For most of my childhood, I had a strong dislike for both reading and writing, but that started to change in 10th grade when my English teacher pushed me to see literature differently. Instead of just reading for the plot, we started looking at stories more analytically and thinking about motives, patterns, and what characters’ choices revealed about them. That way of thinking made literature much more interesting to me.

The following summer, I went to Vanderbilt University to take a creative writing course at their Summer Academy. I worked alongside a professor to build a portfolio with ~10 pieces, and it deepened my interest in literature, specifically through poetry and storytelling, which reiterated the concept of seeing writing not only as expression but also as something you can really analyze and think through.

Around that same time, I read Freakonomics by Dubner & Levitt for a school assignment, and it completely changed how I thought about the business environment. What interested me most was that behavioral economics asked the same kinds of questions I had started asking in literature: why people make the choices they do, what goes on behind the scenes influences them, and what patterns you can find in their behavior. I always knew I wanted to pursue a profession in science or business, but realizing that economics could combine them all and more together in that way made the subject feel unexpectedly familiar and exciting to me.

I then founded Swiftly Speaking, an official club at my high school that combined my love for music with an appreciation for literature through lyrical storytelling. It gave me another way to explore how stories and lyrics reveal meaning and patterns in human behavior, while also bringing together a group of people who share the same niche interest.

In my junior and senior years of high school, I pursued the AP Capstone program, taking AP Seminar and later AP Research alongside AP English Language and AP U.S. History. Through those classes, I wrote a thesis each year and continued developing my research in behavioral economics while strengthening my analytical writing skills and exploring these ideas further with a more professional pursuit.