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+SHORT ESSAY QUESTIONS
+
+Please discuss your involvement in any student organization(s) in which your membership provides more insight into your qualifications in Social Studies.  Include any positions/roles you currently hold or have held with an explanation as to how your involvement has grown your passion for this discipline.
+----------------
+Of my extracurriculars, Model United Nations relates most directly to Social Studies.
+In it, I compete at conferences and act as director of research for the club, writing background guides on the countries we represent.
+For this, I've done thorough research on Nigeria's political (internal and international) and economic statuses, and looked into a few specific problems which its government wants solved.
+Representing the country of Nigeria, specifically, required an abnormal viewpoint to be accurate: sustaining corruption or at least de-emphasizing its prevalence within Nigeria.
+While this opposes UN decrees, it is realistic because nation-states are necessarily self-preserving, and that degree of reality has grown my passion for social studies.
+My exposure to novel policy decisions through Model UN has been helpful because these "unintuitive" cases broaden my horizons beyond existing Western biases.
+
+The elimination or mitigation of my western bias is also why I'm part of my school's Academic Bowl team: I want to have the information to understand historical change.
+Some of the artistic and literary of Academic Bowl specify pivotal parts of culture.
+Questions about The Canterbury Tales, for example, require knowledge about the pilgrim context, and while it's not extraordinarily deep, the connection is nonetheless valuable.
+On the same note, projects and competitions I've done with my engineering elective, while they're not directly related to social studies, have developed my critical thinking and problem solving.
+In a hovercraft design competition, our team was focused on solving problems one at a time, which carries over to social studies, especially in the large-scale international problems in Model UN or other simulations.
+Often, solutions are proposed which attempt to rework the entire system, which is clearly unworkable, but engineering design has first principles which can be applied to myriad problems.
+
+Please discuss any school, district, regional, state, or national awards that you have received. 
+----------------
+In Model UN, I've won several awards at the high school level.
+Model UN awards are split into two categories: "best delegate" and "best position paper."
+I believe my contribution to partnerships is in both categories, but I am stronger in writing, which speaks to my ability to think deeply about the topics covered in the social sciences and to articulate those ideas.
+I'm often restless without at least one decent solution on which to back myself, so I work hard towards finding those resolutions to problems of the sort I'd face in GHP and do face in Model UN.
+Because of this, I've won position paper awards at both Georgia State's and University of Georgia's conferences.
+
+This feeds into the delegate aspect.
+As is common between most delegates, I feel the argumentative spirit and enjoy not just explaining my ideas, but having my peers understanding them.
+This feeds into efforts towards cohesion and maintenance of singular ideas such that they could be implemented in a realistic environment.
+I've also won Best Delegate at Georgia State and, at National High School Model UN, my partner and I had the opportunity to speak to the entire conference at the UN's offical building.
+It was an honor to speak on behalf of our committee's extensive development over a five day period and to have done that level of work deserving the award.
+
+I've also won district and state awards in the technology fair.
+Because of my focus on solution quality, I greatly enjoy programming and the logical correctness it affords (similar to a well-structured organization or idea) and have competed for that.
+I have received 2nd and 3rd place awards for the programming challenge at the district level because I put more effort into maintaining correctness and quality of my "response" than ensuring its completeness.
+Rather than addressing every part partially, I addressed the parts which I could fully and well, which maps well to one of the values of the social sciences---deliberate progress on sound solutions over rapid growth on a shaky foundation.
+
+Please discuss any volunteer activities (hours) in which you participate on a regular basis 
+----------------
+I've been volunteering continuously since 7th grade, in most cases for my local community in Roswell.
+During middle school, my primary occupation was staffing school events like serving pizza at a local elementary school's bingo night or helping to set up events with special needs students.
+I chose to do these local people-facing activities because I value my community and the people which it comprises.
+I also particularly enjoy helping people because it gives a very concrete sense of what the "good" that's being done is.
+During the summer, I also volunteered, as part of a 2-week camp, with various organizations in Chattanooga.
+This included one that helps widows with landscaping, in which I cleared kudzu.
+I also helped package food for a food bank.
+Neither of these were as direct opportunities to help out groups or organizations, but the idea of the people behind the causes values these activities.
+
+Currently, I'm a member of the INTERACT volunteer organization, sponsored by Rotary Int'l.
+I've continued my local people-first focus and, this semester, helped administer the bouncy houses at the end-of-summer event
+Also, with an organization called Rivers Alive, I've helped keep the public parks cleaner and prevent pollutive missteps.
+With this organization, I've cleared privet and helped open back up new space within the park.
+Much like with people-facing work, this had a very visible and concrete benefit after it was done, and I'm glad to have been able to give to such a project.
+
+Additionally, I've volunteered with a local cat shelter Furkids.
+To help maintain the facilities of a "cat room" at a local pet store, I regularly clean the litterboxes and refill water/food for the cats as well as play with them to keep activity levels up.
+This program has clear benefits because it helps cats get off the streets and into loving homes (adoption rates for this specific component are high enough that the population is practically refreshed every couple of months)
+
+Why are you interested in attending GHP in this area of study? Why should you be selected to attend GHP? What can you contribute to GHP? What do you expect to gain from GHP? (500 words)
+----------------
+I want to attend GHP for Social Studies because I think that the courses will be novel.
+From my knowledge of the curriculum, it's centered around simulations and open-ended discussion, which aren't often simultaneously available in either Model UN or in a classroom setting.
+I also think the selection process for attendees would make those discussions and simulations more ideologically diverse (because of the focus on fairness during the application process) and productive than it would otherwise be.
+As a program, GHP seems well-designed, and specifically in the category of Social Studies, the skills that I'd develop line up with those I want to further improve upon.
+
+These include historical analysis and collaborative problem-solving, which are addressed well by the GHP environment and which I'd expect to improve through the program.
+By collaborative problem solving, I'm referring to the ability to, as a group, create novel solutions to difficult issues instead of very roughly enmeshing numerous discrete ideas.
+I've seen that failure to actually collaborate happen repeatedly in Model UN, because more than in the intensive GHP program, delegates misunderstand or misrepresent their nation, and instead of a cohesive plan like "foreign aid combined with an incentive program" or "legislative lobbying and publication of new ideas," grotesque compromises arise which don't really serve anyone because there isn't a very strong focus on actual solutions.
+Historical analysis goes hand-in-hand with this; GHP provides an environment where nuance is more prevalent, so it's easier to get a little bit "into the weeds" on why existing systems are the way they are and if enough has actually changed to justify new reforms or proposals.
+
+I'd hope to help foster this environment by espousing those same principles.
+I value nuance and modularity of ideas, so I'd contribute to the group by actively working towards high-quality discussion because I have firsthand experience with most of these pitfalls.
+These experiences were mostly in Model UN, but a good portion of applicable ideas can be derived from engineering standards and processes.
+Trying out (or evaluating, in the case of most social sciences) multiple different options, and spending relatively little resources on each, frequently gives better results than developing one idea fully, but is mostly ignored as a strategy for the social sciences.
+Similarly, precise identification of the target problem is fundamental to engineering design, and while such a step sometimes occurs in group decisionmaking, it's seldom complete or sufficiently descriptive.
+For example, at a conference where the issue was water security, numerous delegations attempted to target food security and imperialism instead of solving one problem and solving it well.
+This can be attributed to a certain amount of interconnectedness, but modularity of policies should be preserved to the best of our abilities.
+
+1. Out of all the disciplines in the field of social studies/sciences, which do you consider the most relevant to modern global society and why? (300 words)
+----------------
+  Politics certainly has the most obvious impact on modern society (and political science by proxy) because "day-to-day" administrative decisions, locally and regionally, are controlled by politicians even though politicians don't enforce those policies.
+But it's not particularly relevant to broader change in society.
+When I'm doing research on a country in Model UN, I typically start with broad economic or social structures and conditions because policy statements are mostly short-term reflections of previous action.
+That's partially because starting broad is easy, but it's relevant that motivations and incentives explain most (if not all) of human behavior.
+The study of why people act in certain ways goes by many names---psychology, anthropology, philosophy, but the most pragmatic is economics.
+
+The central property which makes economics a "stronger" model of the world than other social sciences is scalability.
+On a national or supranational scale, economics explains much of international relations like imperialism, diplomacy, and colonialism, especially in the modern era.
+China's interference in the South China Sea, for example, is motivated by the breadth of trade traveling through those waters.
+The US has similar policies in the Middle East which justify military intervention because of the economic dependence on oil.
+On a national scale, this manifests in all policy decisions simply because implementations cost money, and in the rare case it doesn't directly (like environmental regulation), someone's wallet is affected.
+On a smaller scale, microeconomics can explain virtually any decision, from political allegiances to choice of occupation, because it's a lens for optimization problems.
+Conventional economics isn't a perfect model for the world, especially on an individual scale where heuristics and incomplete consideration of potential choices are prevalent, but it is a good model for society; economics, being a theory of interaction with incentives and self-interest, is most relevant to modern global society.
+
+2. Following a century of expansion and growth in democracy globally, democratic ideals and practices are currently facing significant stress and decrease. Identify and evaluate the most significant causes of this situation and explore how this trend might be reversed. (500 words)
+----------------
+The United States heads up the movement to spread democracy, and it has been doing so since the Cold War era.
+Before that, the push for democracy was less explicit, but the aftereffects of decolonization and the World Wars improved the standing of democracy, specifically in the developing world.
+That was because the West imposed its will externally, and while often by objectionable methods, did create new democratic states like India.
+Fortunately, democracies maintain the rights of the people at least to some degree because the government (if it is a true democracy) is intrinsically aligned with the will of the people.
+Conversely, authoritarian nations are incentivized to ignore if not outright abuse human rights.
+China provides cheap manufactured goods for the West and is able to maintain that because worker conditions are worse there.
+Because the government ignores democratic ideals with their single party CCCP system, they're able to create dependency within other nations and spread their own influence more effectively.
+
+Authoritarian nations are also becoming more prevalent and the United States' policies are becoming less effective because the West is becoming dependent on autocracies.
+While certainly not the sole threat, China is making authoritarian, China-aligned, communist states easier in their bands of influence (especially Africa) by pouring foreign aid into those countries.
+The US and EU could not easily defeat China in a trade war because the state economy is growing and growing quickly, but it might be able to out-compete it.
+The current strategy of supplying foreign aid and influence across Africa and parts of Asia should be continued, but instead of military support, China's infrastructure building programs are clearly working and may be a reasonable target for emulation.
+Dependence on the low cost of goods should also be avoided, but that trend is much harder to reverse because even if suppliers were switched to a South American country, for example, the autocratic threat is still being aided.
+
+In the case of the Middle East, the United States is actively propping up states whose actions run counter to the US's stated beliefs.
+One of these is Saudi Arabia: the rich oil nation founded on a monarchy and with an ever-growing US-supplied military.
+Like China, this can't be addressed directly without destabilizing oil flow and further endangering the Middle East.
+The ideal solution would be to end oil dependence, but that's highly unrealistic.
+In fact, there are no easy solutions in the Middle East for the time being except to continue existing policies and wait.
+However, the satellite states influenced by Middle Eastern, Chinese, or Russian authoriatarianism can be addressed.
+The US should attempt to reward democratic reforms, if possible, but avoid revolution because those often make stabilizing the nation harder.
+Furthermore, direct aid like in Yemen can circumvent some of the impact or leverage of these dictators, so outside of rapid alienation of major supply chain partners, the West has little choice but to slowly push for democratic change inside and outside of import nations.