4S Ranch girl is shortlisted for global essay prize

Meera Shyamal, an Oak Valley Middle School seventh-grader, has been shortlisted in the junior category for the John Locke Institute 2025 Global Essay Prize.

The competition’s junior category was for entrants under the age of 15. They were to choose one of seven essay options. Meera, 12, selected “Your citizenship at birth was chosen for you. Which citizenship would you have chosen?”

In her three-page essay, Meera said if given a choice, she would have selected Denmark.

“If I could choose my birth citizenship, without a doubt, I wholeheartedly would best thrive as a young girl in Denmark due to their gun safety laws, the prioritization of a healthy balance between work and social life, and their sustainability efforts towards the environment,” she wrote.

Meera she did not enter the contest to win, but to strengthen her writing skills.

“My parents heard about it,” she said. “I struggle with writing, so my parents encouraged me to enter as a new learning experience.”

Meera is the daughter of 4S Ranch residents Nandini Nagraj and Shyamal Ramachandran.

“I was very surprised,” Nagraj said, adding she didn’t read her daughter’s essay until after receiving the shortlist notification on Aug. 14.

The purpose of encouraging their daughter to enter last spring, Nagraj said, was to give her a goal. Without it, Meera was unlikely to work on her writing skills, which are important in high school, her mother said.

Nagraj said she is proud that the essay showed the abilities her daughter had as a then-sixth-grader.

“I was impressed with myself and have to give credit to those who helped me with the process, such as my teachers and others in the community,” Meera said.

Her neighbors who go to high school read early drafts and told Meera where she needed to do more research. Meera said she spent 2 ½ months last spring researching and writing her essay.

In the essay she described a school lockdown in third grade and how “gun safety is barely an issue for Danes compared to American citizens like myself.

“Life is safer than other countries in Europe and across the world because of their strict gun laws which make sure people don’t have easy access to guns and weapons,” she wrote.

While the U.S. experienced at least 479 mass shootings in 2022, Denmark had only two in the past seven years, she wrote, adding that school shootings in the U.S. “cause a lot of stress and trauma on students which negatively impacts the rest of their childhood/development.”

Meera also praised Denmark for the well-balanced social and work life its residents experience, in contrast to the U.S. where she wrote that 1 in 4 Americans “are stressed because they are unable to fit hobbies in their schedules outside of work and it’s also widely known that stress leads to unproductivity.”

In her essay, Meera mentioned Denmark’s environmental policies, giving windmills and eco-friendly transportation options aided by infrastructure as examples.

She did mention one drawback to living in Denmark — medical staff shortages that cause long wait times to receive healthcare. However, she wrote the country also offers free health insurance to every citizen, which does not exist in the United States.

Meera researched several countries, including Sweden and Norway, before choosing Denmark. She chose this essay option because she enjoys researching other countries, she said.

Terence Kealey, the contest’s chairman of examiners, wrote to Meera that the competition received 63,328 entries and of those, the top 18.65% were shortlisted (this would be just over 11,800 worldwide). He did not say how many of the essays were in the regular versus junior categories.

According to the competition’s website, the junior category winner will receive a $5,000 scholarship toward the cost of attending any John Locke Institute program. Awards will be announced on Oct. 4 at a ceremony in London, which Meera said she will not be attending.

All short-listed candidates will receive a certificate to acknowledge their achievement.

The John Locke Institute works to “embolden the best and brightest students to become more academically ambitious and more intellectually adventurous,” according to its website.

Its programs include residential courses, revision seminars, essay competition and special events. It is named in honor of 17th century Oxford philosopher, political scientist, economist and medical doctor John Locke, who has been dubbed “the grandfather of Classical Liberalism.”

In order to advance in the contest, those shortlisted had to complete an online English language test.

“This helps us to track how closely our candidates’ English language skills correspond to the quality of their submission,” Kealey wrote.

The test asked questions about grammar, correct sentence structure and punctuation, Meera said.