For the last three years my extracurricular life has been spent at practice with my local rowing team. I’ve always done a sport of some type. Most often it was soccer though my freshmen year of high school I decided to try out rowing. Within a month I had been given the position of coxswain for the freshmen eight, and along with it the task of controlling eight unruly freshmen boys and keeping a $30,000 racing shell from being damaged. My sophomore year I earned the coxswain position on my team’s top boat the Men’s Junior 8+. On that boat we went undefeated all season and brought the team their second national title. Junior year I once again earned the spot of coxswain on the top boat, which this time was the Med’s 1st Varsity 8. The job as a coxswain is fairly simple. My job is to act as a second coach, I am in charge of the boys who comprise my crew and it is my job to make sure they do their job to the best of their ability. At the same time every day at practice it is demanded of me that I behave in a mature and responsible manner. My experience on my rowing team has been truly defining, I learned things about myself I would have never known had I not joined the team. As a coxswain I have to behave as if I were a coach I must act maturely and responsibly. My ability to do so has earned me respect and the honor of commanding the fastest boats my team can field. Even through the worst of times in my life I have always had rowing as an escape. At crew I am stress free and without outside burdens, I am free to be myself. I am certain that had I not joined the rowing team my freshmen year I would have been a different person. I would not have made the friends I did I would not have gained the confidence I have. And the feeling of belonging and the feeling of being needed by someone besides my parents would be something I would lust after, and probably would never find without rowing. It is thanks to joining crew that I became a well-rounded confident individual.

My mother being a teacher loved history and culture because of her passion and my father’s love of travel from a young age I traveled a lot. Most of the vacations were to locations with in the United States but the trips that I remember the best were always to places like Quebec or Istanbul. Whenever and where ever we traveled I always came back with fond memories of the different cultures and people. Often times our trips were off the beaten path, my parents always hated going to cliché tourist sites unless they were amazing. And so the trips were always eye opening and gave a beautiful look into the true culture of country we visited. One of my favorite trips was our trip to turkey where we visited Istanbul and Cappadocia. While there we visited many historical and important locations such as the Hagia Sophia, when we were not visiting well known “tourist traps” we ate in the homes of locals. One of the coolest experiences was visiting a family owned pottery company that had by tradition hand crafted and hand painted all the dishes in the shop. I hope that the rest of my life will also be filled with great memories of faraway places with interesting cultures just like the memories I procured as a child.