My background 

My mom came to Ecuador with World Teach, and that's where she met my dad. When I was pretty young, they separated. I ended up with a family in Philly in the US and a family in Ecuador, so I spent a lot of time moving back and forth.

For middle school, I went to a school called Masterman. It's a public school in Philly, but you have to apply for middle school and then again for high school. I applied for high school, and right then the pandemic started at the end of my eighth grade. I decided to move to Ecuador and do my first year of high school there. That had its challenges, but it was really nice to be able to spend time with family again. It was a really unique and great experience for me.

Then I moved back to Philly and continued to take classes there. It's a pretty unique school in that all of the classes are honors level, and the only other option is AP. So it's sort of a competitive environment at times, which can be kind of toxic. But besides that, it was a small school, so we all got to know each other really well. I also got to know each of the teachers. From that aspect, it was really nice because we were able to sort of create the culture that we wanted there. Because of that, I found myself getting involved in a lot of different clubs in addition to whatever classes I was taking. They didn't allow us to take any AP classes until our junior year. So before that, it was just core classes like biology, chemistry, different levels of foreign languages, etc. And then for my AP classes, I took AP US History, AP Language and Composition, AP US Government and Politics, AP Calculus BC, AP Spanish Language and Culture, and AP Literature and Composition.

Stats 

For my AP exams, I scored 4s and 5s. I took the SAT twice and sent the second score that I got. I got a 1520, with a 780 on the English portion and a 740 on the math portion. Because I attended high school in the US, I didn't need to submit any English language exams.

Why Yale?

When I visited Yale, it definitely had a different vibe than the other schools I visited. I was accepted into Princeton, Columbia, and Penn as well in the Ivy League. Those were sort of my biggest options that I was looking at. What I noticed about Yale was that there seemed to be a more creative culture there. You saw people from a lot of different backgrounds. However, something about Yale was specific in the way that you saw a bigger difference between each one of the students on campus. And yet, you saw a really big social scene on campus as well, which is easy to lose when academics are such a big piece of life. This was the culture that I envisioned myself in.

I would say the other big thing for me was the fact that I want to study Global Affairs. I think the global affairs school at Yale offers some pretty specific opportunities that other schools don't offer so much. One of the big things for me was their capstone project. So in your senior year, instead of writing a thesis, you end up essentially doing a consultant job for an NGO. That's something that I am really interested in. Once I graduate, I hope to go into NGO work and humanitarian aid or political rights. This project was really moving for me because I think if you get caught up in the academics of it all without putting in that practice and putting in the physical work, you sort of end up kind of isolated. That's the perfect opportunity to not only travel but also have some hands-on experience before going into the job that I envision myself in in the future.

Financial aid 

Yale is really generous with financial aid, and their office is very helpful throughout the entire process. Financial aid was definitely one of the aspects I considered when choosing my university.

Extracurriculars and honors 

My school really encouraged extracurriculars, so every lunch period, I would go to some different club depending on the day. I was president of a club called HAAMS, which was short for HOLA AACC ACA Middle School. Each of those other words are acronyms for our different affinity groups at our school. We brought together Latinx, African American, and Asian American students in the middle school and provided mentoring for them. We would lead different lessons on various cultures from around the world or help them with schoolwork and those kinds of things. That was a really big piece for me because I had firsthand experience of feeling really isolated from my culture, and providing a space for those middle schoolers to connect to their roots was pretty important to me.

Another club I was in was the mock trial team. That was just a really fun experience because we would get to go into court, the actual physical court in Philadelphia, and present our cases. I was in peer counseling, which was a sort of mentoring group of high schoolers that would go to middle schoolers. I was in a political theory book club. I did volleyball as well, though I was really bad at it. By my senior year, I asked the coach if I could just dress up as the mascot because I was spending so much time just warming the bench. So that was a fun experience to get to sort of dance around the court.

I was also president of the United Minority Coalition, which brought students together to advocate for policy changes at the school. I was president of a political theory book club as well. I was in the National Honor Society and our school's world affairs club too.

I got an Outstanding Leadership in mathematics award for tutoring and helping out my classmates in math class. I got an outstanding school spirit award. I think that was in part because I ran this other club called the United Minority Coalition, which worked with the different affinity groups in the school to bring about more tangible change in school policy. I also got a global affairs award and a Spanish award for being supposedly the best AP Spanish student. Lastly, I got a gold medal among bilingual students on the national Spanish exam and then a few different College Board honors such as AP Scholar, the National Hispanic Recognition Program, and I was a Commended National Merit Scholar. I was also the salutatorian of my class.