Emma Cox '23 Recruiting Profile

I played multiple other sports growing up, but didn't know anything about crew until Middle School. Once I found rowing, I felt a connection to it like I hadn't with other sports - I love rowing and want to continue doing it after high school. I really like the feeling of pushing myself through an obstacle (e.g., pain and lack of O2 at the end of a race) and succeeding. But it's most rewarding when I get to share that feeling with teammates. I want the chance in college to have that strong shared bond and team connection. I feel like through my HS crew team, I have 100 friends around all the time. I’ve always been incredibly outgoing and extroverted. I love working with and forming connections with other people. Rowing in college would give me a unique opportunity to continue that through sports.

As an example, this Fall, along with 2 classmates, I co-founded a club at my high school called WoFit. WoFit is a women’s fitness and weightlifting club that we created to provide other girls with a non-intimidating environment in which to exercise, lift weights and bond. I currently serve as co-president of the club and help run workouts on Fridays. This was an outgrowth of my experience wrestling on a team comprised mostly of boys and weightlifting with them. I didn't find it intimidating, but a few other girls on the team did and I wanted to do something to make it more fun for other girls to join.

If you get to know me, you'll find that I have a lot of balance in my life. I'm incredibly busy and have a lot of interests - not just in a variety of sports, but other school activities and things outside of school with multiple different groups of friends - but the constant change keeps me engaged. For example, as mentioned above, rather than rowing 12 months a year, I lift weights and wrestle (usually against boys) in the Winter season. For anyone who hasn't done it, wrestling is not only a really challenging strength workout, but an enormously difficult cardio workout as well - basically like doing 2K test pieces one after another every time you step on the mat. Wrestling and weightlifting keep me from burning out, while getting me more prepared for the Spring crew season than I would otherwise be just by Erging all winter.

I'm active off the field in sports as well. For example, in 2020, my sister and I organized a used equipment collection for youth sports in McLean, Virginia. Building on the success we had in 2020, we ran collections again in Spring 2021 and 2022, and I plan to continue running this as an annual event. We've collected hundreds of pairs of shoes/cleats, balls, gloves, bats, uniforms, etc. - enough to fill multiple delivery trucks. We partnered with a local charitable organization (Leveling the Playing Field) to donate the equipment and uniforms to support underprivileged schools, after school programs and athletic leagues. We started this program not just as a way to recycle equipment that was no longer being used, but as a way to help enable underprivileged kids to participate in a wide variety of sports and raise the overall level of competition in our region. Last Fall, I was named as a student representative of the Governing Board for McLean Youth Athletics, which runs 11 youth sports in McLean.

I have also volunteered as a STEMbassador for the Young Scholars Science Program in Fairfax County, Virginia and done volunteer fundraising for a club at my high school called Girls in Literature that purchases and distributes books to underprivileged girls. Pre-COVID, I was an assistant coach in the 4th Grade Girls League of McLean Youth Basketball and played string bass in an orchestra and jazz ensemble.

I was recently elected to be a Captain of my Science Olympiad team for my senior year. I was first elected to be an Officer during my sophomore year and was one of only two underclassmen in club leadership that year. I served as the publicist, budget manager, and point-of-contact for our school’s finance teams, such as our Academic Boosters and Partnership Fund, and led the recruiting effort as we formed our team. I was re-elected to the same position for my junior year. In addition, at the beginning of last school year, I was invited to be on a student panel for the incoming administrators and teachers. I expected only a few to show up, and was astounded when more than 120 teachers and staff came. I was the youngest student chosen to represent the student body. As part of this student panel, we answered questions about the curriculum and changes we wanted to see at the school, and debated certain policies that had been in place in our county for decades. I was proud to be chosen and happy to receive compliments from teachers on my ideas and confidence in public speaking.

Finally, in addition to activities I mentioned above like WoFit and Science Olympiad, every once in a while, I get involved in something crazy that is unrelated to anything else and purely for fun or the challenge. The most recent one was a full-length remake of the entire Terminator 2 movie, done last Summer and Fall scene-by-scene by a group of about 30 of my friends. We used live action, animation, claymation, green screens, computer gaming, minecraft and other methods to make the movie and played it to a packed HS auditorium when we finished.

In short, I'm outgoing and unique - someone who makes friends easily and can work well with just about anyone in any situation - and someone who is willing (and not afraid) to jump into new, and even uncomfortable, situations and try out new things.