Meet John: Number one in the senior class. National Honor Society president. Perfect scorer on the ACT. If I tie for third in the Poetry Slam, he places second. If I set a personal record in cross-country, he’s team MVP. It’s always the same story: In the world of transcripts and awards ceremonies, I am […]

In order to doom a child, just involve the television. While television can be good in small, educational doses, the amount of time a child spends in front of the TV directly affects the performance in many important fields of a child’s life. Academics, health, physical performance, character, and safety: they are all negatively affected […]

I need to focus on the sounds in this hallway- amongst other noises I can hear the hum of a vending machine, the airstream from the vents, and the ding of the elevator reaching floor 8, none of which is the sound I am listening for. The coast seems clear, so I muster up all […]

“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 […]