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Lexington

I can’t remember the first time I visited Lexington, Kentucky or when I first decided that it was my favorite place. Lexington is known as the horse capital of the world, so it makes sense that it is my favorite city. I go there every summer for horse competitions at the Kentucky Horse Park, and it is always the best part of my year. One of the first times I remember going to Lexington was for a horse show a few years ago when I was riding my trainer’s horse named Annie. Annie is a really trustworthy and good beginner horse, but isn’t very pretty at all. She is knock kneed and has a sway back, but everyone loved her anyways. I was really excited to bring her to a big horse show because I thought we were really good and I had never shown in Kentucky before. Horse shows are the best because you basically get to hang out with your horse all day. At my barn, you have to feed them, brush them, and take care of them all by yourself because we don’t have grooms or barn hands like a lot of ...
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Robots

* this is too short, if you have any suggestions to make it longer let me know If I could have a robot, I would want a robot like Tony Stark has in Iron Man. When I first saw the movie, I thought that his robot was really cool because he could talk to it like a human. I don’t know if this technology actually exists in real life, but I think that the closest thing to it would be if Siri was a robot and could actually do things. If everyone had these robots it could be scary because they could get too smart then take over the world. Tony Stark’s robot is actually really smart even though he always calls it stupid in the movie which is sad. I think it would be cool to have one of those robots that just came everywhere with me and then it could do everything I wanted. It would also be cool because Tony Stark’s robot can recognize people’s faces and tell him about the person. This would be cool because if you were walking around in public, you could learn about people who you walk by. ...
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Bella and Olive

Bella has always been the favorite in the family. She is 8 years old now but we adopted her when she was just a few months old. When I was around nine, my dad told my family that we were going for a drive but he wouldn’t tell us where we were going. I was excited and confused because we had never done anything like this. I remember constantly asking where we were going until I annoyed everyone so much that my dad finally told us that we were going to look at puppies. At first, I thought he was joking. We had a chocolate lab, Molly, before but she had passed away a while before so I hadn’t really expected us to get a new dog so suddenly. We finally pulled up to the house and when we got out of our car, a swarm of yellow lab puppies ran up and I was in heaven. We played with the puppies for a while and finally decided on one of the girl puppies who seemed extra excited and really seemed to bond with us. We went into the house and paid for her then wrapped her in a blanket that smelled...
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Doing Nothing is Still Something

I have pondered the phrase ‘doing nothing’ for a long time. People are always doing something. Even if that means that you’re just sitting in a chair thinking, then you’re sitting in a chair thinking, not doing nothing. If you’re watching Netflix, then that is something that you are doing. I spend a lot of my time ‘doing nothing,’ but I don’t think of it that way. Society thinks that relaxation should not be counted as a good use of time but I disagree. Relaxation is essential to having a healthy brain. If you spent all of your time doing things and work then you would probably explode. I don't think it is possible to actually be ‘doing nothing.’ I tried to think of how it could be possible and the closest I could come was floating in space not moving, but then wouldn’t you still be floating? Even if you found something to do where you were doing nothing, you would still be breathing and your heart would still be beating. I’m not sure if I should count this as something you are ...
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Assumptions

note: this essay is way over the word limit so I would appreciate comments on what I can take out :) In our society, people make assumptions about others based on their appearance every day. Because I’m a girl, many people assume that I am not smart enough to be successful in engineering. I have wanted to be an engineer since grade school, and if I hadn’t been raised in such a nurturing environment, I’m not sure that I would still be confident enough to do it. I can’t pick only one time that people have expressed doubts about my ability to pursue engineering, so I am going to talk about a few of the times that I still think about to this day. The first time I remember experiencing someone thinking I wasn’t good enough because of my gender was when I was still in grade school and I joined an all-girls First Lego League team. We worked hard during the months leading up to the competition and ended up winning the Judge’s Choice award and qualifying for state. Even though we were clear...
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Mr. Kipling

Under my bed is a huge tub stuffed full of horse show ribbons. If you dig deep enough, there are ribbons from when I rode at barns that I left years ago. On the top are the ribbons that I have won on my current horse Kip, and all of the ribbons in between tell the story of my riding career. I have switched barns more than most riders do in their lives, and I have ridden at almost every barn in the Champaign area at some point. I was seven years old when I first started riding at my first barn and I was a natural. My confidence grew as I breezed through my weekly lessons and easily brought home blue ribbons at the local horse shows. My trainer at the time did not challenge me and always told me that I was great and didn’t need to change. I realized that this was not what I needed to progress as a rider, so I sought out a lesson at a new barn with the coach of the Illinois Equestrian Team. Instantly, my talent paradigm blew up. The jumps were high and the courses were complex. The ...
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Office Supplies

I still remember the satisfaction of looking at the perfectly stacked cans and boxes after reorganizing our pantry when I was a preschooler. By fifth grade, my mom forwarded me all school emails, asking me to let her know if there was anything that needed follow up, like a signature for a field trip form. I loved this added responsibility and was proud of my ability to manage big parts of my own life. It wasn't long before I discovered the office supply store. I made my family wait endlessly while I carefully searched for the newest organizational resources and the perfect decorative notebooks to use for my ever growing compilation of to-do lists. I was always the girl in my class who had her folders organized in rainbow order and would frequently win the weekly award for cleanest chair bag. I still consider myself an organized person today, but I don’t enjoy it nearly as much as I did when I was younger. I took my organization very seriously and was on the border of being very ann...
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