Technology vs. Me My mother and I live together in Saratoga, California, the heart of “Silicon Valley,” yet we might as well come from different worlds. As a computer engineer, she daily taps away at computer programming tasks and using complicated math formulas, while I spend my time on chick lit novels, my electric bass, and the high school pool that leaves me smelling like chlorine for most of the morning. Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area yet...

I began spinning stories when I was five years old, creating an alternate universe in which I was queen of the world and therefore did not have to clean my room. That love of storytelling never left me: it simply deepened. At the beginning of my freshman year, I, like many of my peers, complained about the literary classics we were obliged to read. Yet as my high school career progressed, I found myself spending hours happily reading novels that...

Tour. For the first 15 years of my life, I was (unfortunately) a hardcore UCLA fan. I almost refused to even look at USC out of loyalty to a school I hadn't gotten into yet,...