"What do you do if you love someone that lives across the ocean?"  At 2 a.m. one night junior year, I sat on the ground in tears. I had no family around me; the only people I could confide to were my classmates. Flashback to fourth grade.  Found in a ragged Chinese textbook: "Facial masks are a significant part of Chinese performing arts. Each color signifies a different value. Black means neutrality. Red means courage. Purple means justice. You can...

"Yue Yue, zhe xie zi zen me shuo," my grandmother asked me as she pointed to our street name; her eyes beamed with curiosity. My mind raced to translate her Chinese into English. Moments later, I successfully deciphered her question: How do you pronounce these words? Since I was two, my mother single-handedly balanced caring for and financially supporting me. To relieve her workload, my grandparents came from China to help cook and clean while I became the family mechanic....

Listen. From a young age, I was taught to obey, to accept everything I was given. As a child in a traditional Chinese family, these Confucianist values were passed from generation to generation, and I conformed to them. In first grade, my ten dollars went missing in a classmate's hands. Rather than speaking up for myself, I remained silent, deciding this was my fate. Years later, I read about a group of students from Parkland that ignited a nationwide movement...

I serve as a troop leader, a troop of middle school girl coders that is. Armed with our proficiency in HTML, CSS, and Javascript, we develop websites. MORNING BRIEF. I stand on the podium in front of the brightly-lit room, defended by a microphone and two teaching assistants. "Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper were women who pioneered computer science; we can too," I proclaim in front of a class of sixteen girls. My motivational words were followed by a video...

10 a.m., Statler Hall. As a student in Arts and Sciences, I listen attentively to Dr. Gries in Object-Oriented Programming and Data Structures. The complexity of Object-Oriented Programming contrasts the simplicity of animations I programmed as a high school freshman. Poring over Khan Academy videos, I gradually progressed from developing drawings in middle school to creating websites now. I fell in love with coding's similarity to solving a puzzle: I would picture the outcome beforehand and then piece together the...

Freshman year, I was confused about what I wanted to pursue in the future. I then enrolled in Pre-AP Computer Science and developed an interactive calculator that can easily solve problems with less than 50 lines of Java. The simple logic yet lasting impact of code intrigued me. Sophomore and junior year, I continued exploring code by enrolling in higher-level courses, attending summer camps, and teaching myself programming. Coding is like a puzzle; I can combine creativity with problem-solving. When I...

Listen. From a young age, I was taught to obey, to accept everything I was given. As a child in a traditional family, these Confucianist values were passed from generation to generation, and I conformed to them. In first grade, my ten dollars went missing in a classmate's hands. Rather than speaking up for myself, I remained silent, deciding this was my fate. Sophomore year, I read about a group of students from Parkland that ignited a nationwide movement for...