Aaliya Moorjani’s Application Essays for Yale Young Global Scholars
Yale Young Global Scholars (YYGS) is a two-week summer academic programme at Yale University in the United States. It brings together talented high school students from around the world to learn, share ideas, explore new subjects, and understand different points of view.
My niece, Aaliya Moorjani, is an accomplished young squash player who competes at the national level in India. She has applied to the YYGS programme, and the essays presented here offer a glimpse into her thoughts, interests, experiences, and aspirations.
These essays are shared for private reading, with the hope that they offer an insight into Aaliya’s personality, her way of thinking, and the ideas that inspire her.
Prompt for the First Essay:
Describe a time when you were pushed outside of your comfort zone and the experience went differently than what you hoped for or intended, and then reflect on what you learned from the experience.
(300-400 words)
One of the strangest things about playing squash at a high level is that sometimes the person I am most worried about on court is not my opponent. It is myself.
I have played squash since I was nine, and over the years I have competed at Nationals and internationally. Training has become a huge part of my life, with sessions often beginning in the morning and continuing again in the evening. From the outside, that probably sounds like I should be completely comfortable on a squash court. For a long time, I thought so too. But before matches, especially important ones, I would feel my chest tighten, my legs become heavy, and tears start coming before I had even hit a ball. I knew I was physically prepared, but my mind seemed to have a different plan.
I used to think the solution was simple: train more. If I worked harder, I would become better, and if I became better, I would be more confident. That logic worked everywhere but on court. After particularly difficult matches, I would sit against the tin wondering how I could train for hours every day and still feel completely unprepared when it actually mattered.
Eventually, I realised I was trying to solve the wrong problem. I did not need another 4-hour training session. I needed to understand what was happening to me when I was under pressure. That pushed me into learning about sports psychology, emotional regulation and how the body responds to stress. I started experimenting with different methods of grounding myself before and during matches, which eventually led me to explore how I could help other young athletes facing the same problem. This became the basis of my Personal Project, where I am designing a five-sense fidget tool to help young athletes manage performance anxiety.
None of this magically made me fearless. I still have matches where I get nervous and days where I do not play the way I want to. The difference is that I no longer see those days as evidence that I am not good enough.
Looking back, I realise that I had been treating preparation as if it could solve everything. Squash taught me that sometimes the hardest problems are not physical ones. I learned that being pushed out of my comfort zone does not always mean being comfortable there. Sometimes it means understanding why you are uncomfortable and learning to move forward anyway.
I still care enormously about winning. But I have stopped treating every scoreboard as a measurement of who I am. And strangely enough, that has made me enjoy the game a whole lot more.