I have a copy of Plato's Republic with 200 pages of margin notes, most of them arguments. About a third of the notes are in pen. The rest are in different colors of pencil, which means they were written at different times, which means I have been arguing with this book for three years.

The argument started with Book I, where Thrasymachus claims that justice is whatever benefits the stronger party. I was fifteen. I thought this was obviously wrong. I wrote 'NO' in the margin in capital letters and three exclamation points.

By the time I reached Book IV, I had started to worry that Thrasymachus might be partially right. By Book IX, I had written a two-page response in the back cover. By the time I finished the Republic the first time, I had more questions than when I started, which I now understand to be the point.

The problem I want to solve is not a single problem — it's a method problem. Most of the serious disagreements I see around me, whether political, moral, or social, seem to stem not from people having different values but from people never having been taught to reason carefully about values at all. We are, as a society, philosophically underprepared for the questions we are being asked.

I've been trying to address this in a small way: I run a weekly Socratic seminar at my high school, open to any student, structured around primary texts and the practice of genuine disagreement. In two years we have had 34 sessions. The average attendance is 19 students. Twice we have had to continue the conversation the following week because we weren't done.

At Columbia, I want to study philosophy and political science — not to find answers, but to build better questions. Thrasymachus is still partially right, I think. But 'partially' is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and I intend to spend the next four years figuring out exactly how much.