Saluations!

My family consists of myself, my mom, my dad, and my two little brothers. One thing we all enjoy doing is playing board games together. Some of our favorites are Catan, Niagara, and Ticket to Ride. We also enjoy traveling as a family. One of our favorite places to travel to is Nova Scotia, Canada. There, we like to hike and look at the interesting minerals, like amethyst, agate, and petrified wood. Although my brothers sometimes annoy me, as all little siblings are wont to do, I love them deeply and I really enjoy teaching them new things. Here are some old photos of us!

I am a member of Scouts BSA Troop 163, Sturbridge. In Scouts, we do a lot of fun things such as hiking, camping, team-building games, climbing, and archery. One of my favorite things I’ve done was hiking Mount Monadnock in a program that our summer camp offers called the Sunset Summit. We start from camp at about 3 pm, hike up the mountain, watch the sunset, and hike down, arriving back at camp around 10 pm. I’m currently a patrol leader in my troop, which means that I lead a small group of Scouts at meetings and campouts and make sure that they’re not having trouble advancing in rank. My rank is Star, which is the 5^th out of 7 ranks. To get to this point, I had to tie knots, do community service, and earn merit badges like the Swimming badge. If you’d like to learn more about the BSA, you can check out their website here: Scouts BSA!

In middle school, the main math competition I participated in was MATHCOUNTS. In 6^th and 7^th grade, I only competed in the Chapter division, but in 8^th grade, I made it to the States division, which I remember being very exciting at the time. In high school, I participated in WOCOMAL with Shepherd Hill Regional High School’s math team in 9^th and 10^th grades. Being on math team is very fun because it’s a place where everyone can work together and collaborate on problems. In my experience, this means that everyone is super friendly and supportive of each other! This year I joined the MAMS math team and it looks like it will be awesome as well. It’s a lot bigger than Shepherd Hill’s team, which is pretty cool because it means even more people to work with. I’m excited to see how it goes! If you want to check out statistics and past problems from WOCOMAL meets, you can visit their website at this link: WOCOMAL.

Some of my more creative hobbies are baking and art. I love to paint with watercolors and draw. Mostly I draw monsters and fantasy creatures. A particular strength of mine is drawing extremely realistic eyes. I often draw Dungeons & Dragons related art. I also have a passion for baking. I love to make my family happy by cooking up desserts in the kitchen. One of my favorite desserts I’ve made was a batch of cinnamon rolls which I cooked in a Dutch oven over coals on a campout. After making the dough and cutting out all the rolls, I took the whole batch camping and made campfire cinnamon rolls! Other things I've enjoyed making are cream puffs, pound cake, and various types of cookies. (I'm always baking test batches around Christmastime!)

Being in Scouts, I have done a lot of different community service projects including trail cleanup, flag retirement, and helping with people’s Eagle Scout projects. As you may or may not know, Mass Academy requires students to complete 100 hours of community service between our orientation and the time we graduate. This summer, I got 20 of those hours helping out with a STEM camp named Starbase CT. I helped kids with CAD programs, simple experiments, and building challenges like a scooter they could actually ride! It was really fun and I got to learn a lot about how best to teach people through the opportunity. To learn more about Starbase you can visit their website right here: Starbase CT.