THE QU FORUM A.B.

Anton Baptista

“My dad and I watched a lot of documentaries growing up, and I feel like that has a large impact on what I enjoy doing. History doesn’t so much influence my life as it shows me how I got here, and that fascinates me more than anything else. Quarantine stood out because it just kind of felt like I droned through it and I didn’t really have any passions or interests. All my clubs shut down, and so after that point, I stopped talking to a lot of my friends. Going into junior year, I didn’t think I’d be able to reconnect with all my friends, but it was actually fairly seamless. I learned a lot about myself during quarantine, it gave me time to self reflect on and improve myself. I learned that you don’t always need motivation to kind of do things because I was very demotivated, but I still got pretty okay grades. But it also showed me that passion doesn’t just come on its own, you need to manage it and you can’t do things too frequently, or else they get monotonous. When it comes to history, I’m reading about it, but it’s not my whole life. So it’s a balance of studying and maintaining my social life.”