I’ve been practicing martial arts for over half of my life. Because of that, I still have trouble wrapping my head around the fact that most people retreat to a happy place where no one is yelling at the top of their lungs, the smell of sweat doesn’t hang in the air, and there’s not even the slightest chance of getting punched in the face. But that’s probably just because I grew up with it. My...

Over the past few months, I have been told time and time again that my college experience will be shaped just as much by how I pursue my interests outside the classroom as by what I do in the traditional learning environment. As soon as I learned that my success in college would depend on taking advantage of educational opportunities beyond my required coursework, I began looking for universities that would provide not only a stellar education, but valuable outside...

I received interviews from Brown, Harvard and UPenn, and while all the interviewers were extremely helpful and kind, the best advice was given to me by the Harvard alumni. She explained that as a local resident, her primary interest was not to vet and exclude...

Small secret that not a lot of other students at my school have seemed to figure out: teachers legitimately enjoy talking to kids outside of class. I've talked to teachers about their plans to go back and get terminal degrees in their field, about wacky business ideas they've had, about anything and everything we feel like. And that doesn't mean having...

My ultimate goal is to become a pediatrician, so a school with a strong...

This is going to stand in almost complete contradiction with my last point but hear me out...I declined Johns Hopkins' offer of admission because of their focus on medicine. While I feel confident that I'm going to continue on to medical school, I'm...

I started looking at US News and World Report's rankings of schools, broken down by academic field, in order to find the top schools in undergrad biological sciences....