Alone, in the rain, in Rodin’s Paris garden, fatigue tugged at my brain and eyelids; I hadn’t slept well in months, decoding weeks of pre-calc missed during district and regional mock trial competitions, college tours, and coordinating my first gallery sticker sales. Divorce strained my single dad, a West Virginian entrepreneur who escaped from Appalachian dirt. I was getting porky, though I ate little some days. Strength in solitude was my lifestyle - I didn’t crave the...

Junior year, I was a Mock Trial coach. With just two more points in the Regional competition, my team would have advanced to State, beating the undefeated State Champions, who placed 5th internationally last year. Sounds crazy, but our coach quit before the first practice. We wrongly expected consistency from her replacement. I decided to hold practice unsupervised when we hadn’t met in two weeks. We devised a competition strategy, pairing vets with rookies. Each vet drilled their mentee...

“I’m the CEO of Allo. I sell stickers with my art on them. Each sticker sold feeds five kids. . . . Since ninth grade. . . . I am sixteen, yes.” I founded Allo to help the community in a high-impact, scalable way. While there are many ways to clock in volunteer hours, Allo is uniquely me. Social justice has been at the Necco dinner table for three generations: My grandparents ran and taught at deaf and special needs schools. Dad founded a foster...

You must know, I am an artist. Fear not a cheesy diatribe about my process – I could care less about melodramatically creating life by swirling a brush. Snoozeville! Rather than some hobby, art is the outlook I bring to the world. You can see it on my on my eyelids and my tidy planner, on my trademark glossy lips that I use to open court, and in my fiery determination. In Cincinnati, the impenetrable Chrome-Dome I call home, I stick...

“If not you, who? If not now, when?” - Hillel The Elder This quote is plastered on a giant wall at Cincinnati’s Underground Railroad museum. When I first became involved in the common sense gun safety movement, I was hesitant to dedicate much time. After all, junior year grades most heavily determine my future. I was stacked with weeks of pre-calc missed during district and regional mock trial competitions, college tours, and coordinating my first gallery sticker sales, on...

The Students: avant-garde; colorful; dynamic; diverse (in culture and thought); devoutly driven; eclectic; independent; infinitely intellectual; insatiably curious The Campus: wild food; international hub; scrumptious architecture; world-class art; classical The Academics: intellectual conversations outside the classroom; heavy humanities; classics; primary source-based learning; mind-blowing discussions with field leaders and brilliant peers; learning not to perform a technical skill, but to think critically; global; improving quality of life by understanding the human condition

“50,” Catullus Ars Amatoria, Ovid The Bean Trees, Barbara Kingsolver Gardner’s Art Through the Ages, Helen Gardner Nineteenth Century Art: A Critical History, Stephen F. Eisenman An Introduction to Language [Linguistics], Victoria Fromkin Ethics in the Real World: 82 Brief Essays on Things That Matter, Peter Singer To Kill a Mockingbird; Harper Lee

Comprendre la peinture au musée d’Orsay, Françoise Bayle Le Petit Livre des Haïkus, Muriel Détrie The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls The Accusation: Forbidden Stories from Inside North Korea, Bandi Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China, Leslie T. Chang Essential Picasso, Laura Payne Manet, Claudia Lyn Cahan Michelangelo, Jesse McDonald Hillbilly Elegy Full Service, Scotty Bowers Beaton in the Sixties: The Cecil Beaton Diaries As He Wrote Them, 1965-1969, Hugo Vickers A...

Columbia Daily Spectator Moms Demand Action (site) Learn French with Alexa (site) StudyTee (productivity inspiration; site) Refinery29 (fashion; site) Man Repeller (fashion; site) 60 Minutes Overtime NPR (site) Brevity Magazine (literary) Posternaks Film Photography (site) Antoine Cordet Art (site) Ivan Alifan: Contemporary Figurative Artist (site) Henrik Aa Ulalden Art (site) Marco Grassi (art; site) Belle Kroll (art; site) John Yuyi (photography; site) Humans of New York (site) Daily Overview (worldwide geography photos from 32,000 feet; history; site) Pat McGrath (makeup artist) Another...

Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood, film Lion, film Call Me By Your Name, film Y Tu Mama También, film Loving Vincent, film Bojack Horseman, Netflix series Rick and Morty, series Seinfeld, series Silicon Valley, series Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown; series Dear Evan Hansen, Broadway @columbiaadmissions on Instagram @columbiaalumni on Instagram @columbia on Instagram @columbia_coop on Instagram @columbiaschoolofthearts on IG @columbiacollege1754 on IG @lilisumner on Instagram (model/artist) @theartistedit on Instagram (cosmetology/fashion) @cincinnati_revealed on Instagram ...