Personal Statements

1. Describe an activity, interest, experience or achievement in your life that has been particularly meaningful to you.

The work done for my first short film production, titled Mass Education, provided me with an experience that has been particularly meaningful to me. Serving as the sole craftsman and artist behind the production, I conducted the project on my own during my junior year in high school.

For the production, there were many tasks that needed to be completed: I wrote the narrative after repetitive, but successively increasing quality of drafts; performed a rigorous search for locations to shoot the film; prepared very precise storyboards; met with school administrators for the purposes of authorizing my plans; gathered and made friends to play on-screen roles; built a home-made camera apparatus for special camera movements; handled all the video photography myself; worked in close interaction with on-screen participants to achieve desired performances; and finally, edited all the compiled footage into a short film that resembles, near-perfectly, what I had intended to create from conception. These various objectives were the result of intense thought and note-keeping. They also helped solidify a sense of independence and dedication to a subject of interest.

Retrospectively, as I get older and move farther away from this great time, I have come to realize that there is an unlisted, scarcely discussed satisfaction in orchestrating creative projects that exist outside the confines of any institutional requirements and in full accordance with the desire of a reign-holding, lone-navigating artist.

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2. If you were president of the United States for a day, what one policy – whether serious or semi-serious – would you implement? Why?

If I were president of the United States for a day, I would implement a permanent policy to abolish the use of television.

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I would enact such a policy because I believe in the long-standing virtue of individualism in the United States. This virtue is under attack today by the circus-like atmosphere of television, the electronic hypnotist, comforter, and drug, that saturates minds with content that precedes a need or desire for it. Even the news programs, by which a staggering 89% of Americans receive their information on current events are becoming more viscerally attractive and sensationalistic in their presentation of the world. Usually presenting events that are trivial with regards to money-making, community issues and the general welfare of the state, this maelstrom of frivolity must come to an end. Many stories are chosen for their audaciousness, daring, and curiosity due solely to their uniqueness. This is not necessarily the fault of the programmers, but the fault of our collective community to realize that any medium that moves in time and does not encourage record-keeping, repetition, and an orderly progression of ideas corrupts the process of rational understanding in favor of loose, hole-laden intuitive understanding that can be very harmful to serious individual expression.