A day in the life of 18­year-old David Lanster is full of typical teenage stuff: school, baseball practice and homework. And then he starts cooking. “Some nights I’m up until 1: 00 a.m. making pies, or even later if we’re cooking beef,” said the student at Ransom Everglades High School in Florida, US.

For the past year, Lanster and Kelly Moran, his classmate, have been hosting fancy dinner parties at Lanster’s parents’ home. Their meals have 17 courses and are all made by themselves. Their guests used to give them gifts to thank them until the pair decided to do something nice for charity. “We got some really great Miami Heat tickets, a nice watch, and many kitchen gadgets (小器具),” Lanster said. “But we wanted to make this something positive for people other than us.”

Lanster and Moran focus on Common Threads, a charity that aims to teach kids in poor communities to cook and make healthy eating choices. The young cooks ask their guests to give however much they want as payment for their meals. It all goes to Common Threads because Lanster’s parents cover their food costs. After their last 12­person event, Lanster and Moran gave $1,600 to the charity.

Now, they’re taking their show out of the kitchen and on the road. They have started to organize private dinner parties with a similar model: the host pays for the ingredients, and the guests make a donation to a charity of their choice.

Without formal training, Lanster said he had been interested in cooking since he helped his mom in the kitchen when he was very young. He learned how to cook by reading cookbooks and watching TV programs. Outside the kitchen, the two are busy preparing their college applications. Neither of them is sure what they will do in the future, but they’ve promised their parents that they will leave professional cooking alone until they finish school.

Isabel Allende was born on August 2, 1942, in Lima, Peru. Her parents were both from Chile, where their families had held a great deal of political influence. Not only was Isabel’s godfather once the president of Chile, but her father and her stepfather were both important diplomats. Despite her connection to political power, Isabel’s childhood was not easy. At the age of two, Isabel’s biological father abandoned her family, which forced them to live with her grandparents in Chile. During this time, she was exposed to her grandmothers love for astrology (占星术) and storytelling, which influenced her writing in the future.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Isabel Allende worked as a journalist, writing for both magazines and television. After her godfather, President Salvador Allende, lost power and was murdered in 1973, Isabel and her family left Chile because they felt it was too dangerous to remain under the rule of Augusto Pinochet, the new, cruel leader of Chile. For thirteen years, Isabel and her family lived in Venezuela, where she began to write fiction.

She used personal experiences to inspire her writing throughout her career. In fact, many of her novels are based on personal life events. In 1985, Isabel Allende published her first novel called The House of the Spirits. This bestselling novel was inspired by a letter Isabel wrote in 1981 to her ill grandfather. The novel turned out to be a story about two Chilean families whose lives are changed because of a military coup. One of her later novels, Paula (1994), is about her daughter, who passed away from a rare disease at a young age.

Isabel Allende has won many awards for her bold and creative writing. Not only has she won the Chilean National Prize for Literature in 2010, but she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014.

For my first year at Oxford, I barely said anything in tutorials(辅导课).

We'd have 2-3 tutorials a week, each ranging from 1 to 3 hours. Some would feel informal with comfortable chairs and teas, sitting and chatting with a few friends. Others would feel more like we were being grilled for facts. In both types, I was pretty quiet. I was shy, introverted, and worried that everyone would think I was stupid. The fact is that everyone in Oxford, Harvard, Yale, etc. has felt insecure about their intelligence at some point. I didn't volunteer in discussions and, as a result, I didn't understand much. My understandings of different texts never matured or became complex. They stayed the same. And they were often wrong.

Then, somewhere in the middle of my second year, I got over myself, stopped being worried, and offered more of my own opinions. I responded to others, asked thoughtful questions, and interacted way more. I always asked if I didn't understand something. Most of the time, others also didn't understand the thing I was confused about and felt happy I asked.

I went from being a passive learner and having everything go over my head to being an active learner and having tons more information understood. In tutorials, I took notes. After tutorials, I reviewed those notes. I rewrote them. I explained new concepts to my friends in other subject areas. And I felt smarter. I went from struggling and failing to thriving and suddenly getting firsts on my essays.

Being an active student also means asking for help. So I recommend you to visit your tutor during office hours and ask for their help or ask your peers to help explain stuff to you. Or get a mentor(导师) if you can. I had a PhD student mentor me once a week over coffee in my final year. It was the best thing that happened to my studies.