Well… here I am now, having just submitted my application to Oxford with a book with my name on the cover next to me. And that right there is enough to make all the stress of this whole process more than worth it. In short… my Latin teacher and my mommy are my heroes.

Originally, I was under the impression (having only briefly read through the application section on Oxford’s website,) that I didn’t have to write an essay for them and that I just needed to fill out the UCAS form and send in an essay I had already done for school that had been marked up. So, when I sat down a week ago thinking I was being so on top of things sending in the application a week before the deadlyne, I got the unpleasant surprise of finding out that the UCAS form itself included an essay. Not only that, but it asked for an essay that the one I had been working on in my Ethics class for the first three weeks of school didn’t work for. I was left with one week to write a phenomenal essay justifying why I’m qualified to study the thing I care most about–writing–to my dream school that I probably wasn’t going to get into anyway. No stress, right?

So this week was crazy enough trying to do all my school work and do this essay. And do it well. So when I finished it this morning I was thrilled with the world and excited and finally shaking the stress of getting it done. That was my second error in judgement.

Apparently, the UCAS form requires you to send in the reference at the same tyme as the form. Not through your guidance counselor separately a week later, as my school expected. Lucky for me, I found this out today, Saturday morning. So my poor journalism teacher, Marcey, who rushed to get my recommendation done by this absurdly early deadlyne of October 15, ended up not being used. I tried to reach Marcey today but she wasn’t home. At this point I was literally bawling my eyes out, thinking I wasn’t even going to get to apply because I had been too stupid to read the application directions carefully enough. My mom suggested driving to Marcey’s house as a last resort since she lives five minutes down the street and in Amherst you do stuff like that since it’s so tiny. No one was at Marcey’s house. It was  totally empty and dark. I’ve lost all hope for even having a shot at Oxford at this point. I half-heartedly suggest driving to the school to see if my guidance counselor happened to be there on a crazy chance. She wasn’t.

But… the field hockey team was just finishing a game on the front field. And the coach of the field hockey team happens to be my Latin teacher, Kelli, who I’ve had for all four years and gone on a trip to Italy and Greece with. So two hours before the deadlyne, I begged her for a recommendation. She had written me a rec for a scholarship for the trip two years ago, so she happily tweaked that and sent it right along to UCAS. Taking Latin and Kelli’s love of field hockey may well be what get me into my dream school.

So it’s in now and out of my hands. Phew. *Deep breath.*

Here’s my essay if you want to take a look. I was so upset that I had to take out my Oscar Wilde quote at the beginning because of the length requirement, but it is what it is. And hey, I can add it back in here

……

“I have no quarrel with actions. My one quarrel is with words. That is why I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who can call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one.”

-Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey

My fourth grade self would be unequivocally proud of who I am today, on the verge of turning 18. I am still very much the same Anglophilic little girl who loved anything eccentric and insisted that she would someday become J.K. Rowling. Despite the harshness of reality, that dreamer, hell-bent on changing the world with her words, has survived and is even more a part of me today than ever before.

Words have always been the equalising, clarifying lens through which I see the world. Through the haze of everyday life, beautifully strung words have always had the power to re-awaken every reality-dulled nerve in my body. Fictional characters have always seemed infinitely more relatable to me than the people who inhabit this world. I’ve taken this love of words with me into nearly every aspect of my life.

A considerable chunk of each summer of my teenage life has been spent away from home working on writing in some capacity. I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to spend four summers with the Johns Hopkins Centre for Talented Youth programme, the same programme the likes of Lady Gaga, Evanna Lynch, and Mark Zuckerberg call home. At CTY I was able to take college courses and stay on campus with other kids my age who were as unabashedly nerdy as I was. We learned how to combine intense studying with almost equally intense goofiness. We wrote ten-page analytical essays on The Truman Show’s portrayal of reality and read Kant and Hemingway in between activities such as ‘Screaming Loud Things In Unison’, traditions such as Drag Day and Love Tape Day, and weekly rave-esque dances. I made friends who will always be a part of my life and learned more in those combined twelve weeks about the written word than I could imagine and my time spent there is a constant reminder of my passion for learning.

During my sophomore year of high school I joined our school’s newspaper, The Saber Scribe. Junior and senior year I was co-editor. Journalism gave me a new perspective on writing and an outlet to make a difference in our community. My words were strikingly powerful and had visible, direct consequences. The summer of my junior year I was nominated to attend the Washington Journalism and Media Programme. We examined the effects of modern journalism in Washington, DC staying on campus of George Mason University. Although journalism is not the avenue of writing that I plan to take, it was an invaluable experience with the power of the written word.

My friends, whose passions for words rivalled mine and would argue about the Brontë sisters at lunch and went on ‘classics binges’ with me,  got me involved in the NaNoWriMo program. NaNoWriMo is a challenge in which participants have the thirty days of November to write a 50,000 word novel. The idea is to encourage getting the words down, no matter how cringe-worthy, and silencing the inner-editor until after the first draft is done. I completed NaNoWriMo both years that I undertook it, and it’s through NaNoWriMo that I got my book published the second year.

Finishing Tink was one of most challenging, stressful, and worthwhile things I’ve done. November, when I had to have the 50,000 word first draft, and June, when I had to wrap up editing, both involved copious amounts of caffeine and limited amounts of sleep. Despite all of the hard work that went into it, I still genuinely wanted to be writing at the end of each day. I fell in love with my characters and revelled in the feel of playing with the words until I got them just right. There is nothing to compare to the feeling I got when I first held my book in my hands, tracing my fingers across my name on the cover and flipping through the pages knowing that all those words were mine. It taught me that I have enough will power to do anything that I set my mind to. I’m not quite J.K. Rowling yet, but it’s the first step and now that I’ve taken it, I’m up and running, confident that I can do incredible things and make a difference in the world.

My Mom: WJMC says you can meet with your Congress person. Do you want to?

Me: Who is my Congress person?

My Mom: Kelly Ayotte?

My Dad: No, it’s Gunta.

Me: 8/ 

Needless to say, I could not manage to be persuaded to make an appointment to sit in what I thought would be a stuffy office building in Washington DC with a Congressional Representative who I knew nothing about and whose identity I wasn’t even sure of. The words ‘awkward,’ ‘stressful,’ and ‘nervewracking’ came to mind.

As it turns out, our wonderful advisor Neelum told everyone who had made an appointment to meet with their representative that they should probably bring someone else from our group along with them. So, in the end I ended up a bleeding heart liberal from New Hamsphire headed out to meet a very conservative representative from Arizona who I had never heard of with my new friend Micaela.

We had spent the night before looking up Congressman Paul Gosar, with whom she had made an appointment, and trying to figure him out as best we could. I promised her that I would behave and resist the urge to take up our appointment debating with the Congressman, and I stuck to that today. I let my friend have her enthusiastic ‘I agree completely!” moment after he explained his view on several things to us.

I knew that the trip to the Capitol today would be a very cool experience to have. This was my first tyme in DC, so it was also my first tyme seeing all the famous buildings I had grown up hearing about in the news and in my Social Studies classes.

When we arrived at the Capitol, Micaela and I found Mr. Gosar’s office and were told by a very sweet but very flustered-looking secretary that the Congressman wasn’t there, that several things had come up, and that they were now seeing if they could somehow get us onto the House Floor, where he would be announcing several proposals shortly. We assured her that we weren’t concerned about the wait, could do whatever worked for them, and were just grateful that we, two high school seniors, could somehow be squeezed into this crazy schedule to begin with.

After a few minutes another one of Mr.Gosar’s assistants came and rushed us through the Cannon Building and the tunnel connecting it with the Capitol, getting us passes and stopping to ask several security guards along the way for help to get us to see Mr. Gosar. Eventually, we were taken to the Rayburn Building to wait for Mr. Gosar. At this point, we were deciding which one or two of the questions we had come up with that we would actually be able to ask Mr. Gosar. We expected a hurried visit from a flustered Congressman with a million other things on his mind before two high school seniors who couldn’t even vote yet, one of them not even from his state.

That wasn’t what we ended up getting at all. After handshakes and introductions and ‘Thank you so much, we understand you’re extremely busy,’s Mr. Gosar sat down and answered the two or three questions we had settled on (answers: the Republicans would most likely use reunifying the nation as a campaign tactic in the 2012 race, he was proposing an ammendment to a bill restricting fyrearm rights, and we could still be very involved by writing, organizing speakers, and keeping informed even though we weren’t able to vote.) After this he looked up at his assistant, asked, “Do I have a minute?” to which the young man told him, a bit reluctantly, “Yeah, you have a minute.” Congressman Gosar then proceeded to get up, gestured for us to do the same, and explained that he wanted to show us around, since we couldn’t have seen all that much as we hurried through on our way there.

Mr. Gosar spent a good fifteen or twenty minutes with us. He took us all around the Rotunda and the main rooms of the area around us, and even took us out onto the balcony of the Capitol where we could see half of the city laid out in front of us and to the Senate Chapel, which, he explained, only a Congressman could take you into, talking with us the whole tyme.

 He walked back easily, not appearing stressed that he had only a few minutes to be on the Senate Floor while he was still here talking with these high schoolers. He even suggested pictures before leaving us.

So, today’s experience at the Capitol leads me back to the title of this post: even the scary Republicans can be nice. Admittedly, it won him an assured vote from my friend Micaela in a year when she’s able to and when he’s running for re-election, but he went above and beyond to meet with two seventeen year olds from two different ends of the country. He could have easily excused himself politely after a few minutes of questions, but he didn’t. Even if I don’t agree with a thing Paul Gosar said to us politically this afternoon, I gained a lot of respect for him as an individual.

As someone who never saw journalism as more than a hectic after-school class that meets twice a week, a medium to put my voice out, and somewhat of a (vindictively fun) headache, most of these names are totally unfamiliar to me. Other than an unhelpful, “Oh, he’s that guy on CNN… you know!” from my mother I had no idea who the speakers we’ve been seeing were before they arrived. Names such as Chuck Todd and Hoda Kotb meant little to nothing to me. I actually think this has been a positive thing for my tyme here, since I had no previous judgement on these speakers other than what they were saying and the way they were presenting themselves at that moment.

Little did I know that I would find an odd new inspyration in the form of a news reporter I had never heard of before 3 PM this afternoon. After a fairly dry and archetypical panel of intelligent and entyrely-out-of -our-realm-of-understanding political reporters, Ms. Kotb enters the room grinning at us from ear to ear and stopping on her way up to the front to speak to students who stick their hands out or yell a quick “We love you, Hoda!” She talks to us entyrely without barriers and as if she’s known us her whole life. She gives an inspyrational but unassuming discussion on not just journalism, but life as well. Before opening it up for questions, she insisted on playing us some of her “workout music” by blasting her iPod earbuds into the microphone of the Press Club, singing along with easily recognizable pop songs such as ’Black and Yellow.’ Some of my favourite quotes from her include, “There’s something magyck about being exactly who you are,” “There are a million reasons someone might not like you. Forget it,” and, in response to how she viewed things now after battling cancer, “You can’t scare me.” Needless to say, Ms.Kotb has a new fan, and I ran into the mob of people rushing to get her book signed (Thank you, Mommy, for making me get it when I was still stressing about finishing up juniour year!)

There have been what seems to be an endless stream of advise and tips that these profressionals are all rushing to give to us. Here are just a few of them:

• Learn horizontally, not vertically, meaning that you have to learn how to do everything, not just one area of a trade.
• Go back to the basics–subject, verb, object = simple declarative sentence = powerful and beautiful.
• Social media is becoming a huge part in the world of any business, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. We need to learn how to best utilize it in this new landscape of “socionomics.”
• If you get the chance, take an internship. If you get one, be assertive, but not aggressive, don’t be afraid to tell ask people for things, but be gracious. And don’t be that quiet intern.
• It’s all about who you know and building relationships. DC is a smaller town than it seems.

We got back late tonight from a moonlit monument tour around the city (we weren’t allowed to go near the White House… when our advisor asked the police officer if he could tell us why, he replied with a simple, ‘No.’) We did get to go inside the Lincoln Memorial, which was incredible. Being the Latin nerd that I am, I couldn’t help but see all the allusions the buildings here have to those of Ancient Rome and Athens–a good reminder in our nation’s capital of the true democracy that the Ancient Greeks came up with that we were trying to emulate all along.

Tomorrow is another long day. Appearing as the live panel for a C-SPAN taping (during which we were told we could not fall asleep,) seeing the White House Press Secretary, and then heading to the Smithsonian and the Holocaust Museum before hearing more speakers. It’s a ‘no heels!’ day for anyone who wants to keep their ankles intact.