Any student enrolled in English 101P, 101, 102, or 112 during Spring 2025 through Spring 2026 may submit an essay of any kind on any topic. There are no length limits for this category. Ilaria Aliberti wrote the 2nd place submission in the First-Year Writing category for the 2026 President’s Writing Awards.
About Ilaria
Hi! My name is Ilaria and I am a christian, Italian student here at Boise State University. My intended major is Neuroscience and I’m planning on going to medical school right after getting my Bachelor’s. My plan is to become a Neurologist (either general or pediatric) and, so far, I’m loving diving into new classes and getting to know more about my subject of interest. The path is still long since I am only a freshman, but I’m trusting God with all of this!
Besides studying and taking 20 credits per semester, I also like spending time with my family, volunteering at St. Luke’s Hospital weekly, going shopping, serving in any activity my church organizes, and enjoying quality time with my friends. Writing has always been a passion of mine –
it helps me put my thoughts and feelings down so that I may analyze them from a distance and, for some instances, it’s like I’m able to talk to my inner self. English is not my first language, – I have spent the first 15 years of my life in Italy – so it wasn’t easy at the beginning to express myself with words that didn’t belong to me.
This was a real challenge for me and being able to reach this accomplishment helped me see that all the effort I’m putting in pursuing my dreams/goals is not waisted.
I’d like to leave anyone reading this paragraph with one of the verses that has accompanied me whenever things would feel too have to handle:
“Depend on the Lord in whatever you do, and your plans will succeed” – Proverbs 16:3
Hope you guys will enjoy my narrative ! 🙂
Winning Manuscript – Resistance and Prejudice
Have you ever looked at something and hated it just because it existed? That’s how I first felt when I’d look down at my Cambridge Coursework textbook for my advanced English program. As I was sitting down at the kitchen table, my thoughts were rushing, my heart was pumping, and all I wanted was to skip to the next day where none of that would be happening; where my tears wouldn’t be burning my eyes so much so as to make them close shut. But then, that delicate, warm touch… Those are the moments in which we need to let parts of ourselves die in order to discover the beauty enclosed inside that ugly and furry chrysalis. New knowledge scares humankind due to the uncertainty of what might come, and most often than not, this is the reason keeping ourselves – our minds, bodies, and souls – from reaching a power we retained ourselves incapable of handling.
Our family is originally from Naples, in Southern Italy. I love describing my city as a place where winter does not exist and where the sea breeze wakes you up in the morning. We left it in 2022 due to a working opportunity my dad had received from Micron. My father has worked with American companies and American people for as long as he can remember. This has often shaped the way he would approach our education in terms of vocabulary, reading, literature, and – of course – foreign languages. He would try to draw us, kids, as close to English as possible, “It’s going to look great on your curriculum one day,” he’d say with a monotone and wiseacre tone, “Employers look for these kinds of skills!” It was a never-ending debate that would often take place during the earliest hours of the afternoon, and that would later end up in both my parents trying to search for a good English professor on the internet.
Any time a discourse like this would open I would try with all of my might to jump into my homework and tune their pesky speech out. I hated that. The idea of being forced into such a literacy I did not want anything to do with would provide me with such anger and opposition that I would find it difficult, at times, to keep a calm voice while responding to my parents that I wasn’t interested in adding another subject to my already busy 6th-grade schedule. It was a torment. And it was always directed to me, somehow. Why weren’t my siblings involved? Why was I supposed to be the one to always step forward and accept any major request? Was that because I am the oldest amongst my siblings? All of those responsibilities and expectations… Sometimes it felt more like a burden than an honor to be the oldest.
In Italy, the oldest child is almost always the one to be treated with major affection and towards whom all of the attention is aimed. But this also means that there are greater standards to satisfy, but I wasn’t ready to meet those standards, yet. Part of this checklist – made by my parents – was concentrated on the training of my mind. I define my dad as a living encyclopedia due to how literate he is on a wide variety of subjects. He has always wanted the same for me and, in some instances, I would enjoy his little lessons most of the time. Some of the things he’d teach me would always turn out to be useful in any environment – at school, with peers, even with older people. But there was something different in being pushed into a whole new world against my own will.
Anger had become a spontaneous reaction to the words “Cambridge course,” and that was due to how frequently my mom would pick on me – sometimes with haughtiness and sometimes with the I-want-the-best-for-you excuse – by delivering an hour-long speech on how important this course was. My mom is a moderately tall woman, with tipsy-brown curly hair, emerald-tinted eyes, a Mediterranean skin tone that, together with her firm voice, makes her the subject of spontaneous compliments. She has always had that je ne sais quoi I have never been able to imitate, and that used to mark our arguments throughout my teenage years. Even though people have never once missed remarking on how alike we are, I have always thought of an aspect of her personality I’ve never been able to integrate into mine. Mom has a pure spirit, the kind that genuinely worries and cares about others; she goes beyond what anybody else sees and never puts herself before others’ needs – even if that will cost her something. That’s what makes her be loved by the public. As a teenager (at the time), all I wanted to avoid was to become like her, because I knew I couldn’t – even if I didn’t want to make that affirmation to myself.
Therefore, any time she’d joyfully state how helpful it would be for me to learn English, I’d see it as a challenge in which accepting her kindness would mean losing. What a naive and selfish girl I used to be.
Despite my arrogant character, there was someone who knew exactly how to handle my attitude. My dad. He has been my rock since I was a kid. Always looking above the concrete situation, never letting me cry alone. His whole face is a silly smile able to calm me down and fire me up at the same time. I knew I would do anything to make that man proud of me. Indeed, he was – and still is – the one to blame for convincing – it felt like forcing – me to ultimately take this heavy English course.
In less than a week, I was signed up for the Cambridge class of the year. What a medieval torture. The class was made of socially awkward subjects whose human-to-human interactions made the debates between Republicans and Democrats seem like all rainbows and pink ponies.
The teacher, as well as her students, didn’t even know on what page she was supposed to begin.
And what would keep strangling my mind was the thought that this torture could not end that year. There would be subsequent classes each year, which would end only with me passing the C2 test (this would establish me with a native-speaker level of English) – some argued that this test would be almost impossible even for a pure native speaker; but my parents aimed for me to pass this exam at any cost. Lucas Pasqualin will identify very precisely what was happening in my life, as well as what would be happening years later, in his essay Don’t Panic by writing “Most students in those early years were just getting a grasp on language, but the expectations put on me at that time had implications that lasted well into my life” (237). And that was right for me as well. I don’t know about my other classmates, but as far as what concerns me, that class truly gave a shift to my life.
Every day, as soon as I’d finished my homework at home, there was an already-scheduled study session with my dad, which was supposed to deepen and speed my English-learning process. It would usually take place in the kitchen both before and after dinner, and it would end whenever my father was satisfied with my achievements. I was not only trying to fight back the urge to not show up to that class anymore, now I even had to swallow the extra practice down until the very end of the school year. Why weren’t my parents trying to understand my point?
Was I just a curriculum characterized by major milestones, GPAs, and grades to them? Or was I the one to be blind?
The answers were soon to be found. It was a Friday evening around 8:30 pm, the kitchen table was at the center of the room, weighted down by the amount of books and papers crowding its surface. My elbows were pointed down on it firmly as if I wished the earth to crack open. My thoughts were wandering in any direction, trying to prevent tears from falling down. The first weeks had already passed by together with the first few months, but my hatred had kept growing inside of my chest so much to become frustration. My eyes were trying to focus on the sentence my dad had written down before exiting the room – vain was my effort. All I could think of was how miserable I was for not being able to pick up a language that had so easily become part of my father’s life. How unsatisfied must he have felt about me. I was a disappointment; a stupid marionette that wasn’t built to please. As my head was facing down, my heart started rushing together with the million self-drowning thoughts that wouldn’t give me peace. All I wanted at that moment was to skip to the very next day so that I wouldn’t be forced to shut my eyes due to the burning sensation of packed tears accumulating inside my eyelid. It was too much – too much pressure, too many expectations, too much for my brain to comprehend. I couldn’t keep it in anymore. I let it all go. The paper went blurry, and my eyes could only see colored spots without making sense of any of the shapes around.
And just as I was drowning in that sea of desperation, I felt that warm, long-awaited sensation on my shoulder that soon embraced me without needing a spoken mutual agreement. We sat there for a while, not a word was spoken, no question was asked. It was just me and him, as always. When my eyes had finally stopped pouring water, I looked at him like a puppy looks at their owner when it is hungry. I wasn’t mad, not at him at least. I was ashamed of the limits I was giving myself. My dad pushed all of the books away, looked at me gently, a soft smile rising on the right corner of his lips. With a silky and casual tone, he then exclaimed, “Do you know the difference between a coward and a hero?” My mind went numb to the sound of this
rhetoric-sounding question. “The difference,” he continued after a short pause, “is that the coward runs away from his fears, while the hero faces them.” I don’t know what it was about his
words, but they made me feel as if my behavior for the last few months had just been nonsense, driven by that little scared kid that still lived rent-free within me. The truth was that I wasn’t mad because I was forced into that new literacy; I was mad because I didn’t want the world to see my weakness.
All the resistance I had been building was growing taller and taller to the point where it was impossible for me to see clearly. Not only was I blocking out this opportunity to learn, but I was also judging my parents harshly and unfairly by looking at them as if all that they were doing was not caring about my feelings and thoughts. Perhaps, the one who was not caring about myself was me only.
After that evening, I decided I wouldn’t be complaining about this class anymore.
Something inside of me had changed. Suddenly, my face would begin forming a smile any time I’d enter the classroom. For the first time, it seemed as if those walls weren’t as dark as they looked at first anymore. At home, I was doing my very best to be on top of every extra exercise my dad would put on my plate. American songs, movies, YouTube videos, and books became part of my daily life. I wasn’t learning just a language; I was exploring something that would later have a huge impact on both my thinking process and my life itself. Without these courses, without my parents pushing for them as much as they did, I wouldn’t be able to be here writing, socializing, interacting with this new world I’ve learned to appreciate.
Resistance and prejudice had been shaping my personality to the point where I was creating an armor meant to keep challenges out of my way. I was pushing away my dad, whose intentions were to help me and support me, and I was putting a limit on how much I was truly able to push the gas pedal of my mind. Any time there would be moments like this, my mom would repeat the same sentence characterized by a genuinely kind tone, “You have the whole world in your mind. You can do anything.” Sounds poetic…almost basic, doesn’t it? But the most beautiful things don’t need to be complicated to be appreciated. That’s what makes them beautiful: in their simplicity, in their ordinary look, they are able to shift the dynamic of a whole universe. Indeed, this truth has been capable of shaping my attitude towards new experiences and towards how I decide to build my path in order to get through them.
Works Cited
Pasqualin, Luis. “Don’t Panic: A Hitchhiker’s Guide to My Literacy.” Writing About Writing: A College Reader, edited by Elizabeth Wardle & Doug Downs, 4th edition, 2016. pp 236-244.