“When I first came out of quarantine, I don’t think I really knew who I was.

Quarantine was pretty bad, I was depressed and separated from my family and friends. I don’t think I made noise in choir for three weeks, I was too scared to open my mouth. Choir is a place where you know you’re safe, valued and respected.

It really helps you find yourself. I feel like I’ve rediscovered who I am, what I enjoy doing, what I stand for and what I want to do here. That’s why I became treasurer [of choir] my sophomore year, vice president junior year and the president this year. I feel eternally grateful to the community that I’ve gotten to be a part of. My one goal has been to try and cultivate and share that environment I was so fortunate to walk into.

I’ve done choir since first grade. I kept doing it through middle school because I enjoy music, and a lot of professionals, like conductors, opera singers and pianists, are in my family.

It wasn’t until my seventh grade when I saw the Bellaire Madrigal Choir come perform at my middle school. I was like, ‘That’s what I want to be a part of.’ Even when quarantine happened, seeing that one performance, that’s what kept me going. [That was] what made me decide that this is the school I want to go to, this is the place where I want to be.

Something I wasn’t good at for a long time was setting boundaries and the ability to say, ‘No,’ so it was easy for me to overextend myself and end up burning out. After summer, different people helped remind me that you have to take care of yourself, and that’s something that’s been hard for me. I think it’s a good quality to want to help people, but there needs to be a balance. It’s really important to know you can’t take care of other people if you don’t take care of yourself.

[Being at Bellaire] was life-changing for the opportunities that I got to have here, all the competitions and the opportunities I got to be impactful in people’s lives. I think needing to figure out a balance is something that I’ve gotten better at but I could definitely improve once I’m in college.

I’m going to Trinity University in San Antonio. Ever since I was five, I was like, ‘I’m going to be an entomological field researcher,’ which was quite different from most people in my family. Although I still kept that love for Biosciences and expanded to botany and mycology, I don’t really know [what] I’ll do right now.

I think I’m just going to take some classes and I’ll figure out what I want to do. It’s okay not to know what you’re going to do, [but] it’s kind of scary not knowing. I have plenty of friends that are like, ‘This is what I’m doing and I know what I’m going to do.’ But, overall, I know I have some aspirations, and my main goal is to get to talk with people and make relationships, however that ends up working out.”