My academic and musical studies have taken me far and wide.

As a student at the Nueva School, I’ve had the opportunity to go on amazing school trips. In 8th grade, I spent two weeks in China with the rest of my Mandarin classmates immersing myself in the language I had studied for all of middle school and most of elementary school. During the first week, we went sightseeing in many of the major cities of China, including Beijing, Hangzhou, and Wuzhen. I walked along the Great Wall, visited the Forbidden City, and saw historic statues of the Buddha in the Lingyin Temple. Unfortunately, in Beijing I suffered an allergic reaction to peanuts and had to be taken to the emergency room. Just a few days later, I fell ill with food poisoning. Despite these unfortunate incidents, I recovered and jumped back into activities as quickly as I could. During the second week, I did a homestay in Shanghai with Chong Shang, a student at the SMIC school. It was difficult but rewarding to spend most of my day communicating solely in Mandarin, and I found that I’d come a long way since 3rd grade, when I’d begun to learn the language. But, I felt that I still had a long way to go and decided to continue to study Chinese in high school.

In 9th grade, I spent a week in Peru as part of a group focused on art. We investigated street art in Lima and tried our hands at pottery, hatmaking, and weaving in villages. Our sightseeing destinations included Machu Picchu, the Ollantaytambo ruins, and the Maras salt mines. The following year, my 10th grade class visited Costa Rica. My group stayed at the Soltis Center, a research center run by Texas A&M University a couple hours north of the capital. Over the course of the week I saw amazingly colorful tropical birds during early morning hikes, enormous insects and frogs during nighttime forays into the underbrush, bands of coati running across roads, and snakes slowly coiling around branches. Halfway through the week, we visited a local elementary school and helped to construct a butterfly habitat in the yard. After lunch, we played a game of soccer and I tried to converse with the students with the ten or so Spanish words and phrases I knew.

I’ve also been on some wonderful trips with my orchestras. In the summer of 2018, I was accepted to the National Youth Orchestra 2. After two weeks of residency at SUNY Purchase rehearsing under Maestro Joseph Young and playing chamber music with members of the National Youth Orchestra of the USA, we flew down to Miami Beach to rehearse and perform with Maestro Carlos Miguel Prieto and violinist Gil Shaham at the New World Center. We then spent our last two days in New York once more, to play our final concert at Carnegie Hall. In the summer of 2019, I went on tour in Europe with the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra. Over the course of a week and a half, we rehearsed and performed in some of the greatest halls in the world, including the Hamburg Elbphilharmonie, the Berlin Philharmonie, and the Vienna Musikverein. The tour started in Denmark, with two performances in Odense and Copenhagen; the jetlag and early sunrises took some getting used to. But, we were in top shape for our next concerts in Hamburg and Berlin in front of thousands of audience members. After crossing over into Austria for a few days to rehearse and perform in Vienna, we finished our tour in Budapest, Hungary. In each of the cities, I spent countless afternoons and evenings wandering around with my friends, trying to find interesting, undiscovered areas. Though we sometimes planned out a few hours with specific destinations in mind, I particularly enjoyed the time we spent taking random turns. At the end of the day, we often found ourselves stranded far away from the hotel with no data plan, asking strangers for directions. Of course, the more organized “tours” my friends and I went on were equally memorable: silently walking through the concrete slabs of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, my first time completing an escape room, sitting under a tree in the Rosenborg Castle Gardens.

Just a few weeks after the conclusion of my orchestra’s European tour, I joined the National Youth Orchestra 2 for a second time. I was named associate concertmaster of NYO2 2019 and performed in the second chair of the orchestra during our tour of Miami and our concert at Carnegie Hall. The orchestra was once again led by Carlos Miguel Prieto and played alongside pianist Gabriela Montero, who is known for her genius improvisations on themes suggested by audience members. Her improvisation on ‘Edelweiss’ from The Sound of Music at the New World Center was so beautiful and inspired that I broke down into tears backstage.

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, I haven’t been able to go on the trips and tours that I had been planning. After finally turning 16 and becoming eligible to apply for the National Youth Orchestra of the USA, I was accepted in January. I was very excited to go on the North American Tour with soloist Midori, one of the most legendary violinists of all time. Unfortunately, both the NYO-USA tour and my junior trip to Montana were canceled. NYO-USA put on a 2-week remote program, which was an amazing experience. I had the chance to hear Wynton Marsalis and Jacob Collier speak about their experiences with and inspirations in music, and took lessons and masterclasses with wonderful faculty. You can watch NYO-USA 2020’s recording of Valerie Coleman’s Umoja here.