Read the college application essay a high-school senior wrote on the dangers of pandemics — before coronavirus hit the United States

• Grant Colvin is a high school senior at Shawnee Mission East High School.
• For his college application essays, he wrote about his fascination with pandemics — months before the coronavirus pandemic swept across the United States.
• Colvin hopes to study nursing in college, and wants to get involved in public health.
• The following is his college essay, published in full.

Admittedly, I spent hours of my childhood playing computer games like Pandemic 2 with the goal of engineering a pandemic that could annihilate humanity. My strategy was to lie dormant until my extremely contagious virus had infected nearly everyone (including the elusive dwellers of Greenland and New Zealand) before introducing nasty symptoms like encephalitis, cysts, and various organ failures. While the occasional vaccine breakthrough would sabotage my design, the world's vulnerability to such a cataclysm horrified my 9-year-old self. Since then, however, my fear of pandemics morphed into a fascination.

Due to the international nature of pandemics, my passion mutated to include not just the biological aspect, but the geopolitical as well. How do epidemics affect peace-building in the Global South? Would alliances strengthen in response to a worldwide outbreak, or would the anarchic nature of the international arena prevail? These questions supplanted my childhood nightmares in keeping me up at night; eventually, I strive to find the answers.

My initial encounter with pandemics spawned out of fear, but it quickly ignited my desire to learn about global health frameworks and foment a sense of empathy and collaboration across borders. While my ability to actualize my passions is currently limited, I've taken opportunities like volunteering with the Dominican Republic Medical Partnership to assist Haitian migrants in the Dominican Republic with combating mosquito-borne illnesses and promoting sanitation and safe breastfeeding practices. This expanded my horizons beyond pandemics to global health more broadly, giving me an insatiable itch (different from the kind in my simulations) to become more informed about a political sphere inextricably connected with tangible outcomes. While future pandemics are inevitable in an increasingly interconnected and urbanizing world, I want to be part of the effort to defeat them when they come.

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