PIQ 1: Leadership
Junior year, I became section leader for our marching band's eleven trumpets, and within two weeks, half of them weren't speaking to the other half.
The split was simple. The four seniors had marched together for three years and wanted to keep doing things their way, including skipping the warm-up I was supposed to run. The freshmen wanted to know why the seniors got to skip it. Both groups came to me, separately, every day.
My first move was the wrong one. I told the seniors they had to do the warm-up because I was section leader. They did it, badly and loudly, and the freshmen saw exactly how much my title was worth.
So I tried listening instead. I asked each senior, one at a time, what they'd change about the warm-up. Their answers were the same: it was built for beginners and wasted ten minutes they needed for the hardest passage in our show. They were right. I rebuilt the warm-up into two tracks, the basics and a harder version made from that passage, and asked the two strongest seniors to lead the second track instead of skipping it.
Then I paired every freshman with an upperclassman for the four-minute closer, the part of the show everyone was struggling with. Each pair recorded themselves once a week and sent it to me, and I gave each pair one thing to fix. One of the seniors, Jordan, started staying after rehearsal with his freshman partner without my asking.
At our final competition, our section earned the highest music score in the band. At the end-of-season party, the freshmen and seniors sat at the same table.
This year, two of last year's freshmen run the basics track. I didn't ask them to. They asked me.
PIQ 2: Creative side
Most of my creativity happens in the first five minutes of a tutoring session, when I ask a student to explain a problem to me before I explain anything to them.
I didn't start that way. Freshman year, my Algebra 2 teacher asked me to help a senior who was failing, and for three weeks I explained every problem the way I'd solve it, slower each time. Nothing landed. Out of ideas one afternoon, I asked him to walk me through a logarithm problem himself, and halfway through I realized he thought logs were a kind of multiplication. I had been answering a question he wasn't asking.
Since then, I've tutored at an after-school program and two learning centers, and every student's explanation sends me somewhere different. A few examples:
A fifth grader refused to touch word problems but would talk about Minecraft for twenty minutes straight. We rewrote his ratio homework as crafting recipes. Two planks make four sticks; how many sticks from twenty-four planks? He finished the worksheet and asked for another.
A junior could solve problems out loud but froze on paper during tests. We practiced with her narrating every step under a timer, then whispering, then working silently. Her next test score went up fourteen points.
In an online Spanish class for kids ages six to fourteen, I was effectively running three lessons at once. The younger kids got flashcard races every five minutes. The older ones, bored by games, wanted to know why verbs change, so I drew conjugation charts on the shared whiteboard while the races went on.
None of these approaches came from a textbook. They came from listening long enough to hear what a student was actually confused about, then being willing to throw out my plan. It doesn't produce anything you could hang on a wall, but finding the one explanation that fits one particular person is the most creative thing I do.
PIQ 3: Talent or skill
The first badminton game I ever played, I lost 21–6 to my friend's twelve-year-old brother. He laughed through most of it.
I wanted to be better than that. Freshman year, I made my school's JV team as the last alternate, which mostly meant flipping the scorecards. The nearest club was a forty-minute drive, too far for my parents on weeknights, so I practiced where I could. I hit a shuttle against our garage door until my mom asked me to stop because of the noise, then moved to the side of the house. I tied a rope between two chairs in the living room as a net and copied footwork from tutorial videos, pausing every few seconds to see where the player's feet landed. I filled a notebook with drills and timed myself on each one.
By sophomore year I made varsity. I also kept losing.
Once I could drive, I started going to the club twice a week to play people far better than me: a group of college students and an older man everyone called Coach. I lost almost every game for two months. Somewhere in there, losing started to feel different. After every loss, I asked whoever beat me what I'd done wrong. Most people were happy to tell me, and Coach usually had three answers. I also propped my phone against my water bottle to film my games, then rewatched them at half speed, pausing every time I was late to the shuttle. Every shot I couldn't return went into my notebook, and I drilled it that week. The first time I won a point off a college player with his own drop shot, he stopped and asked who had taught me that.
Junior year, our team went undefeated and won both our league and section titles. I played third singles, which isn't glamorous, but I didn't lose a match all season.
I still look for games I'll probably lose. What I'm actually good at, I've realized, isn't badminton. It's showing up the day after a loss with a list of what to fix.
PIQ 4: Educational opportunity or barrier
The biggest educational barrier I've faced is a simple one: my high school does not offer AP Computer Science. When I asked about it as a sophomore, my counselor explained that the teacher who used to teach it had retired and no one had replaced him.
I enrolled in the school's only programming elective, which focused on basic web design, and finished its assignments by October. After that, I found a free AP-level course online through a university and worked through it in the library after school, usually two units a week. The material was manageable. The isolation was harder. When my code broke, I posted the error on a forum and waited, sometimes a full day, for someone to respond.
In January, I learned that two other students were teaching themselves the same course, and we began meeting on Tuesdays in an empty classroom. By spring, the group had grown to seven. I organized a shared folder of practice problems by topic and set one rule: try for ten minutes on your own before asking for help. Mr. Patel, a math teacher, offered us his room and often stayed to grade while we worked.
Taking the exam required the school to order it and assign a proctor, so I wrote a one-page proposal listing the cost, the seven students, and our practice scores, and presented it to the principal. She approved it. Six of us passed, and I earned a 5.
This year, AP Computer Science appears in our course catalog for the first time, and twenty-eight students are enrolled. I've already taken the exam, so I'm not one of them, but I visit the class on Thursdays to help with debugging. Of everything I learned that year, it's the skill I had to build most on my own, and the one I'm most glad to pass along.
PIQ 5: Significant challenge
Oct. 3: 5 hours of sleep. Migraine at 10:40. Missed chemistry. Oct. 4: 4.5 hours. Migraine at 9:15. Missed chemistry and English. Oct. 6: 7 hours. No migraine.
That's the first page of a log I started in the fall of my junior year, after I had already missed eleven days of school. By December the count was nineteen.
The migraines came without warning, and once one started, I couldn't look at a screen or a page without the words smearing. I spent much of second period lying in the nurse's office with the lights off, listening to my chemistry class happen down the hall. My grades dropped quickly. I got a 58 on a test covering reactions I had never seen taught, and for a few weeks I stopped telling my parents my scores.
I started the log because my neurologist asked for one, but I kept it more carefully than she expected: sleep, meals, screen time, and every migraine down to the minute. Six weeks in, the pattern was hard to miss. Almost every migraine followed a night with less than six hours of sleep, and I was losing sleep because I stayed up late catching up on the school I'd missed during migraines.
So I rebuilt my week around sleep. I emailed each of my teachers with the log attached and asked for notes in advance, so that on bad days I could listen to recordings with my eyes closed instead of losing the material. My chemistry teacher began leaving printed slides in my folder every Monday. I moved most of my homework to lunch and kept an eleven o'clock bedtime, even the night before tests.
By spring, the migraines had dropped from about three a week to three a month. I asked to retake the reactions test, scored a 91, and finished chemistry with an A.
The log is on its third notebook now. Most of the entries are boring, which is exactly the point.
PIQ 6: Academic subject
My grandmother switches between Tagalog and English mid-sentence. "Nag-drive ka ba?" Did you drive? The verb is English. Everything around it is Tagalog.
For years I didn't notice. Then in ninth grade I started hearing it everywhere: at family parties, in my cousins' group chat, in the way my mom answers the phone. I wanted to know if there were rules to it, or if everyone was improvising.
My school doesn't offer linguistics, so I started with what I could find. I checked out a used intro textbook and read it on the bus, and I took a free online course from the University of Edinburgh that I didn't fully understand the first time through. The second time, I did. I learned that what my family does has a name, code-switching, and that linguists still argue about whether grammar limits where a switch can happen.
That argument hooked me, so I tested it. Over one summer, with everyone's permission, I recorded about four hours of conversation at family gatherings and logged every switch, 612 in total, in a spreadsheet, sorted by where in the sentence it happened. Most fit the patterns my textbook predicted. Forty-one didn't, and nearly all of those came from my two youngest cousins, who grew up speaking mostly English.
I wrote it up as an eight-page paper and emailed it to a linguistics professor at a nearby college, not really expecting an answer. She replied with two pages of notes and a reading list, and we've met over video three times since.
I don't know yet whether my cousins' "mistakes" are mistakes or the start of a new pattern. That's the question I want to keep working on. In the meantime, I've started recording my grandmother's stories, partly for the data and partly because no one else in my family had thought to.
PIQ 7: Community
Every weekday at 8:05, my grandmother waits at the stop outside our apartment complex for the bus to her senior center. For years she left home forty minutes early, because the schedule posted there was only in English, and she reads Vietnamese.
When the route changed last spring and she missed two doctor's appointments in one month, I decided the problem was the sign, not her.
My first fix was a translated schedule taped to the pole. The city removed it three days later. I emailed the regional transit agency and heard nothing, emailed again, called, and finally found the name of their community outreach coordinator in the minutes of a public board meeting. I wrote to her directly.
She answered within a week. The agency could install translated signs, she said, but only at stops where riders showed a need. So I wrote a short survey in English, Vietnamese, and Spanish and spent three mornings and two evenings at the stop with a clipboard, asking strangers to fill it out. I collected 117 responses; eighty-one people said they'd rather read the schedule in a language other than English. I sent her the results in a spreadsheet with a one-paragraph summary.
Two months later, new signs went up at our stop and four others on the route, in all three languages, with a QR code for live arrival times. My mom and I proofread the Vietnamese version and caught two mistakes, which the agency corrected.
My grandmother leaves fifteen minutes early now. What stays with me is how many people at that stop had been quietly working around the same problem for years without anyone asking whether it could be fixed. I've started noticing problems like that everywhere, and I've learned the first step is usually just finding out who's in charge.
PIQ 8: Beyond the application
I own a sewing machine named after my great-aunt, a seam ripper I've replaced four times, and a spreadsheet my friends describe as "concerning."
The spreadsheet tracks every piece of clothing I've bought at a thrift store since I was fifteen: what I paid, what was wrong with it, how long it took to fix, and what I sold it for. There are 214 rows. Row one is a denim jacket with a broken zipper that I bought for $4, made worse while replacing the zipper, and eventually wore myself because nobody would buy it.
I learned to sew from YouTube and from Mrs. Lin, who runs the alterations shop near my school and let me watch her work on Saturday mornings in exchange for sweeping. She taught me that most "ruined" clothes have one of five problems: a missing button, a broken zipper, a split seam, a stain, or a bad fit. The first four can usually be fixed in under an hour. The fifth is why I now own a lot of measuring tape.
Over two years, I've resold about 180 pieces online and made a little over $2,300 in profit. Part of it paid for a better machine. The rest goes into a jar labeled "college," which my mom finds hilarious.
The money is nice, but the part I love is looking at something everyone else walked past and figuring out what's wrong with it. A wool coat with a torn lining, to me, is just a Tuesday night.
Last spring, I started running a free repair table at our school's clothing swap. People bring me jackets with stuck zippers and jeans with blown-out knees, and instead of fixing them, I hand over the needle and walk them through it. Almost everyone starts by telling me they can't sew. By the end of the afternoon, most of them have.