Honors & Awards
Scholastic Art & Writing Awards
Silver Key (2024, Painting)
Honorable Mention (2025, Painting, Mixed Media)Amphion Literary & Art Magazine – Selected Cover Artist (2024)
Peddie 156th & 157th Declamation Contest – Honorable Mention (2024, 2025)
Peddie Talent Show – 2nd Place (2024, Vocal Performance)
MAPL Golf Championship – 1st Place Team (2025)
Musical Theatre
Vocal Performance
- Performer
Vocal Performance
- Performer
SEPTEMBER 2022 – PRESENT
I was cast as Fiona in Peddie’s Freshman Musical, Shrek, just weeks into 9th grade, which gave me my first opportunity to lead a story on stage and taught me how to carry emotional weight in front of an audience. In 10th grade, I was the only sophomore selected for a major role—Gloria Thorpe in Damn Yankees—in a school-wide production usually led by upperclassmen. Outside of theatre, I performed for the entire student body and faculty at Peddie’s chapel and alumni memorials as a solo vocalist and as a part of choral subgroups Peddie Singers in 10th grade and Treblemakers in 9th, developing vocal presence in public spaces. Within various school-wide events, I was selected lead vocalist for Blair Day band in 10th grade as well as in school concerts, performing jazz and musical theatre repertoire. Through Actor’s Studio and private lessons, I studied the arts of acting and singing respectively, focusing on control, nuance, and emotional expression.
Theater allows me to channel my empathy and creativity while exploring emotions I might otherwise suppress. As a performer, I learn to inhabit different lives and communicate truths beyond words. Acting makes me feel most human and most present. The vulnerability necessary to take part in performance is exactly what teaches me most about courage, honesty, and connection.
These experiences challenged my perfectionism and taught me to prioritize presence, emotional connection, and genuine joy on stage with both cast and audience.
I hope to continue studying voice and plan to pursue musical theatre as an extracurricular in college, where performance will remain a core part of how I explore my artistic expression and empathy.
Visual Storytelling
Amphion
Literary Art Magazine
- Artist and Editor
Amphion
Literary Art Magazine
- Artist and Editor
SEPTEMBER 2022 – PRESENT
I’ve independently studied human anatomy and color theory since childhood, not out of requirement, but out of curiosity. I’ve produced and submitted multiple works to the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, receiving recognition including a Silver Key. All of my individual development has been shaped by meticulous observation and iterative experimentation—sometimes with digital tools like Procreate, and sometimes in traditional media. That personal practice evolved when I joined Amphion, Peddie’s 100-year-old literary and art magazine, where I was selected as the 2024 cover artist for an annual anthology of art and writing. I later became layout editor, helping to curate work and mentor newer contributors; each role deepened my understanding of how even unrelated artworks with different themes can connect with each other to encompass a web of narratives about the world around and within us as creators.
Art, for me, is a conversation between discipline and chaos. I often think about what creativity really is, and that question leads me into periods of doubt and breakthrough. In this process, I confront personal limits, challenge them, and grow. Ironically, my art is where my most obsessive, precise self emerges. I am methodical and sometimes even rigid, but it’s that structure that gives my expression room to expand.
Art has taught me that tension is a necessary part of growth. The creative process often begins with frustration, be it a lack of originality, technical challenge, or conceptual confusion, but I’ve learned to welcome that discomfort and work through it. I now recognize that creativity is a rigorous process of revision, observation, and risk. In that way, art parallels how I approach complex questions in other fields as well.
I plan to lead Amphion in my senior year and continue applying visual-narrative design strategies to my independent project, where storytelling is built as much through silence and structure as through language. In college, I hope to integrate my personal visual practice and experience working with other editors in Amphion into academic inquiry as well as my passion for other art forms, using visual art not only for my own expression but for interpretation and critique.
Peddie Student DEI
Leadership Council
- SDEI Leader
Leadership Council
- SDEI Leader
MAY 2025 – MAY 2027
I will serve for 2 and a half years as a long-term Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Leader by acting as a liaison between the DEI office and student body in order to collaborate with affinity groups to foster dialogue and representation through culturally responsive events and lead community-wide workshops with them.
Having moved across the world several times, I’ve long understood that identity is shaped as much by environment as by self. That’s what drew me to becoming a DEI leader who wants to grow surface-level awareness in the community into an open, respectful conversation that highlights voices who are not given the chance to be heard in mainstream spaces.
As a new DEI Council Leader, I’m learning how to turn personal experience into shared space for conversation and change. Although this role demands the challenge of faithfully advocating for all identities, I’ve already learned that simply listening and dispassionately facilitating conversation between conflicts is enough to guide all parties to a compassionate solution that creates genuine progress to a more inclusive community.
In college, I hope to embody DEI work through participation in any student leadership that requires communication, in the classroom with peers, and in my academic endeavors; proper representation of all interpretations is necessary, especially when discussing objective facts.
Peddie Creative Writing
Signature Program
- Participant
Signature Program
- Participant
SEPTEMBER 2025 – MAY 2027
Peddie’s Creative Writing Signature Experience Program allows selected students to dig deep into various works across literary history and utilize their research to aid them in their original work, which they polish through 2 years with their peers and their teacher.
As a student in the CWSE, I will participate in an in-person creative writing summer program in my junior summer of 2026. As a final challenge, I will craft a portfolio of work in a chosen genre, and publicly present my capstone in a community reading.
Although I have always been passionate about both reading and writing, I have never explored its creative aspect within a specialized, academic setting. As a prospective English student in my undergraduate years as well as a law student beyond, I hope to study creative writing to elevate my understanding of language as a tool in delivering eloquence and efficacy.
Psychology Research
(1-on-1 Faculty Mentorship)
- Researcher
(1-on-1 Faculty Mentorship)
- Researcher
JULY 2025 – OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2025
I was selected for the Psychology (Labs; 1-on-1) track of the Horizon Academic Research Program, a selective research opportunity designed for high school students preparing for undergraduate-level scholarship.
I was matched with Dr. Aliza Spruch-Feiner, a clinical psychologist whose work focuses on trauma, identity, and personality disorders. Her approach integrates both psychodynamic and cognitive-behavioral perspectives, which aligns with my interest in how lived experiences shape who we become.
Under her mentorship, I’m conducting weekly research meetings to develop a 20-page academic paper exploring the relationship between suffering, memory, and narrative identity—how internal wounds reshape the self and how storytelling might help make sense of pain.
This is my first experience working within a formal academic research structure. I hope to develop not only a paper that meets academic standards, but also a clearer voice as a thinker—someone who can hold emotional truth and intellectual rigor in the same sentence.
Princeton CIEL Senior Center Intergenerational Musical Volunteer
MARCH 2025 – PRESENT
Twice a month, I visit the Princeton Senior Center to sing and spend time with senior adults.
I began volunteering at the senior center to perform in hopes of uplifting the seniors, but quickly discovered that music wasn’t just entertainment but also a vessel for intergenerational communication through music and culture. Songs often stirred memories, and those memories turned into stories I hadn’t expected to hear.
Over time, I found myself listening more than performing, staying after to talk with residents about their lives, their regrets, and the people they missed. One elderly woman once cried and told me I had “touched something deep inside” her and that I had reminded her of her humanity. I realized that I was sparking genuine healing in many people.
I hope to continue volunteering and perform for senior members. This experience became the emotional origin of my independent project in planning to archive their memory through voice, illustration, and reflection.
Independent Project - Founder/Artist/Interviewer
JUNE 2025 – PRESENT
I hope to create an independent storytelling project where I collect elders’ memories through interviews, then translate those moments into original illustrations, written reflections, and voice recordings that give voice to and encompass their unheard yet deeply significant history.
While I have been consistently connecting with seniors through my musical volunteering and subsequent conversation, I feel that my unarchived personal connection is not enough in order to also share their stories to the rest of the world. I want to give voice to elders who may feel unable to provide their perspectives to younger generations. Although this project intersects majorly with my artistic interests, its core lies in my lifelong vision to amplify silenced voices through legal representation.
Peddie Varsity
Girls Golf - Athlete
Girls Golf - Athlete
SEPTEMBER 2023 – PRESENT
I am a player in Peddie’s Varsity Girls Golf team.
Golf has helped me become more resilient, more patient, and more team-minded throughout the hardships I’ve experienced living in a boarding school. Through golf, I can understand that my endurance are equally vital.
Once, when I came down with a cold and could not play in a match, my coach told me how the team was not the same without my presence, and that my sense of humor and ability to lighten the mood was just as important as my efforts to improve at the sport itself. I’ve come to see that humor, strong bonds between team members, and a sense of balance in a competitive environment just as essential as technical skill.
Golf is the only sport that has stayed with me through every chapter of my life. Even if I never play competitively again, I know I’ll return to it, because it’s given me a critical experience in how to be a productive member of a team.
Languages
Korean (mother tongue, native fluency)
English (second language, native fluency)
I approach each character not as someone to imitate, but as someone to understand. I study the rhythm of their language, their silences, their contradictions. I believe acting isn’t about becoming someone else—it’s about expanding into parts of yourself you’ve never had permission to access.
I train for precision, but I perform for truth.
On stage, I listen as much as I speak. My goal is not to impress but to connect—quietly, honestly, and with intention.
I study each piece—its phrasing, breath, and structure—before I perform it. I care about tone, articulation, and control, but also about how the music lives and breathes in the moment. My voice isn’t just a tool for expression; it’s a way of listening, shaping, and connecting.
On stage, I aim for clarity, not perfection. I want each sound to mean something—to carry both discipline and feeling. Singing allows me to reveal what can’t always be said, with honesty and precision.
I work across mediums—drawing, painting, digital composition—but what stays constant is my interest in memory, emotion, and the spaces in between. I’m drawn to textures, rhythms, and quiet tension. My creative process often begins with discomfort, but it’s through that uncertainty that form begins to emerge.
Art is how I make sense of what I can’t explain directly.
I don’t aim for perfection; I aim for presence.
Each piece is a way of listening—visually, emotionally, and structurally.
I’m drawn to the parts of experience that resist simple language—grief, silence, contradiction. Writing helps me stay with those things without needing to solve them. I care about voice, rhythm, and the weight of each word. I write slowly, listening as I go.
I don’t see writing as a way to declare what I know, but as a space to find out what I feel. My goal isn’t clarity for its own sake—it’s resonance. I want the reader to pause, not just understand.
For me, writing isn’t about closure. It’s about staying open.
© RIVER AN 2005