Music has been an influential force in my life for as long as I can remember, an omnipresent source of inspiration and form of expression. However, there were a few critical moments in my life that were shaped by music. As a kid, I was homeschooled until eighth grade. Because of this, I was not a very social child. While I was involved in many extracurriculars, I largely kept to myself and was extremely quiet. Unknown to me at the time, I was living with severe undiagnosed social anxiety that made it difficult for me to put myself in situations necessary to meet new people and make new friends, something that wasn't naturally facilitated in my day-to-day life as it would be for someone in public school. One extracurricular activity that I was involved in was the Paul Green Rock Academy, a music program for kids located in the Hudson Valley area in New York. The program was geared towards teaching rock music through performance, involving themed quarterly rock performances and weekly rehearsals. I had only begun playing guitar six months before joining, and I was terrified to begin. Rehearsals were emotionally exhausting as I had never had my personality and abilities on display for such lengths of time before. However, it was because of this program that I started to learn electric guitar and play rock music, which I soon discovered I had a strong passion for. Over time, my confidence grew and I found a love for performances and experiencing the excitement of live music. This musical experience helped me on my way towards finding my place in the world. Another time at which music shaped the trajectory of my life was at the beginning of the COVID pandemic. At the time, I was playing with a rock band of my own, and when COVID hit, we could not continue to perform. For the first time in seven years, I did not have any opportunities to play music with others or perform. This encouraged me to find other means of creating music on my own. Exploring the world of solo electric guitar, I soon found myself wanting to play multiple parts, which led me to experiment with recording. This blossomed into an exploration of the entire world of music production. Suddenly, a band wasn't necessary for me to experience the joy of music creation in genres that I already enjoyed. Music production became the subject that I study at school as a double major in music composition and music production. Music school in itself has led me to places I never dreamed I would go. While I intended for my time to be mostly devoted to audio and composition, I have found myself performing services for my fellow students as a guitarist more than I have as an audio engineer. I have had the pleasure of performing on countless events including student recitals, premieres of compositions dedicated to lost family members, recording sessions for classwork and original music, and gigs not affiliated with classmates or school events. These performances have been invaluable in helping me figure out how to conduct myself as a professional. It has shown me the skills necessary on both sides of the interactions I have had. Playing in the studio for friends has taught me so much about being a good producer, and performing on premiers has taught me how to be a better composer. The brilliance of music school is in the lessons that are never intend to be taught, but that I've realized are some of the most important of them all.

From small to large, our everyday lives are full of decisions and actions that can affect our carbon footprints. I was taught to be conscious of the decisions that I make and their impact on the environment from a young age. The household that I grew up in was unusually progressive and green. For as long as I can remember, our home has been an ever-evolving project of sustainability and waste reduction. We were the first to own Nissan’s electric car in the Hudson Valley, and we were one of the first in my area to have rooftop solar panels. My parents instilled in me the value of buying local as we were a member of multiple farms over the years, and in 2022 we became regulars at a store where customers can bring jars to refill with various items, such as grains, soaps, and snacks. Translating the strategies that my family uses to a college lifestyle has not been easy, but I have made some adaptations to bring these methods to a new setting in small but impactful ways. Most of my waste is produced in the kitchen. At my university, there are no options to compost food, and in dining halls, there are no options for green food packaging. I am fortunate to have a kitchen, so I spend my dining dollars on ingredients and produce to cook that I can take home from the market in reusable bags rather than buying fast food and bringing it home in extra packaging. When I have money to spend, I go off campus to stores where I can buy food in bulk. Cooking for myself has greatly reduced how much food waste I produce. In addition to minding how I get my food, I am mindful of the types of food I eat. My family has always been vegetarian, and I remain vegetarian in college for a few reasons. One of which is that raising cattle is a highly polluting practice; cows raised specifically for slaughter are responsible for releasing 231 billion pounds of methane into the atmosphere every year. With pollution in mind, I also do not eat from fast food chains such as McDonalds for many reasons including the factory farming techniques they employ and the vast amount of food waste they produce. As a student-athlete, I can go through multiple changes of clothing every day. While the impact is small, I have made efforts to wear fewer clothes throughout the day so I do fewer loads of laundry and use less water. I have reduced the number of dryer sheets I use after finding out most brands tell you to use more than is necessary, and I now use either laundry detergent strips or a stronger detergent for my running clothes that comes in a cardboard box to use less packaging. Living sustainably and reducing one’s carbon footprint is not easy, but it is something that needs to be strived for on a global scale. Reducing one’s carbon footprint helps to conserve fossil fuels and oil, which is a finite resource that the world is predicted to run out of before the year 2100, and it also helps slow the release of greenhouse gasses, which are contributing to the rise in average global temperatures and thus the increase of the sort of climate change as seen in the recent catastrophic disasters in places such as California. In a world where we must pay more to create less waste, it is a daunting task, but together we can make small changes that add up to something more.

My love for music has been a presence in my life for as long as I can remember. It is hard to determine why some people have a greater passion for the arts than others, but I believe my passion was kindled by exposure from a young age. My dad is a bassist, but he had an acoustic guitar and he would play it for me and my twin sister when we were young enough to be sung to sleep, and he continued to play it around my family well after those young years had passed. I took my first piano lessons at age 5, but I always knew I wanted to play the guitar. My parents got me a toy guitar for Christmas one year, but I didn’t know how to play it yet, so it sat unused for years. One day my parents heard me take it out of the case and play around with it in my room, and, to my dad's annoyance, I tried to tune the guitar. He picked it up afterwards to retune it, but I had left it perfectly in tune. When I told him I tuned it by remembering the distinctive sound of him tuning his acoustic guitar so many times when I was little, they discovered I had perfect pitch. I started guitar lessons at age 10 and my world was transformed. Guitar had so much to offer that piano didn’t, but it was challenging far beyond my wildest imagination, so much so that I spent nights crying with frustration after I started to learn electric guitar. However, my hard work paid off; I joined the Paul Green Rock Academy, a performance-based rock music program that ran on weekends, and I quickly became a highly valued and versatile rock guitarist. I performed with the Paul Green Rock Academy for five years before leaving to focus on school. Music, along with distance running, is something meditative that has always helped me find peace when school gets difficult. Having the power to create something that I can truly call my own is liberating and invaluable. This feeling got a new meaning during the pandemic era. The band that I performed with for the first two years of high school stopped meeting when COVID began, and after doing a deep dive into solo guitar playing, I missed the feeling of playing in a setting with other instruments and musical elements. It was at this point that I discovered the world of music production. With a laptop and minimal gear, a whole new musical experience unfolded before me. Never before had I had such access to something that I understood so little and it was exhilarating. I honed my skills through the first year of COVID, attending a vocational music production program during my senior year of high school. I enjoyed studio work so much that I decided to study music production and composition in a five-year double major program at the Hartt School of Music at the University of Hartford. As I learn about the music industry, I realize that it is almost impossible to follow an exact career plan. One key lesson from my many professors has been that the music industry can lead you anywhere and that it can be valuable to accept different turns in your career path with an open mind. While I am becoming fond of learning the technical aspects of being an audio engineer and a mix engineer, my dream is to be a music producer, where I can utilize my skills as an engineer and a songwriter.

It is difficult to teach a child about the importance of mental health. I was not taught about mental health when I was young, and since before the age of ten, I have struggled with depression and anxiety. I did not have the tools to understand my feelings in the earlier years when I struggled. I was homeschooled, so my social circle was very small. I didn’t have close friends or peers that I felt I could talk to about my feelings at the time besides my twin sister, but I was hesitant to talk to her, fearing that she would pass information on to my parents. By the time my parents realized that I was having issues with my mental health, years had passed, and after such a long time concealing my feelings, I was reluctant to open up when my parents signed me up for therapy around age 14. That same year, my parents enrolled me and my sister in public school, and I discovered one of my great passions today, which is distance running. I had run with my dad a few times before joining the cross country team in eighth grade, but the joy of racing was relatively new to me and I was immediately hooked. The transition to public school was rough, but I learned the importance of having hobbies that bring happiness into your life. When I felt at my lowest points socially and academically, I had something to redirect my focus. During my high school years, I also discovered music production. While I have always been passionate about music and have played guitar and piano for most of my life, production was a new and exciting way to express myself through music. I grew so fond of music production and songwriting that I went on to study them in college. As much as I wished that hobbies were a perfect solution to my issues, they were not. While they helped me immensely through some of the hardest times in my life, one can’t bail out a ship with a thimble. Much like running, if your body isn’t healthy, you can’t expect to race well, and if your mind isn’t healthy, you can’t expect to perform well in situations that are mentally taxing. It is still important to take extra steps in your life to care for your mind and to keep in touch with your feelings as best as possible. I am lucky to have someone in college who has experience with different methods of mental self-care, and they have helped me learn more about myself and find methods that work for me. They helped me discover that I have had severe social anxiety since early childhood, which is something that I was never educated on and never thought I could be affected by. I now keep a journal where I document my moods, and I take time for my mental health when I feel overwhelmed, during which I have tried some newer, less demanding hobbies, such as drawing. This has been the toughest semester yet of my college career. Two weeks after arriving on campus, I had to stop running due to a stress reaction. I haven’t run in nine weeks, and it has been difficult to stay positive and feel healthy mentally despite my constant involvement in the music world. However, with the new techniques I have begun, I am empowered to still be the best I can be despite my situation. Nobody can expect to be perfect, but I have the resources I need to keep getting better every day.