Chelsea Hu ’24 took inspiration from the use of balance in dance to formu- late her essay.
Chelsea Hu ’24’s essay, “How to Find Your Balance,” was one of eleven winning essays published by the New York Times (NYT) for The Learning Network’s new “How To” Informational Writing Contest for Teenagers. In her essay, Hu touched on finding balance through the lens of dance, drawing inspiration from Judith Wombwell, founding Director of DeadFall Dance, and her teachings on how to “find your central axis.”
Hu described her thoughts while piecing together the idea for this essay. She intended to provide useful advice for students at an academically rigorous school like Andover, where balance is especially important.
“I was thinking how I could build up my ‘How To’ essay, and I thought I would write something that was actually serviceable to peoples’ lives, and provide some advice that I thought was actionable. So, I think something I struggle with [at Andover], perhaps a lot of students here struggle with, is finding balance in their lives. Whether it’s balance between their academic lives and individual lives, or balance in other facets. I thought I would write about balance, because it was just something that seemed to be relevant to people, and I also want to find a sort of innovative approach to it, because I think there’s lots of work about balance, so I thought dance would be a cool metaphor for it,” said Hu.
Additionally, Hu shared the importance of balance as a Senior at Andover, when it is easy to overextend oneself. She aimed to explore how balance supports achieving goals in life, and how balance is possible for an Andover student.
“Finding balance is a very important part of my Andover experience. Now that I’m a Senior I can definitely speak to the importance of balance. It’s really easy to overexert yourself here, I think in most places really, but just in terms of finding balance I think that’s what allows us to sustain all of our ambitions, and every project, every assignment, is just something else on our plate that we have to balance. Being able to find balance and juggle the different things that we have to do with what we want to do, that’s pretty important to the student experience,” said Hu.
Wombwell’s dance lessons were an enduring motif in Hu’s essay, with many of her quotes being connected to the challenges of daily life. Wombwell elaborated on the idea of physical balance while dancing and how it teaches one how to balance different aspects of our lives.
“The study of dance continually tackles the elements of how to balance in many complex ways. There are also dance moves that teach students to fall and recover, in other words, [be] comfortable taking risks and being off balance because they can come back to their center using momentum. One element in balance is developing a strong foundation of technical control which then allows students to soar. Think about what foundational habits as a person can both ground you and enable you to soar,” wrote Wombwell in an email to The Phillipian.
Hu also touched on a sense of pride for her overall contribution to the contest and the submission itself. Hu highlighted how while this was the first of such NYT contests she had participated in, she was eager to expand to other forms of writing and continue her contest submission journey.
“I’ve always wanted to try my hand at one of the New York Times student contests. In all honesty, I had no intention of writing a ‘How To’ essay, I just found the contest, [and] thought it’d be a really cool opportunity to try and turn something in. I would say I definitely have plans to continue writing, in different capacities as well. I’m very [interested] in critical writing, which sort of follows naturally from my passion [for] debate. The ‘How To’ was a really cool opportunity because it’s something sort of outside of my ballpark, and it was really cool to just learn about informational writing, but I think going forward, I definitely want to also branch out [and] try editorial writing–just more argumentative writing as a whole,” said Hu.
