I met my current cello teacher, Amit Peled, when he came to Portugal to give a masterclass. I knew then that I wanted to study with him but was reluctant to apply to colleges in the US since they seemed so expensive. He persuaded me, though, and in the end I was lucky enough to win a full scholarship. I’d met some people who’d studied at Peabody before but the first time I saw the school myself was the day I moved in. It was a bit of a blind date! The campus is in a very nice part of Baltimore -from all the beautiful old buildings you can tell you’re at the oldest conservatory in the country, but we’re not far from the city centre and only ten minutes by bus from the main Johns Hopkins site.
With so much to do, there’s no average week here. I tend to have academic classes most weeks, though, and since my focus is solo and chamber performance I do a lot of playing. Each year Peabody runs a competition for a different family of instruments and in my first year it was for strings. As a freshman I was very surprised to come first, but winning led to lots of exciting performance opportunities this year, including playing a concerto with the conservatory orchestra.