Parv Gosai, 11

“You have to fight for your spot, nothing is going to be handed to you. You’re going to have to work hard to get wherever you want. There are times when you’ll be faced with people from across the world and you’re all just trying to fight for these places, and it’s taught me a lot. Times when I’ve done really bad, like my freshman year when I didn’t get into All State [band], I felt awful about that. It made me want it even more, and I pushed even harder and the next year I made it in. I think the reason I made it in the next year was because of me not getting in my first year. It pushed me to be even better than I was. Once you get rejected you feel like, ‘okay now I need to do even better,’ and you just keep pushing and pushing and I think that is what helped me get in the next year.”