Big Kids

My Photo scholarship 2010 entry

Worldwide | Tuesday, October 5, 2010 | 5 photos

I am an American film student currently finishing a semester in Wellington, New Zealand. My time in New Zealand has been filled with adventures in some of the most breath-taking places. And yet, I have found that one of my favorite places is five minutes from my flat in Wellington, the Central Park playground, where there is a Flying Fox, a massive, exhilarating zip line. My friends and I play on it all the time. It makes us feel like we are children again.
One of the greatest things I have learned in life is that I have so much more to learn. I think this is why I love the Flying Fox so much. It reminds me that, though I am twenty, I am still a child. It is this child-like receptiveness that is essential in discovering, and so I go here over and over again to remind myself of how much I do not know.
Two summers ago I worked at an extreme outdoor adventure camp in northern California as a videographer. There I videoed a climb up Mt. Shasta, rafting journeys down the Klamath river, a 109-mile bike ride to the coast, and many other incredible and challenging activities. It was that summer that I began to realize my dream to use film and photography to portray the environment, culture, and our interactions with the two. It is my dream to work for someone like National Geographic. This is my dream because through it, no matter how much I know, I will inevitably continue to learn. I desire to have a willingness to learn that exceeds my capability to learn, and I see this as an opportunity that will not be the fulfillment of this goal, but rather the continuous beginning of a lifelong journey.