About Me

       Hello! My name is Melody! Among other things, I am a proud and successful student, debater, violist, pianist, vocalist, and Malaysian-American. A little bit of context: my mother is an accountant who values precision, order, and coherence, and my father is a musician and photographer who values aesthetic beauty and loves to create & improvise. From them I inherited the key dimensions of my personality.
       Like my mother, I think with clarity and insight, and like my father, I have an artist’s heart and creative spirit. Aside from music, I am quite experienced with creative writing, painting, and photography.
       As a self-taught visual artist, I enjoy using different mediums and styles to express myself, especially calligraphy, with which I draw beauty out of a simple, ordinary word. If the mere shape of words can elevate the soul, their power and meaning inspires even more transcendence. With words we can share our stories, make promises, and sing ballads. We can also change the minds of others, with reasoned argumentation — a skill I have honed as a New York City Championship debater. With this experience has come confidence in my speech, the ability to lead, a knack for persuading others, better faculty for listening to others, and most importantly, the capacity to truly understand issues from all perspectives.
       A deepened engagement with the world of ideas has opened my mind even further — to others’ views, experiences, and truths. And that is why I’m applying to boarding school: to expand the horizons of my mind and heart even more while helping others expand theirs, so that I can pay it forward and contribute meaningfully to our world and our future.
"Draw My Life" 1 Minute Video (made in Dec 2019) [link]