LOVE Catherine Ye

The Pennsylvania Governor's School for Global Entrepreneurship was the most eye-opening experience of my life. In the five weeks I was at Governor's School I learned more about the world than I could ever learn in a high school classroom. With over five hundred applicants, the forty selected from Pennsylvania were a mix of musicians, athletes, artists, and bookworms. There were also ten international students. Living for five weeks with such a diverse group of people allowed me to see not only the differences between the United States and the world, but also the differences within Pennsylvania.

This photograph was taken at the LOVE sculpture at Lehigh University, where I spent thirty-five days learning with and growing to love the other forty-nine students. From the left, the people are Kevin, Ilana, me, Jay, and Olaf. This photograph happened spontaneously. Ilana and I saw the sculpture and wanted to take a picture of it. Kevin, Jay, and Olaf walked by and decided to jump in.

Kevin is from a rural and relatively poor part of western Pennsylvania. There are no nearby malls and only a total of 1,000 high school students in the entire county. He pulled up the census data on his county and compared it to my own. His...