Post 19. Those Moments

{Unedited Reflection Draft - 6.18.25}

When I first applied to boarding school at ten years old, I wrote my application essay by hand on a piece of lined paper. I still remember sending it to the school’s admissions office in an envelope. It was about how much I loved my summer camp and basketball. I thought it was the greatest thing ever written but, when I read it back a few years ago, I couldn’t understand myself at all.

The main takeaway: I did not know how to form a narrative and lacked the tools to build one.

For the next eight years at boarding school, though, writing became my best friend. Constructing narratives and dissecting texts became one of my greatest sources of joy. And I have my incredible teachers to thank for that. Among them are Mrs. Lila Bhan and Mr. Pier Kooistra.

Mrs. Bhan is someone I see as a second mother. She is the most kind-hearted soul I’ve ever known and someone I will never be able to repay. She was both my dorm parent and English teacher, helping me grow from a 10 year old mess into a more thoughtful young man and student.

When I made a grammar mistake in conversation, she’d smile—her sign that I had messed up. With Mrs. Bhan, I built out the foundation of how to write. I left middle school with a clear grasp of structure and but was ready to expand my thinking. I wanted to take on deeper topics even though I didn’t entirely understand what I meant by that at the time.

Soon after, I started high school. At Lawrenceville, every classroom, from English to Physics to Spanish, had a Harkness table. The method was first introduced at Phillips Exeter in the 1930s, when Edward Harkness funded a new approach to learning: students sitting around one table, discussing ideas as equals, with no lectures and no hand-raising. The teacher is simply a participant at the table for discussion. I’ve attached a photo from Google for reference:

At the Harkness table, you were expected to come prepared, ready to contribute your own thinking, but also to build on others’ ideas. I can’t think of any class where I saw the Harkness model more in action than Mr. Pier Kooistra’s class. If you were going to speak during the discussion, you better have a page number and quote in hand. He pushed us to ground our ideas in the text and found every new take so refreshing.

What I appreciated most about his class was the emphasis on shaping ideas with structure and intent. He made essay writing and discussions feel like a craft. I’d often stay after class to work through a thesis or unpack a scene from a novel. Those conversations weren’t just about finishing the assignment. They were about learning how to think—about how to take something abstract and turn it into an argument that could hold. I love that process: the challenge of building a differentiated idea and shaping it into something coherent and defensible. It was slow, focused work, but when that moment of clarity hit, it was just raw joy.

It’s the construction of a differentiated thought that I keep coming back to. I’m slowly remembering that this is what brings me energy—not recognition, not achievement, and definitely not the goals I’ve spent hundreds of hours simulating in my head. Thinking about it now, that actually makes sense neurologically. The feeling I get from imagined success is something my brain has already rehearsed. But the feeling of a novel idea forming in real time—that’s something I can’t recreate.

I think I’ve struggled to build these moments in recent months and years. But as I’ve started my internship at a hedge fund this summer, I’m seeing the exact same opportunity. Although I’ve exchanged a Google document and page numbers for excel financial models and SOTP valuations, I’m finding that same flow. The process of pulling pieces together, shaping them into a coherent view, and standing behind the logic—I love it.

As I continue to think through my professional aspirations, I need to shift my outlook. I need to chase these moments and seek out work that gives me more of these moments. If I can keep finding that, I think I’ll be alright.