I'm not going to sugarcoat it. High school girls can be mean. Add the explosive personalities of high school theatre girls, and you've got yourself a war zone. You enter freshman year all dewy-eyed and full of dreams, but the upperclassmen can smell fresh chum in the water. Remember Fame? My mom played it on our ancient VCR practically on repeat. Debbie Allen's character warned her students: "Fame costs. And right here is where you start paying... in sweat." Well, I was willing to sweat. Buckets. I wanted to act, dance, and more than anything, choreograph. That's how I met Katherine, a JUNIOR trusted to choreograph Matilda. Wait. WHAT? A STUDENT could choreograph an entire musical? I practically launched myself across the rehearsal room. "HELLOKATHERINEMYNAMEISHARPERANDIWANTTOBEYOUANDTEACHDANCE!" "Cute. Move those mats and I'll think about it." Subtle, I know. Katherine befriended me, and I became her shadow. When she got bored choreographing the less exciting parts, she'd let me figure them out. PINCH ME! I was choreographing for a real musical! Until I got called in for a little "talk." Apparently, Katherine had complained to the teachers that I was choreographing without permission. The same Katherine who'd encouraged me to do it. I was humiliated. My choreography career was over. Embarrassed and angry, I retreated to choreographing small swing choir numbers. Eventually, I was selected to help choreograph SpongeBob SquarePants: The Musical. Finally! Except this time, I wasn't somebody's shadow. I had authority. Turns out, leading teenagers is HARD. I created dances; they gossiped, talked back, and ignored me. My voice grew sharper, my patience thinner. Then came Maude, a dancer who felt she wasn't getting enough stage time. She requested a meeting with the teachers. Oh, GREAT. Here we go again. Except this time, I was on the other side of the table. I came prepared: choreography, formations, numbers. RECEIPTS. Maude was dancing just as much as everyone else. I could have stopped there. But I remembered Katherine. I remembered how it felt to have someone turn on me when all I wanted was a chance. "Maude, I love what you bring to this show. I don't want you to feel like you're being ignored." We sat together, looked through the numbers, and discovered something. Maude wasn't asking for MORE dancing. She loved certain songs and wanted to be part of them. Oh. Well, THAT I could work with. We adjusted formations, moved things around, and made the show better. Not because Maude was right about everything, or because I was wrong. Because we actually listened to each other. Mean theatre girls exist because mean theatre girls existed before them. I want to break that cycle. Collaboration means making room for someone's ideas, even when you disagree. At Oberlin, I'm pursuing a BA+BFA in Integrated Arts, exploring acting, directing, dance, and writing. Someday, I want my own theatre company where everyone has a voice. Oberlin costs over $90,000 a year. NINETY THOUSAND DOLLARS. Merit and need-based aid have greatly reduced my cost to roughly $32,000 annually. My parents contribute what they can, but my dad's freelance work grows less predictable every year. I refuse to ask them for more than they can afford. This is MY dream, but I don't want debt to bury it before I can build that company. Pamela Branchini believed in encouraging artists. I want to do that too. I couldn't change what Katherine did to me. But I could make sure Maude's story ended differently.

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.