“I’m going to the University of Texas at Austin (UT) for business.
I wanted to do business because it’s a pretty versatile degree, and I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do at first. I didn’t want to do a humanities major because for me, it’d be harder to get a job with it. That’s what led me to choose business, though I’m considering either doing banking or law. If I did law, I’d like to start doing some type of corporate law.I was considering adding a dual major or adding on government, but I’m going to wait until I get into UT and see how the workload is for business. If it isn’t too demanding, then I might add on that secondary major.
Bellaire’s changed me [in the way that] I’ve become more extroverted over the past four years and more confident in doing different things. When I was a freshman, I wasn’t sure of myself and I didn’t have a lot of sense of identity. [At that age], when you’re that young, you kind of float through life and not really think of anything. But now I feel like I’m so much older, like now I have to think about the future when I do things.
If I had to describe high school in three words I would say: challenging, funny and senioritis. [It was] challenging both academically and socially. With high school, you’re getting out of middle school and have to find your friends, and [you] don’t have footing in a new place, especially coming out of COVID. For everyone, I can imagine there was a lack of social skills because it took a while to get adjusted to actually going to school again. [It was] funny because we’ve had so many incidents over the last four years here and it feels like it’s straight out of a sitcom. [Lastly], senioritis because I’m in IB and right now we have to do so many long essays, and it’s really draining when you’re committed to college and all you want to do is really nothing.
I started looking into colleges throughout junior year, especially in the summer before senior year. I feel like you get the most research out of a college when you are writing your supplemental essays about it because you have to go into so much depth about the classes, and that’s what can really draw you into a college. Besides UT, I mostly applied to T-10s [top ten universities in the U.S.], but I was really disappointed when I didn’t get into them. I eventually learned how to accept that through talking to my friends and family about my results, and by realizing there was nothing I could do to change what had already happened. I just needed to make the best of the opportunity in front of me.
One thing I wish I’d known when I started high school would be to start trying to get internships during freshman year. That’s my actual advice because it’s so hard to get into one when you wait until the last minute to do everything. Also, find something that you like and build on it. If you know what you like from when you’re young enough as a freshman, there’s so much more opportunity to take that and have the time to do something with it, something meaningful. That can get you better opportunities with what you want to do because you’ll succeed in what you actually like. Take all the opportunities you see. Turn things that you usually don’t see as an opportunity into something that is.”
