I started playing soccer back home in Germany when I was five years old when my mother saw an ad in the newspaper about a new team at the local academy.

It was a boys team and I ended up being the only girl making the tryouts, which was really exciting. My parents knew that, "Oh, she might be decent if she made these tryouts, and it's not just gonna be for fun eventually."

So I played with boys my entire life, growing up in Germany, and made it through the youth national team and all the regional teams, up to playing in the European Championships for the under 17s, which has been one of my biggest highlights.

I felt cool and badass that I was good enough to play with all the boys. It was very natural for a lot of girls to play with boys in Germany, and it makes you a lot better, so harnessing that is awesome.

At the same time, playing with the boys could be pretty tough and restrictive – I've gotten a lot of bad comments on the side.

A lot of parents of boys who used to be on my teams, would be very angry when I played over one of their kids. They’d think I was stealing a spot from the boys who could be showcasing themselves, as I couldn’t really make it to the men's league anyway. That was obviously really tough for me to navigate as a kid.

But I was able to catch the eye of a German player who's playing in the Bundesliga, and Penn State at the time. I thought, "This is awesome. She gets to live in the US, gets to study more or less for free, and is playing high level soccer."

I reached out to an agency and went through the whole recruiting process. I started talking to a few Ivy League schools, and that's when the deal was sealed.

I came to Harvard, and it’s been the best ride of my life.

[As told to @Ragi Gupta — continued]