“Alyssa? Can I please come in? Please? I’m scared. Please?” I hear my eight-year-old brother whisper under the door as I remove the pillow from over my ears. “Yeah, come in, and close the door quietly.” He scampers in before my parents notice he is out of his bedroom. We sit on my bedroom floor, […]

“Girls, we need to talk.” Her face was red, and she looked more nervous than I had ever seen her. “Are we in trouble?” my sister asked. Mom shook her head, and we waited for her to speak again. We must have looked like statues, unable to blink and fixed on each quiver of her […]

Step by step I inch my way up the beautiful marble stairs of Grand Central Station, becoming closer and closer to my favorite place; the concrete jungle, better known as New York City. I can’t help but to fantasize about life in the city. I strut my way down Broadway in my two-thousand dollar Louboutins […]

My uncle began teasing me about it when I was seven. I was riding with him in his combine, watching stalk after stalk of corn slip through the heavy outermost blades, when he said, “You’re going to be one of them starving artists, aren’t you?” I denied it. Starving? Not me. But his words stuck […]

Give us a brief chapter of your autobiography. Rebecca S. F. was born to the strains of Pachelbel’s Canon in D. Her mother, a musician, thought the music would calm her newborn. She was wrong. For the first five years of her life, Rebecca was a terror. Granted, a cute, curly-topped terror with huge brown […]

Mark Zuckerberg Born in 1984, Mark Zuckerberg is an entrepreneur who, along with two of his fellow students, founded Facebook while still studying at Harvard. Facebook is a social website that is privately owned, and is used by its members to put up details about themselves through pictures and profiles. It is based on similar […]

I’ve accumulated a plethora of answers to this essay. Each one became more cliche ridden and contrived as the one before. I keep writing and deleting, just hoping that inspiration will fall from the sky or slap me across the face. However, that just isn’t the case. What sets me apart? What makes me an […]

It was Friday, November 7th, 2013. My alarm buzzed; it was pitch black outside and the taste of morning breath consumed my mouth. I had been through this routine of waking up early to catch a flight several times, but this was different. I was excited, threw my blankets off and hopped in the shower. […]

I walk into the gym; all eyes turn to me. I am the only white person in the inner city community center. I feel like an outcast. The man at the door takes my bag as I walk through the metal detector. He gives me a hand shake, like those I had only seen in […]

Will Rogers once said, “If you want to be successful, it’s just this simple. Know what you are doing. Love what you are doing. And believe in what you are doing.” When determining the laws of life that appealed to me, this quote emerged in my mind. The rising generation has the potential for great […]