On the way home from school one day, Mom took us to a pet store just for fun. In a box beneath a heat lamp were the cutest little yellow ducklings, quacking away in their little duckling voices. We fell in love with them immediately. “Oh please can we get one?” we begged Mom. “Please please please?” “Okay,” she said, “BUT JUST ONE.” So we brought it home and put it in the bathtub. It was very happy there, swimming around and making its little baby quackles. But then I started to worry, “What will Dad say when he gets home from work?” (Sometimes Dad wasn't always happy with the decisions Mom made.) As it got closer to 5 pm when Dad's bus was going to arrive, I got nervouser and nervouser. No, that isn't really a word! I should write “more and more nervous.” Anyway, you get my point. By the time Dad got home, you can imagine how my stomach was feeling: like it was full of butterflies! Okay, so Dad got home, put down his lunch pail, took off his coat, and said to us, “What is going on -- you all look funny.” As in funny-strange. The four of us kids were happy and scared at the same time, and I guess it showed on our faces. “Ummm...Dad….ummmm...we have something to show you.” “Okay, what is it?” “Go look in the bathtub.” So he did, and he started laughing! “That little guy looks lonely,” he said, “he needs a friend!” We all jumped into the van and went back to Rodney's Pets & Feed and Dad bought us another little duckling! I named one Martha and the other one Petunia, after two of my favorite books at the time (George & Martha, by James Marshall, and Petunia by Roger Duvoisin). We four loved Martha and Petunia, and they loved us. They followed us everywhere around the backyard. In the late afternoons, we crawled around on the ground, hunting for stalks of their favorite grass -- appropriately named “duck grass weed” -- to bring them. They always quacked “happy, thank you” as they ate it. That's the thing about ducks: their emotions and their words are the same. Their word for “happy” is the same as the happy sound they make and so they pretty much tell you how they feel and what's going on with them. One day, Dad brought home a large fiberglass airline shipping container and he used it to build a little rectangular pond in the backyard. Now they had a real place to swim, and we had our bathtub back. Martha and Petunia would slide into the water, wiggle their tails and quack “happy, swimming” that told us that they liked the water. Sometimes we filled up the Radio Flyer with water and gave them rides around the backyard. I honestly don't know if they liked that so much, because I can't remember the sound that they made while we were tugging them slowly around the yard. But being good sports, they tolerated it. Those days back then felt endless, but in reality they were all too brief. It's a good thing to grow up with animals, which I was lucky to do. Martha and Petunia still live in my heart, and to this day in my mind's ear, I can still hear the sounds they made and what they were saying to me. About the photo: my twin sisters with Martha and Petunia and the Radio Flyer, in our backyard circa 1970.

I live less than an hour away from San Francisco, a lively city in California that is known for its cultural attractions, diverse communities, and world-class cuisine. However, the city that I actually live in is Fremont, California. Our community loves to stay in our comfort zones and children commonly follow their parents' footsteps regardless of their individual passions; Fremont is much more low-scale than San Francisco for obvious reasons. Parents love to shelter their children from the cruel dangers of the world, while the children work hard not for their own aspirations, but for what society tells them will lead to a prosperous and stable life. But I do not fit in with this common ground; I would rather invest in risks, speak with expression, and follow my own passions. But strangely enough, this exact conservative and sheltered environment around me is what sparked the courage in me to be who I am today. People often fear the unknown, but to me, unfamiliarity is simply an opportunity to confront the topic and further expand my knowledge. Most people in this community insist on staying in their comfort zones and doing only what their parents declare as satisfactory. But I also found another common quality among my peers in Fremont; they all developed a vapid personality and lacked personal motivation. After contemplating these two common traits, I finally made the connection that these students don't have their own dreams and aspirations, but simply follow a hollow path that has no connections to their true passions. Ever since that discovery, I set my own goals where I must confront obstacles and risks with courage, explore different career choices to determine my true passion, and always act on my ethics and beliefs so that I can truly live life to its fullest. My family, friends, and teachers all see that I have an aura of positivity, compassion, and empathy in me that is not present in most students of my age. I use my school's reading sessions to go to the Special Education classrooms and socialize with students diagnosed with developmental disorders. I know that deep down, each and every one of these students is astounding and beautiful, and I do the best I can to bring what they have to the surface. I will always contribute to my city in beneficial ways, from tutoring elementary school students and standing up for what is right, to helping the mentally unstable students in my school. I have an indestructible desire to improve everyone's lives, and I believe that staying informed and always wanting to learn is an essential to improvement. Valuable creations have always been captivating to me, and I am eager to investigate if I can connect my vibrant spirit of empathy and compassion and utilize science to make great differences in our world. The city of Fremont has shaped me into the motivated, mature, and compassionate leader that I am today simply from displaying what will happen to me if I do not act with independence and courage.

Have you ever wondered what it's like to have four or five, or maybe more, songs stuck in your head? Imagine having that many people crammed into a small room and all desperately vying for your attention. Now imagine that, in a classroom, when you really want to sing so they leave you alone. But you can't, because a) you'd look like a total weirdo and b) there are other people trying to focus. That's an average day for me. Music is a big part of my family's culture, and it has a lot of meaning for me even beyond that. I think about this a lot: what if we could use music as a tool to connect with people? What if we could use it to tell stories and bring communities together? Growing up, my dad was a music enthusiast. We're a big family - eight kids, all from the same parents - so we made a lot of dishes at dinner. We live in an old farmhouse with no dishwasher, so at the end of the day, we'd all clean the kitchen and do the dishes together. This was in the days before Spotify and iTunes, back in the mid-2000s to early-2010s so if we wanted music, we had to sing. And sing we did. My dad would lead the melody and my sisters would sing harmony and to my eight-year-old ears, there was nothing more beautiful. The world was at its brightest when we were singing together. It made - actually, still makes - you feel like you're part of something greater than the sum of its parts. Even before I was born, my family was musical. So much so that I began to recognize certain songs in the womb, and to put me to bed when I was little, you had to sing "One Hand On The Radio" by Aengus Finnan or I wouldn't sleep. I'm seventeen now. I'm going to be a part of the senior music class, studying in-depth music theory and refining our skills on our chosen instruments - the flute, for me. This class has reinforced what my childhood led me to believe: when you're involved in music, you become part of a greater whole, on two levels. The first level is the local community. I've met some amazing people through music, people that otherwise I'd have no way of knowing. It draws strangers together, with all different strengths and weaknesses, and helps them overcome their failings to create art. Painters use pigments to decorate space, but musicians use sound to decorate time. Being part of that is a spectacular feeling, but one that's quite impossible to describe to someone who hasn't felt it before. The second level is the global community. Just about everyone I know has at least a superficial appreciation for music in some form. If you showed someone from the other side of the world a classical piece like Vivaldi's Four Seasons or Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, they'd have a hard time denying that it's beautiful music. Even if you think it's boring, you can certainly appreciate the skill required to play the pieces. This is true for many other forms of music too, not just classical. Music is a community thing and it's meant to be shared. I could go to Europe or the Middle East or Africa and find another musician to play with, regardless of lingual, cultural, or social differences and perform a piece with them. As long as we can both read music, we can let go of the barriers of society. As a musician, I'm not constrained like others are. My art form allows me a certain kind of freedom and a crazy connection to others that can't be taken away from me. You can't unlearn something, after all. So whether you just listen to music when it plays on the radio or you're a fanatic like me who listens to everything under the sun, remember that music is much more than nicely organized sound. Imagine a scene from your favourite movie, a very emotional one. Now remove the background music, and you're left with something a little more shallow. Music is the language that communicates beyond words and extends beyond the barriers of language. It is the one thing that can speak to anyone no matter where you are or what your culture is. It's the universal language and using it, we can connect with all kinds of people. And in a world that's so divided, so disjointed, couldn't we use a little more unity?