"In this world, Elwood, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant." Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. You may quote me.” I was thirteen when I first heard those words from the James Stewart movie Harvey. They stayed in my brain for about a year. After a year, I began to question them. Why only be smart or pleasant? I knew that for most of my life I had been smart. But as I grew older, I seemed to edge closer and closer to being pleasant. It crystallized about halfway through my freshman year that I wanted to be both. I wanted to be pleasant, I wanted to be amicable. I wanted to be a good person, not just simply a great one. So for the summer before my sophomore year, I went on a political road trip.  It was a trip with about twenty kids from all over the country, who came together to hear presentations from people on both sides of controversial issues, such as marriage equality and minimum wage. Hearing both sides of an issue allowed me to gain a perspective on not only my own views but of the people on the other side of the aisle. The summer road trip gave me a deeper understanding of the people around me, which led to a deeper empathy towards others. This was the start of a more pleasant me, who knew that fighting is rarely necessary and seldom effective.

The other half of my goal was intelligence. I had always desperately wanted to be smart. Not just smart by comparison or for my age but undeniable intelligent, no matter the surroundings or situation. I realized that to be smarter, I would have to have to go beyond a regular education or school curriculum. To do this, I took classes outside of school in Spanish, and use computer applications to learn German. I developed the ambition to know eight languages. I read too. I read classics and famous literary oddities and tried to get my hands on anything on Time’s List of the 100 Best Novels. My ambition became to be a cosmopolitan good Samaritan.