander's first choice. Someone else learns their relationship isn't as solid as they thought. Another contestant finally acts on a crush they've been pretending not to have for weeks. And it all happens in front of the entire villa. Then comes the final twist. Every islander secretly answers one last question: If there were a recoupling tonight, who would you choose? The answers appear on giant screens at exactly the same time. No warning. No editing. No explanations. Just chaos. The winning couple earns a luxury date. Everyone else earns the most uncomfortable night around the fire pit of their entire lives. I think Spill the Tea: Goblin Mode would be perfect for Love Island because the best moments on the show happen when a silly game accidentally reveals something real. This challenge has the flirting, the drama, the jealousy, the surprises, and the awkward conversations that fans love. First the tea gets spilled. Then the islanders have to decide what to do with the truth. And in the Love Island villa, the truth is usually a lot more dangerous than the secret.

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.

I was supposed to be researching how to act like a mean pig. That's what acting is supposed to be, right? Not this time. While preparing to play Squealer in Tatty Hennessy’s adaptation of Animal Farm, I got stuck on one question: why does anyone believe him? Squealer is the pig who explains away every broken promise, unfair decision, and abuse of power. At first, I thought of him as a liar. Easy enough. But the longer I rehearsed, the less interesting that answer became. The real question was not why Squealer lied. It was why the other animals listened. So I started researching propaganda. I watched old Disney cartoons, educational films, political speeches, and clips of Baghdad Bob insisting everything was fine while chaos unfolded behind him. I learned that propaganda does not always arrive looking scary or serious. Sometimes it is simple. Sometimes it is funny. Sometimes it repeats itself until people are too tired or too afraid to argue. That changed the way I played Squealer. I stopped treating him like a cartoon villain and started thinking about why a comforting lie can be easier to accept than a frightening truth. I was supposed to be doing character research. Somehow, I ended up studying history, politics, psychology, and media literacy. That is when theatre started to feel bigger to me. Acting was not just memorizing lines, hitting marks, or making “strong choices.” It was trying to understand people. A liberal arts education gives theatre students more ways to do that before we ever step onstage. History, English, political science, psychology, and philosophy are not outside the rehearsal room. They are already in it. I felt that again playing Abigail in The Crucible. Abigail is easy to dismiss as cruel, but psychology made me ask a better question: what happens when a terrified young woman discovers that accusation gives her power for the first time? History and political science helped me understand how fear can spread through a community until truth becomes almost impossible to hear. As Emily in Our Town, I found myself thinking about philosophy without calling it philosophy. The play asks why ordinary moments matter and why we so often fail to notice them until they are gone. English helped me pay attention to the plainness of Thornton Wilder’s language. Emily does not need grand speeches. Her heartbreak is in how ordinary everything is. The same thing happens when I write. In one play, I wrote about an eleven-year-old girl whose parents are divorcing. Instead of writing a realistic living-room scene, I had five future versions of her come out of a closet to tell her what her life might become. That play grew out of psychology, creative writing, and the question of how people become themselves. That is what liberal arts study gives a theatre artist: more doors into a story. History gives us the world around a character. English gives us the language. Political science reveals power. Psychology helps explain behavior that may look irrational from the outside but feels necessary from within. I will be going to Oberlin College, where I will be part of the BA+BFA in Integrated Arts program. After spending weeks studying propaganda to understand a pig, the idea of separating art from history, politics, literature, and psychology no longer makes much sense to me. I wanted an education that would let the thinking show up onstage. Theatre teaches us how to tell stories. Liberal arts study helps us understand the people inside them. For me, those two pursuits are inseparable.

The Truth Sideways “It is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened, but what may happen, what is possible according to the law of probability or necessity. The poet and the historian differ not by writing in verse or in prose. The true difference is that one relates what has happened, the other what may happen. Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular.” Aristotle, Poetics, Chapter 9 Aristotle sounds calm here, which is almost suspicious, because what he is saying is not calm at all. He is defending invented things: ghosts, tyrants, daughters, monsters, liars, lovers, fools, people who ruin their own lives and then act surprised. At first, the passage seems to make a simple distinction: history tells us what happened, while poetry tells us what could happen. But Aristotle is making a more dangerous claim than that. He is arguing that fiction is not less truthful because it did not happen. Through probability, necessity, and the movement from the particular to the universal, art can reveal the pattern underneath the event: not just who lied, who died, or who won, but why people keep doing the same terrible, beautiful, human things again and again. The first important word is “function.” Aristotle says, “It is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened.” He is not just describing what poets happen to do. He is defining their job. A poet is not a reporter. A playwright is not a security camera. The artist’s purpose is not simply to say, “This occurred, then this occurred, then this occurred.” That kind of truth matters, but Aristotle insists it is not the only kind. Facts can tell us that someone lied. Art can show us the hunger underneath the lie. Facts can tell us that someone died. Art can make us feel how the living keep reaching for them anyway. That is why the phrase “what may happen” matters. Aristotle does not mean that poetry can be random just because it is imaginary. He immediately limits possibility with “the law of probability or necessity.” That phrase is the engine of the whole passage. A story may invent its people, places, and events, but if it is good, those inventions obey pressure. “Probability” means the action feels likely for this kind of person in this kind of situation. “Necessity” means that once the choices have been made, the consequences cannot simply be escaped. A character cannot break only because the script wants a dramatic moment. They have to arrive at the breaking. Their fear has to build. Their defenses have to fail. Their body has to know the truth before their mouth does. This is the brutal logic of drama. It is not “anything can happen.” It is almost the opposite. In a strong story, anything cannot happen. The invented world has rules because human beings have patterns. A jealous person will not behave like a fearless one. A coward will not suddenly become noble unless something in the action forces that change. A liar will keep lying until the lie costs more than the truth. Aristotle’s “law” makes art sound less like decoration and more like physics: put a person under enough pressure, and something hidden will show itself. That is also why Aristotle says poetry is “more philosophical” than history. That phrase can sound arrogant, as if art is floating above real life with clean hands. But I do not think Aristotle means that history is small or unimportant. History gives us the particular: one person, one battle, one betrayal, one death, one date. Poetry asks a different kind of question. Not only, “What happened?” but “What kind of thing is this?” “Why does it keep happening?” “What does this action reveal about people under pressure?” Poetry is “higher” not because it is prettier, but because it reaches for causes, patterns, and human laws. I understood this most clearly while playing Squealer in Animal Farm. On the surface, Squealer is ridiculous: a pig in a political fable, spinning lies for a barn full of exhausted animals. But the more I worked on him, the less funny he felt. Squealer does not need claws, chains, or an army. His weapon is the story. He changes the meaning of events until the animals no longer trust their own memories. He turns hunger into sacrifice, fear into loyalty, and betrayal into “necessary” leadership. He does not just lie. He rewrites reality out loud. Squealer shows exactly what Aristotle means by the universal inside the particular. He is particular: one pig, one farm, one fable. But what he reveals is universal: people can be controlled not only by force, but by the stories they are taught to believe. The danger is not only that someone lies to you. The danger is that they teach you to participate in the lie. History can document propaganda. It can record speeches, laws, slogans, and consequences. But Orwell’s invented pig makes us feel the private horror of it: the moment when language becomes a cage and the mind starts doubting its own memory. The same Aristotle passage helps me understand Emily in Our Town, though her story works in a quieter way. Emily is painfully particular: one young woman, one small town, one ordinary day from childhood. But when she returns to that day after death, the ordinary becomes almost unbearable. Breakfast, voices, rushing around, people loving each other without stopping to notice. The horror is not that the day was terrible. The horror is that it was beautiful, and she could not fully see it while she was alive. Everyone has wanted, at least once, to reach backward and hold a moment still. Everyone has been loved while distracted. Everyone has missed something while standing inside it. That is the universal. It is not a vague moral like “appreciate life.” It is sharper and more painful than that. The universal is the recognition that human beings often do not understand their lives while they are living them. Emily’s birthday is not my birthday. Her town is not my town. Her death is not my death. But the pattern underneath her story belongs to more than one person. Aristotle says poetry expresses the universal because a single invented life can suddenly expose something that was already true in ours. Theatre makes Aristotle’s argument physical. Drama does not only explain probability and necessity; it puts them in a body. When I choreographed Pippin, I saw that movement could turn an invisible inner voice into something the audience could watch: temptation, panic, hunger, and self-doubt moving through bodies before anyone had to explain them. When I act, write, direct, or choreograph, I am not trying to escape my life by becoming someone else. I am trying to find the secret tunnel between my life and theirs. Sometimes that tunnel is shame. Sometimes it is rage. Sometimes it is the need to be loved so badly that it makes a person ridiculous. Acting asks me to admit that the character and I are not as separate as I want us to be. That is the uncomfortable part. That is also the point. This is why Aristotle adds that poetry is not defined by “verse or prose.” The difference between poetry and history is not about whether something rhymes, sounds beautiful, or looks literary. The difference is purpose. Poetry, drama, movement, and performance take one particular life and uncover the pattern inside it. They ask what fear does when it learns to speak beautifully. They ask what grief sounds like when it tries to be polite. They ask what power does when it realizes people can be ruled through language instead of chains. That matters now because we are surrounded by particulars. Headlines, posts, disasters, rumors, arguments, screenshots, performances of outrage: new facts arrive before we have understood the old ones. But knowing what happened is not the same as understanding what it means. Aristotle’s passage argues that art can slow an event down until the pattern becomes visible. This is not only about a pig on a farm. This is about propaganda. This is not only about a girl returning to her birthday. This is about how life is happening while we are too busy to live it. The invented thing becomes a way of recognizing the real one. Ultimately, Aristotle is arguing that art does not compete with reality by pretending fiction happened. It does something stranger. It invents an action so probable, so necessary, and so particular that we recognize the universal inside it. Poetry and drama show not only what happened, but what could happen, what keeps happening, and what we are capable of becoming under pressure. That is why art matters to me. Not because it is pretty. Not because it is safe. Not because it is a break from reality. It matters because reality is sometimes too large to face directly. So the poet turns it sideways. A pig teaches us how language enslaves. A dead girl teaches us that we were alive and asleep. A body onstage tells the truth before the mouth can bear to say it. Aristotle calls poetry “higher” than history because the best invented stories do not lead us away from the world. They lead us deeper into it.

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.

I have asthma. I also choreographed nearly three hours of nonstop dancing during my senior year. Those two facts sound like they shouldn't coexist. For a long time, I wasn't sure they could. By spring, my life had become a giant color-coded calendar of chaos: college applications, AP classes, Thespian Club responsibilities, rehearsals, performances, and choreography. Every square was full. Somehow, I had also agreed to choreograph my school's production of Pippin, a musical that apparently believes standing still is a personal weakness. My stress was not abstract. It lived in my chest, tight and familiar, in the same place my asthma always sits. I needed somewhere to put all of it. I found it in the rehearsal room. As a dancer and choreographer, fitness has never looked like running marathons or lifting weights. For me, fitness is movement, endurance, and learning what my body is capable of doing. During my senior year, choreographing Pippin meant demonstrating every step I created, over and over again. Most people with asthma probably do not look at hours of nonstop dancing and think, "Sounds fun." Apparently, I do. Then, during rehearsals for "Glory," one of the show's biggest dance numbers, my lungs reminded me that asthma does not care about rehearsal schedules. "Glory" is a war scene. Why a war scene also requires that much dancing, I couldn't tell you, but there I was, teaching choreography by example as usual. Suddenly, I ran out of lung space. The coughing started. At first, I tried to push through it. Then the coughing became harder and harder until I couldn't stop. The next thing I remember is being on the floor. My best friend was already running to grab my inhaler while I struggled to catch my breath. I wasn't dying. Rationally, I knew that. But lying on the rehearsal room floor with my chest locked up and dozens of thoughts racing through my head, it certainly felt like I might be. That moment could have convinced me that asthma was right, that my body had limits I shouldn't challenge. Instead, it taught me something different. A month earlier, that episode would have hit me harder. Fitness had not cured my asthma, and it never will. But months of rehearsals had made me stronger. They gave me endurance, confidence, and something I had never really had before: trust in a body I had spent years viewing as fragile. Most importantly, I went back to rehearsal. Not because I wanted to prove anything to anyone else, but because I loved being there. Dance had become more than exercise. It was stress relief during the most overwhelming year of high school. It was a creative outlet. It was a community. It was the place where college applications, deadlines, and responsibilities faded into the background, replaced by music, movement, and a shared goal. Like Jason Choi, I have experienced how fitness can become much more than a workout. It can become a source of strength when your health makes life harder. Through dance, I learned that fitness is not about having a perfect body or overcoming every obstacle. It is about showing up anyway, discovering what you are capable of, and refusing to let your challenges define you. Asthma is still part of my life. It probably always will be. But thanks to my passion for dance, it no longer gets to decide what I can accomplish.

I grew up in Southern California with one college dream: USC. I knew the fight song before I knew how financial aid worked. I wore cardinal and gold to football watch parties. I talked about becoming a Trojan so often that my family stopped asking where I wanted to go to college. Then I got in. The acceptance email arrived while I was on a college tour with my mom. We were visiting schools I had quietly labeled as backups: Ithaca, DePaul, and Oberlin. As digital confetti flashed across my screen, I assumed the search was over. A few days later, USC's financial aid package arrived. The cost was nearly $80,000 per year. For my family, that number ended the conversation. My dad has spent his career as a freelance television editor, and the entertainment industry that supported our family for years looks very different today than it did when FAFSA collected the financial information used to calculate my aid. Here is what nobody tells you about financial aid: it is built on the past. FAFSA looked at my family's finances from two years ago. Two years ago, my dad's freelance work was thriving. Two years ago, I was sixteen. Two years ago, I was a sophomore. Two years ago, USC was still a dream scribbled in the margins of my notebooks. Two years ago feels like a lifetime ago. The reality we live with today is not the reality reflected on those forms. Financial aid formulas cannot see that. They see a snapshot and call it a portrait. What frustrated me most was not that USC was expensive. It was realizing that the numbers being used to determine my future were already outdated. For years, I had done everything I could to prepare for college. I graduated summa cum laude with a 4.5 GPA. I served as president of my school's Thespian Club. I earned a Judges Choice Award at the California State Thespian Festival and was recognized as a national semifinalist by both the O'Neill National Playwrights Conference and The Blank Theatre Young Playwrights Festival. None of that changed the math. I appealed USC's decision, hoping the university would see the reality my family was living. While I waited, I continued visiting campuses. At Oberlin, something unexpected happened. For the first time on the trip, I stopped comparing a campus to USC and started imagining myself there. Then Oberlin offered more than $59,000 in grants and scholarships. For the first time in months, I felt relief. There is still a significant gap between what aid covers and what my family can comfortably afford. Closing that gap has become my responsibility. Over the past year, I have spent hours researching scholarships, comparing aid packages, calculating costs, and evaluating what different financial decisions could mean after graduation. In the process, I learned that independence is not doing everything alone. It is taking ownership of the challenges in front of you. I learned how to advocate for myself, appeal decisions, ask difficult questions, and make choices based on both opportunity and affordability. This fall, I will attend Oberlin, where I plan to continue developing as a theatre artist, playwright, and storyteller. Pursuing my education with limited financial support has made me more intentional about every opportunity I pursue and every dollar I spend. It has taught me that ambition matters, but responsibility matters too. USC was the dream I started with. Oberlin is the future I chose. The system saw a snapshot. I built a future anyway.