A photo posted by Cecile Lu (@cissyartcafe) on Apr 12, 2016 at 6:59am PDT

I have always been a musical theatre junkie. I'm not quite sure why - I can't really sing (my dad used to make fun of me for my singing voice) and I certainly can't act, but I think there's something really magical about the types of storytelling in theatre productions. The actors' abilities to tell stories through song and dance and movement while aided by the incredible talents of backstage hands and lights and stage and orchestra has always just been rather incredible to me.

Hamilton is one of those really cool musical theatre shows that I have not yet gotten to see and may be on my bucket list for the rest of my life, given how incredibly difficult it is to get reasonable tickets (or tickets at all, at the moment). I resisted jumping on the Hamilton bandwagon for so long - my friend, Julie, kept telling me to listen to the soundtrack and I'd brush her off, saying I didn't like rap - but last month, I finally did.

I fell in love.

There are many things that are amazing about Hamilton - the sheer genius in the songwriting, the colorful cast, the number of different types of music represented - but what I enjoy most is just how much I've learned about America and how much, despite this being set a few hundred years ago, the messages are still so true and so strong today. I opted out of taking AP US History in high school and ended up taking the regular, less rigorous, less interesting course because, as a Canadian international student who had just come from China, I wasn't particularly interested in the considerably short history of America. I also have never really been much of a history person - I enjoy learning it outside of the classroom, but ever since I had a fairly awful history teacher in middle school, I have not really enjoyed most history classes.

Through Hamilton, I became interested in American history. Thousands, millions of people are becoming more interested in learning more about history - about Hamilton's story, about America's story - and only because one man decided to make a fun, interesting, relatable musical around it.

Like I said in my Perfect Pitch blog post, I believe that entertaining education is the best kind of education. When I tutored the child of an MIT staff member in math, she used to tell me she "hated math" but loved when I visited, simply because I made math fun for her and she didn't think of it as math. It was still math, I just made it a game instead of a boring classroom where her teacher didn't believe in her.

That's essentially what Lin Manuel Miranda, the mastermind behind Hamilton, has done. He has gamified American history. No, it's not particularly interactive, so it's not technically a game, but he has made it entertaining, so that people are once again taking interest in history. He has made it likeable, which the different musical genre styles, so that there's a little bit of something for everyone. Most importantly, he has made it relatable, with every ethnicity represented as a main character instead of, like Hollywood so often likes to do, as a supporting or background character.

A couple of months ago I would never have imagined myself picking up a non-fiction history book. They're almost always rather dry and boring, and go into detail about things that I don't find interesting. Now, to sate my own curiosity, I'm reading about an old, dead, white man who was a founding father and created America's financial system. (The book is actually really well written. I'm only a few chapters in, but I really recommend the book.)

Hamilton is getting people interested in education. America has been under quite extensive education reforms - with the SAT changes, No Child Left Behind, the Common Core, the amount of edtech companies emerging to help connect people with quality education - and almost all of it has faced backlash. People know that the education system has issues, but no one seems to agree about how to fix it. This musical, funnily enough, came around at the exact right time.

People are realizing that the only thing you need to do to raise standards is to get kids interested in learning, and the only way to do that, well, is to make the learning interesting and fun. In my mind, history classes will almost always be dry and boring, but in the mind of a child who has just seen Hamilton through it's EduHam program, history might be the most interesting and relatable class there is.

"I am young, scrappy, and hungry, just like my country, and I am not throwing away my shot!"

As a young college student who's about to graduate in a month and a half and has their whole life - along with thousands of variables and quite a lot of uncertainty - ahead of them, this line, among many others, really speaks to me. I'm not particularly scrappy and hungry, but like Alexander Hamilton, I have a thirst to prove myself and help change the world.

I only hope that the work I have done so far will present opportunities in a similar way that the work Alexander Hamilton did presented opportunities to him.

Except a war. I would really like to avoid war. Let's all just talk it out.


Have you listened to the Hamilton soundtrack? What do you think of it?