Kristen's Introduction

My name is Kristen Adolf, and I’m a seventeen-year-old senior in high school.  I take all of my classes at Upstate through the Scholars Academy, so I actually haven’t taken a normal high school class since freshman year.  Because I’m a student through the Scholars Academy, I’m categorized as a non-degree seeking student, thus I haven’t yet committed to a major or minor, but I will have 92 hours of college credit once I graduate this May.  Once I have my high school degree, I will be finishing my undergraduate degree at a different college, most likely out of state.  Right now, my top schools are Cornell University, Mount Holyoke College, and the Lewis Honors College at the University of Kentucky.  I am planning on majoring in pre-veterinary medicine and equine science at these schools, and I will most likely minor in German, French, or Spanish as I’m taking all three languages currently.  I was born and raised in Spartanburg, South Carolina, but I have dual citizenship in Switzerland because my dad lived there until the 1990s.  We try to visit Switzerland every year since my Oma and Opa (grandparents) still live there, and this year they are visiting us as well (in exactly a week, actually!)

Outside of school, the activity that I dedicate the most time to is horseback riding.  I’m a competitive equestrian, and I’ve been riding for twelve years now.  I ride as a hunter-jumper, and I have my own horse  —  a thoroughbred gelding named Toby.  This is largely why I plan on majoring in pre-veterinary medicine and equine science  —  I plan on becoming an equine veterinarian in the future.  During the school year, I ride on a team through the Interscholastic Equestrian Association (IEA).  The IEA program allows middle schoolers and high schoolers to ride on a team, which is otherwise unusual in the equestrian sport.  I also dedicate a great deal of time towards volunteering at HALTER, a local therapeutic equestrian center.  At HALTER, volunteers work with disabled children and help improve their mental and physical health through equine-based activities.  I volunteer for six hours every Saturday morning and have recently begun exercising horses for HALTER on Tuesday afternoons for two or three hours as well.  Currently, I don’t have a paying job, but over the summer I worked eight-hour shifts every day at a textile factory in Wellford.  During the school year, it’s just too difficult for me to manage school, riding, and volunteering in addition to a paying job.  Other than my equine-based activities, I’m also very passionate about social justice, and I’m very politically active.  I care a lot about minority rights, with women’s rights and LGBT rights being especially prevalent to me, but I’m a firm believer that feminism must be intersectional.  I was lucky enough to attend the Women’s March on Washington in February 2017, and it was a fantastic experience.

In regards to learning, I am definitely a kinesthetic learner.  I learn best when I can manually write things down and can do things that are more hands-on.  Concerning reading, books have always had an enormous role in my life, especially novels.  Books were always a way for my family to bond.  I even pretended not to be able to read when I was in Kindergarten so that my mom would still read bedtime stories to me.  My family members all love to read, and we always share our favorite books with one another.  For me, the books that stood out most significantly throughout my childhood and early adolescence are without a doubt the Harry Potter series by JK Rowling, We Are the Ants by Shaun David Hutchinson, Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli, and The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller.  The Harry Potter series was the first book series that I read independently, and I’ve made some very good friends through our shared love of the series, as nerdy as it sounds.  The other three are more significant in my life now.  All three are young adult novels that deal with prevalent topics such as mental illness, sexuality, and equality.  All of these novels deal with very contemporary issues, despite taking place in a range of time periods over the span of three millennia.  Of these books, the characters that I most related to were Hermione Granger from the Harry Potter series, an argumentative and intelligent central character in the series,  and Simon Spier, the protagonist in Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda.  Unfortunately, it’s definitely gotten harder to find the time for reading between my schoolwork, volunteering, and riding.  Although I don’t read as much as I did when I was younger, I definitely still enjoy reading novels whenever I get the chance.