Contestant's Info

Creative Submission

My Foundation

I grew up in a Navy family. My grandfather was a Navy Yeoman on an AO (a replenishment oiler) while he served in Vietnam in the late 1960s. My dad is a ‘95 USNA grad who served a full career and will be retiring next year. He started as a Naval Flight Officer flying electronic reconnaissance missions all over the world, and finished as a Permanent Military Professor of English at USNA. The Naval Academy has been a big part of my life for the last 9 years from how often I am on the Yard. I played water polo with the Naval Academy Youth Aquatics Club (and still join them when I’m home from boarding school)  and spent a lot of time there to go to the gym and to participate in other activities, such as camps.  During the COVID years, I was grateful to have the Yard and base as the one place we could do activities outside, such as tennis and taking walks through the disrepaired golf course with my dog. He knows his way around the fairways better than my golf balls know their way to the water.

For most of my early development, I got to live in many different countries and cultures  because my father was either stationed or deployed around the world. I lived in Washington, Spain, Italy, Texas, and Maryland. I spent my first year in WA, then I stayed in Spain for almost three years when my father was deployed to the Middle East and then stationed in Iraq while working with the Army. Immediately following that I moved to Italy, where my father was stationed while working with the Italian NATO force, I then moved to Texas while my dad got his Ph.D at UT at Austin, then moved to Maryland when he started teaching at USNA. When I was in Italy, from being thrown into child care for two years in the small southern town of Taranto, where no one spoke English, I was told that I learned to speak fluent Italian, which I then forgot after not being in italy for twelve  years. Just this summer, however, I have re-learned Italian, teaching myself and practicing while living there for water polo, but I haven’t quite yet regained the full capacity I once had. 

I grew up half Spanish and half military brat. I spent my life in many different places, houses, schools, communities, and countries. I've been pressured to adapt, learn new languages, and constantly change. So now I have little trouble filling roles that demand adaptation. Going away to boarding school at age fourteen, for instance, was relatively easier for me than for others because I had already changed schools five times over the preceding decade. To take another instance, I learned to become a leader and captain my school's water polo team quickly following the graduation of all the previous leaders.