“Everyone brings into the world unique talents and abilities, and some of mine include my strong will and determination. I will continue to engage myself in school, work and sports and try to remember to enjoy the journey along the way. Somehow I have managed to get to the places that always feel right, and this is where my education has led me.”

I was in the third grade when my parents enrolled me in a two-week theater camp. They told me it was just for fun, but they were hoping it would help me be more confident about speaking publicly. It’s safe to say that it worked.

At the conclusion of the camp, there was a showcase performance, where our parents and also a few Hollywood youth agents were invited to see us perform the monologues and plays we had been working on. An agent approached my parents at the end of my performance and asked them about me, and although they laughed it off at first (we weren’t a “performing arts” sort of family), I let them know that acting was something I definitely wanted to pursue. My parents agreed to support me in that pursuit as long as I maintained my good grades in school. So we began our journey into balancing school and acting work that I am still on today.

I’ve learned that in the auditioning process for acting jobs, there is very little that you can control in terms of getting the job you are auditioning for. This is because there are many factors that have nothing to do with the audition (contracts, salary, availability, co-stars, network requirements, agency agreements, etc.) that determine who books the role. In schoolwork it is just the opposite. When I put the effort in, know the material and complete the assignments and tests to the best of my ability, I know that I will most likely get the desired result.

I could not be more grateful for the opportunity I’ve been given on a show that’s been a part of American pop culture for 65 years. I am surer than I have ever been that acting is what I want to do with my life. My work on General Hospital has taught me that I need to dig deep to get to some of the emotional places that the stories require, and I know that having a “regular” life with school, sports and non-actors has helped give my performances depth and helped them to feel real. I have an acting coach who once told me that I should “read about and learn everything you can about whatever you can, because even if you never have an acting job related to what you are learning, it will still give your acting depth.” When my character, Josslyn, struggled with her embarrassment at her schoolmates learning of her kidney transplant, I knew that I could show her emotions realistically because I know what the pressures of fitting in at school and wanting to be like everyone else feels like.

No one is exempt from turmoil in their lives, and I can honestly say I am grateful for the challenges I have had because they have strengthened my character and brought forward certain virtues I might otherwise not have known. Coming so close but ultimately not getting a few huge acting jobs that would have been life-changers has been heartbreaking for me. But everyone brings into the world unique talents and abilities, and some of mine include my strong will and determination. I will continue to engage myself in school, work and sports and try to remember to enjoy the journey along the way. Somehow I have managed to get to the places that always feel right, and this is where my education has led me.

“Homeschooling has been a fundamental part of my life for as long as I can remember. It has given me exciting opportunities along the way that I would have never been able to fulfill otherwise. I am beyond grateful for my parents’ decision to teach me of their own values and truths rather than subjecting me to the sometimes unproductive world of public school.”

Our Home was built on sixteen acres of dense forest, consisting of sprawling gullies, arid meadows grazed down by cattle, and meandering streams, full of life. All of it seemed to be as infinite as the universe to my youthful imagination. I spent hours exploring every nook and cranny of the acreage with my closest of friends and even drew up fictional names and trails we’d discovered on to a map. I still, to this day, think back on how exhilarating it was to stumble upon a new stream or clearing in the woods and how obsessed we became to find all the secrets our plot had to show.

As I grew older, my parents started teaching me the art of gardening and cultivating the land. They showed me that a hard day’s work had more value in it than almost anything else in this life. I didn’t quite see it as a value at the time and just saw it more as a distraction away from the truly important things in life, my Star Wars action figures. But eventually, I started to see what they were all about.

When I was about 8, my mother and some other homeschool moms in the valley started a Thursday-school that I attended with many of my friends for a handful of years. We would participate in arts and crafts, conduct skits, and do other fun activities that hardly seemed like school, which was quite all right by my amigos and me.

By the time high school rolled around, my time of being taught by my mother was coming to a natural end, with my needing a more social outlet for learning and her not being able to teach me the harder subjects in school, such as Chemistry and Math. I started attending classes at Grand Valley Academics in the fall of my 8th grade year. It was a sort of make-shift school led by a handful of homeschool parents who were well educated in different subjects and fields. My first year attending, I took Creative Writing, Biology, and Literature all with the same teacher. Weird, huh? Thankfully, within a year they had upgraded from the youth room of a local church to their very own building with actual classrooms! I’ve taken classes with them for my entire high school experience and have acquired a wealth of knowledge from all of their brilliant teachers along the way. I’ve had many of them for my entire high school career and will be sad to see them go when I graduate. However, I’m still exuberant to be going on to college and excited to see where it takes me.

Homeschooling has been an incredible experience for me, and, if I could, I wouldn’t change a single thing about my education. It has given me the chance to wholly delve into subjects of interest that I wouldn’t have had being confined to an 8:00-4:00 routine. I’m so appreciative of the effort both my parents put into making my time learning as beneficial and enjoyable as possible, and I hope to provide a similar experience for my children one day.

“I am very happy with this learning option as I didn’t only learn about core subjects such as math, language, physics or chemistry but I was able to develop other skill sets that I usually wouldn’t have had the time for. I am grateful that I had the opportunity to know and understand different cultures and learn in many different surroundings.

Being a Christian girl, I enjoyed having the time to practice mercy and love for others through my art (comics, pictures, etc) offering a faith message in the places I visited like nursing homes, small towns lost on the “map”, and preaching at the bus stop.

I would like to thank God for this kind of education because I am convinced that if I had not traveled this way, my life would have had another direction.

That is why I encourage all the kids and parents who are about to make this decision not to doubt it as long as they are united as a family, in good will to go through it.

I have included some pieces of my work.

Greetings from Dina Huapi, Argentina.”

Ayelén Zogalski.