Reflections and Images

 This past week has been crazy. Never in my life did I expect an acceptance from Stanford. A funny anecdote I have is that when I visited Stanford as a rising sophomore, I visited my mom's friends at Palo Alto. One of them asked me if my dream school was Stanford and I said that Stanford isn't my dream school because I wouldn't get in. Well, I suppose that life can be quite unpredictable and surprising at times.  I have no idea what the admissions officers thought of me, but I think my essays played a big role in my acceptance. To be honest, my standardized test scores were quite average and I did not win impressive awards like raising thousands of dollars for world hunger or curing cancer as a 17-year-old. I would say that my supplemental essays for Stanford were like vignettes that showed different aspects of me. I tried my best to write specific, unique things that sounded authentic and personal. The things I wrote not only showed my intellectual vitality (a word Stanfor...

 I think one of the biggest personal challenges that I have is that I cannot forgive myself for my past mistakes or actions. Some of the things that I hate myself aren't really bad, but rather things that I exaggerate and amplify. I hang on to the past and I fail to see myself through a different light that is more understanding and empathic. I once texted my online friend about this problem, and what I found interesting is that she learned to learn from her past mistakes and move on to focus on the future. Similarly, I discussed this insecurity with my summer camp friend over a Zoom call and a huge difference I noticed was that instead of feeling embarrassed about some past incidents, she found them to be funny and light-hearted. This caused me to wonder whether it is uncommon for people like me to always remind themselves of their past mistakes.  The past-self that I hate the most is my 6th-grade self. I have said some pretty unforgivable things in high school that I still r...

Because the second semester of senior year is not as demanding compared to the first semester, this meant that I now have more free time. During the first weeks of February, I was annoyed that I barely achieved any goals for the new year. I only finished one book because that was for English class, so that meant I read zero books outside of school. I wondered how I could finish 55 books by the end of 2021 when I was already 5 books behind the ideal schedule of reading 1 book per week. Fortunately, boredom drove me to read book samples on Overdrive. Overdrive is a library database that has many ebooks and audiobooks. Initially, I thought that I would stop reading after the sample ended but I was wrong. The first sample I read was Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda and I wanted to know what happened in the end so I borrowed it right away. This marked the beginning of my obsession with books.  After finishing Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda in a day, I started using Google to find bo...