What I Stand For

Already before the war, my life was organized around two forms of training:
mental training in the form of play on the chessboard and physical training in the karate. As a child I worked out daily puzzles and timed games with Coach Boronin Ivanovich; chess taught me how to break complicated positions into motifs, judge trade-offs quickly, and think abstractly, viewing positions as states and plans as sequences of moves. In tandem, I trained in karate with Sensei Pavel Pavlovich for countless hours. Karate taught me to translate conceptual plans into precise timing, controlled power, and responsive movement. School, daily training, and frequent competitions in different cities and countries filled my life with steady purpose and movement.

On the first day of the war, I was at home. I remember hearing a loud explosion and the immediate fear that followed, the house felt small and uncertain; people were frightened and rushed. That day many of my relatives and friends left the country. My family did not leave: we are a large family, and my father stayed because he is not scheduled for conscription for another year, until I turn eighteen. Staying meant facing rapidly shrinking certainty: the war disrupted our incomes, and overnight the practical possibility of pursuing studies abroad, especially in the United States, where I had hoped to study, became unreachable.

The war has left several lasting marks on me. The most vivid episode that will remain imprinted in my memory is the suddenness of that first day, the explosion, the panic, and the sight of so many people close to me leaving immediately, leaving me without my usual circle of friends and making me feel suddenly alone. The next morning felt eerily quiet, and everything that once felt stable suddenly seemed uncertain. I also remember losing my first major karate tournament before the war. It was painful, but I learned to think about that loss the way I would think about a chess game, to analyze it calmly, look for patterns, and understand what I could improve. That habit helped me stay collected when the war began. We did not relocate because of the war; we stayed in our home country. Adapting has meant finding ways to continue learning and training despite fewer resources and more uncertainty. I kept studying remotely, at seventeen I completed a year-long remote experience working with a developer in London, contributing to live codebases, learning professional version control workflows, and participating in code reviews. I continued to build small automations and projects, that helped me turn abstract ideas into tools: for example, a script that detects idioms in Ukrainian literature assignments, saving hours of manual work. These projects have been not only academic exercises but practical means to keep growing when conventional training or travel was impossible.

Financially, the war severely reduced our family’s income. Our household now survives on the monthly allowance provided to large families by the state. Because of this, I do not currently have the means to pay for study in the United States, even though studying there has long been my dream. The war made that dream more urgent: living here feels increasingly unsafe, and the desire to continue my education abroad, where I can both study computer science and remain physically safe, is now stronger than ever. We have received the government’s monthly support for large families; beyond that, we have not relied on other humanitarian aid programs. The state allowance has kept basic needs met, but it is far from sufficient to cover higher education or the costs of relocating to study abroad. That financial reality has constrained my options and intensified my motivation to seek scholarships, remote learning opportunities, and any support that could make studying in the U.S. possible.

Chess gave me an abstract paradigm of decision-making; karate forced me to reconcile theory with noisy, imperfect reality; programming taught me to make analysis reproducible and shareable. I want to study computer science to further this syncretism, to learn algorithms and natural language processing to build tools which make human knowledge more resilient and accessible in the wake of disruption.