As I begin to scour the kitchen’s innumerable cupboards and compartments, a recalcitrant thought gathers sudden grasp upon my senses. College applications. I push the inevitable worries out of my cerebrum. Now is not the time for futile anxiety; now is the time for pizza.

Like any self-respecting pseudo-chef, I prefer my pizzas from scratch. While better ingredients do make for a better pizza, they do not come from Papa, board games, Roman statesmen, huts, or any cardboard box. The most palatable pizzas come from passion.

I remove the ingredients of immediate necessity from the cupboard, focusing first and foremost on a solid foundation, a recipe akin to my education. As I mix the ingredients of my pie’s future premise—yeast, flour, olive oil, water, salt, and sugar—the components begin to echo the bedrock of classrooms, textbooks, and debates that have come to impart balance to my intellectual inclinations.

The succeeding layer is a thick blanket of spreadable curiosity. Just as my love for law, government, and debate owe much to my history-heavy coursework, the Prego embraces the dough but all the while imparts an entirely new flavor. Indeed, it is the favored vegetable—healthy yet hearty, nutritious yet delectable. Through the mock trials of Youth and Government, I have come to understand the arduous demands for and of a competent counsel; through Democratic, Administrative, and Student Government chairmanships, the necessity of fair albeit firm leadership; through tutoring, the sine qua non of patient progress.

Finally, I add the cheese. It is the pie’s power protein; the top layer of my professional passions. In life, I seek to penetrate the provolone paradises of perversion and put unwarranted financial corruption, confusion, and captivity past their boiling points. But before I can embark upon a menu of ambitions, my dough must rise to a credible legal mastery. My crust must condense with prospects of increased potential.

As the only program to offer interdisciplinary workplace studies to undergraduates, Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations will fire my fervor for the legal and financial fields in a way that no other college can. At ILR, I will engage in activities both akin and auxiliary to my current pursuits—Student Government, Global Affairs Club, and Hospitality Law Society. I will explore an amalgam of industrial studies without alienating my legal ambitions. Though directed towards the same major as my classmates, I will craft an upper-class course load that caters to my interests. I will even season my studies with course condiments outside of ILR—Psychology and Law at the College of Arts and Sciences, or Competition, Law, and Policy at Cornell’s Law School.

After all, my life has always been a pizza—a continuously cooking amalgam of easy-bake ambitions that, at ILR, can at long last mature into en croute grandeur.