UCLA student’s dream widened after fearing “one choice”

Junamici Scholarship – Natalia Mochernak describes how reading Sylvia Plath at 13 made her recognize her own paralysis over choices, then details how she scaled back her pursuits—until scholarship opportunities and a fuller life at UCLA helped her expand beyond a single “fig” in the

At 13, Natalia Mochernak read Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar,” and one metaphor stayed with her: a fig tree branching into futures, each fig a potential life—love, teaching, travel—until the heroine freezes and watches every dream rot away.

“I recognized the girl in the book — one so scared of making the wrong decision that she didn’t make one at all,” Mochernak writes. In her account, the fear was personal. “It was me.”

Mochernak grew up with “a million passions” and a restless sense that she wanted to do everything. She ran a baking business selling brownies to her middle school classmates. studied Chinese during Sunday school. practiced seven different types of dance. and maintained a blog and Instagram account where she wrote food reviews. She also played competitive tennis, served as an assistant lifeguard at a state beach, and watched an abundance of rom-coms.

Teachers, peers, and family members warned her that she was doing too much. They told her she was stretching herself thin and that there was “no way” she could be successful at everything she was attempting.

She started to believe them.

Mochernak says she quit dancing and closed her baking business. She began making concessions—she put school and tennis at the center of her life, and the rest of her interests faded. “My passion for life wavered, and I lost my color,” she writes, adding that she stopped feeling confident in herself.

In September of her senior year of high school, she committed to playing Division I tennis at UC San Diego. But she describes the feeling that followed as the opposite of triumph: she felt relief, not excitement. She knew she would have to live at home and find two jobs to pay off school. and that the routine would narrow to studying. playing tennis. and working.

The decision, she says, came from fear. “I was so terrified of losing all of my figs that I grabbed the first one that came my way.”

Then she discovered a small opening that changed the outcome. She says her application fee waiver covered four University of California applications, so she applied to UC San Diego and also to UCLA.

When she was accepted into UCLA. she couldn’t hide her smile “for a week.” Without telling anyone. she went into UCLA’s prospective student scholarship portal and applied for every scholarship offered—among them the Junamici Scholarship. awarded each year to one in-state student who shows “immense interest and dedication to a foreign language.”.

A few weeks later, an email arrived telling her she did not receive the scholarship. “I was crushed,” she writes. But she pushed forward, deciding she could apply for more scholarships and bolster her plan with the financial aid she was already given.

In May, the call came. The student receiving the Junamici Scholarship chose a different school, and Mochernak says she would be going to UCLA on a full-ride scholarship. She credits her years of Russian, Spanish, and Mandarin for getting her there.

Her experience at UCLA, in her telling, is where the metaphor finally stops feeling like a warning.

She says she is pursuing “everything I want.” She reports that she recently won a national championship in Texas with her club tennis team. going undefeated in all six singles matches. She also serves as an assistant news editor at the Daily Bruin, contributing to coverage of the university. She is an intern at EdSource California Student Journalism Corps.

When she isn’t studying or competing, Mochernak says she swims in the ocean, hikes, does hot yoga, and goes on runs. She reads books, tries new restaurant and sweet-treat spots in Los Angeles, and plays intramural soccer, volleyball, and flag football—sports she says she had never tried before.

On top of that, she writes that she “opened my heart” and met the love of her life. She says they bonded over burritos, and that she has never been so happy.

Mochernak ties her current path directly to the choices she once tried to shrink. “I didn’t stop at one language — I learned four,” she writes. She is now majoring in communication and Spanish. and she frames UCLA as the place where she decided not to squeeze her dreams into “the perfect box that society created. ” but to let them grow in any direction they want.

For students watching adults tell them to narrow down, her message is blunt: don’t pick one fig. “You can have the whole tree,” she promises.

UCLA Natalia Mochernak education scholarships Junamici Scholarship student life tennis Daily Bruin EdSource California communication and Spanish Spanish Mandarin Russian