Pedro A.
About Me
Hello there! I’m Pedro, I live in Mexico City, Mexico, and I’m in my full-time junior going for my second year at Stanford OHS. Academically, I love the exactness, simplicity, applications, and creative freedom of the art of mathematics above all, making me think more and more about the old question of whether it is created or discovered as I explore new ways through it.
At Stanford OHS, I strive to promote diversity and inclusion, running the Latinx Student Alliance and Spanish Language Club. I’m very interested in exploring linguistic-cultural relationships given my Spanish-English biliteracy and moderate knowledge of Mandarin and French.
Outside of school, playing the piano and creating music on it are my greatest passions, followed by playing the violin, and painting all sorts of styles, ranging from oil to watercolor. I also love swimming and karate! Among the things that are most important to me, you’ll find poverty and education at the top, to which I’m dedicated by running an emergent nonprofit called “The Other Poverty” in an attempt to provide educational opportunities to children from low-income families.
Why I Chose Stanford OHS
Feeling often limited in my previous academic environment, even in the most rigorous private schools in my area, I chose to look for an alternative that allowed me to keep the comfort of my home country and lifestyle while giving me the opportunity to challenge my analytical skills and explore my academic interests to highly levels of complexity. Finding Stanford OHS was like finding the missing piece to my jigsaw puzzle. However, I could still not imagine how life-changing the decision of enrolling at Stanford OHS would be. The amount opportunities Stanford OHS unlocked for me in terms of exploring languages, philosophy, culture, university-level mathematics, and advanced science courses, all while demanding high levels of critical analysis, completely set me apart from the person I would be if I had not decided to stay.
My views on learning completely changed upon enrollment at Stanford OHS, making me value my past and future education to more personal levels, helping me shape my own beliefs and better interact with my surroundings every day.
The international community at Stanford OHS also represented a unique opportunity not only to learn more about the immense and changing world we live in but also to gain greater awareness about my own culture and to strive for diversity and inclusion in the name of my Latinx and Hispanic origins. Having the opportunity to contribute to Stanford OHS’s cultural diversity while having all of these great academic opportunities has also motivated me to turn back to my community and try to spread the school’s philosophy to those not so lucky to have had access to such possibilities.
In that sense too, I am glad that Stanford OHS allows me to pursue my personal projects and extracurricular interests by never saturating me with nonessential coursework. Stanford OHS has had a great influence on my own passions too, providing me inspirational insight directly from Shakespeare's Hamlet for me to translate into a piano piece, to name an example. Coming to Stanford OHS was more than choosing a school, it was choosing a new version of myself.
What I Love About Stanford OHS
The moment I first had the opportunity to interact with the Stanford OHS community and get the first taste of all its nuances, I knew this was the place for me; Stanford OHS captivated me with more than a sense of belonging…a sense of home (quite literally too!). Stanford OHS is a unique combination of the highest academic rigor and a welcoming sense of humanity. The high-caliber faculty members at the school, everyone holding high degrees of academic preparation at the best institutions in the world, not only have the level of expertise to wake true passions for learning in their students but also demonstrate high levels of pedagogic preparation. I can say while all of my teachers have always pushed me and motivated me to advance my ideas to new limits, they have also made me feel supported at all times, making the learning process at such high levels really enjoyable and humane.
Stanford OHS is unique in that sense, letting students explore their interests even to university-level coursework, making them feel like owners of their own learning while supporting them with a solid framework in every course. In-class discussions help students climb the learning scale from understanding up to evaluating and even creating, not only regarding isolated courses but also favoring the intersection of ideas from a variety of fields. So, Stanford OHS has given me the knowledge and entrepreneurial skills necessary to make intellectual connections and refine my own worldviews.
Socially too, as ironic as it may sound, I find Stanford OHS to have a tremendously active community in terms of all the clubs, circles, and other social activities open to everyone, being even more dynamic than the environment in a brick-and-mortar school can be sometimes. Stanford OHS has provided me with the opportunity to open my social limitations to an international community, rich in diverse ideas, cultures, values, and experiences. This has allowed me to gain an invaluable understanding of the complex society we live in, which I could not have gotten at any other school.
As an international student too, Stanford OHS has made me feel like an integral part of the community, even while I reside thousands of kilometers away from my teachers and classmates. Given the diversity of the community, I have been able to find people that share my same experiences, interests, and aspirations, allowing me to find some of my closest friends living on the other side of the world. The quality of the people that make up the Stanford OHS community is the true definition of the leaders of our generation, displaying incredible intellectual aptness yet humility and social motivation.