Hello guys, I am applying to be a page in the Senate. I will put my main 350-word essay below, feel free to ask any questions in the comments.

 I've always been the kind of person who can't stop at the first answer. I notice the small details that make a system click or fall apart, and I get genuinely excited figuring out how the pieces fit together. It's not just curiosity—it's more like a need to see the whole picture, to understand why things work the way they do instead of just accepting that they do. 

          I remember the trips home from hockey practice vividly: the smell of sweat-soaked gear filling the car. My dad, who coached my house league team, would shift from talking about why we lost, which we almost always did, to fielding my questions about everything else. We joked that we were stuck in the first half of the Mighty Ducks movie, except we never got better. Within minutes, I'd be interrogating him. Who takes the presidency after the president pro tempore? What is the nuclear option? Why does the New York Fed governor get a permanent seat when all the others rotate in FOMC meetings? He was patient, far more patient than I would have been, as I peppered him with question after question. He'd answer each one carefully, even when I'd circle back to challenge what he'd just said. Those drives planted something in me: a need to understand not just what happens in politics, but how it happens—the levers and pressure points that make the whole system move. 

          Since then, I've gotten closer to politics with each step: starting a podcast on political science in eighth grade, and now serving as Volunteer Finance Lead for a competitive congressional primary campaign. The Senate Page Program represents exactly what those car rides taught me to look for: a place where my curiosity meets real consequence, a place where understanding how the system works isn't just theoretical but very much tangible. I want to be in the room where these mechanisms I've studied actually operate, to see how a bill moves from theory to reality, how decisions get made when the stakes are real.