I'm applying for a couple summer camps right now, and one of the applications included this prompt:

What person or event in your science and mathematics education has been the most influential in your decision to pursue a career in science or mathematics?

Here's my response. I think it speaks to my core philosophy pretty well:

By far the most influential person throughout my STEM career has been my mother. She's the reason why I developed my curiosity of the world and love of learning.

When I was very young, before I could really talk, she would point to things around me - an airplane, a car, someone walking their dog, the clock on the wall - and talk to me about them. I would nod or shake my head back. When I got older, she would ask questions - what time was it? why was the oven warm? - and when I didn't know or I couldn't answer, she would guide me towards the answer, explaining along the way. She gave just enough hints that I got to the answer in the end, but not enough to spoil the fun of the discovery. This taught me two lessons that fundamentally shaped who I am:

1. The world is interesting! No matter what I was doing, or where I was, my mother always seemed to have some sort of interesting question to ask, or some observation I hadn't made myself. Also, learning and discovering new things was fun!


2. That I shouldn't be scared of trying to answer hard questions. That there was nothing wrong with not knowing, and it shouldn't be something to be scared to approach. The questions she asked me were often 'hard' in that I had to think a lot in order to solve them, but the act of trying to answer them wasn't ever presented as an unpleasant task. In fact, the hard questions were the ones that led to discovery, and I learned they were in fact the fun questions!

These two core principles guide almost all of what I've done over the past sixteen years. I have learned and continue to learn science because I now ask myself these questions about the world; anytime that something around me doesn't fit with my understanding of the world, I'm almost compelled to ask why, to figure out where my knowledge falls short and where it can grow.

This desire to understand the world around me extended past simply knowing isolated facts. I wanted to understand also how everything connected, and this motivated me to learn computer programming. I started very small, with little animations and games, but my goal was to someday be able to simulate the world around me, at least in part, in order to probe at it and understand it better. For example, in late middle school, I became very interested in 3d graphics and spent about a year designing and building rendering software from scratch. Along the way, I truly did gain better understanding of the underlying processes involved, managing to even derive various concepts like rotation matrices on my own.

Additionally, this cycle of curiosity is self-perpetuating: the more I learn, the more I understand the world, and I can ask better questions, leading to more learning. Without fear of failure, nothing holds this back.

Circling back to my parents, their role in my development was so instrumental not only because of the value system she instilled within me, but because they were the only people in my life who would likely ever do so. I wouldn't have picked up quite the same level of curiosity from school, where the act of learning seemed to be presented more as a chore than an aspiration. The love of trying hard things was even less expressed at school - the prevailing mindset among my classmates (and even the teachers in most cases) was that learning was something to be gotten over with as quickly as possible. While this somewhat changed when I got to high school, by then it would have had much less of an impact on me.

That's who I find most influential. Not a famous scientist or revolutionary discovery, but the person who gave me the core philosophy I think science embodies - to look out into the world, ask the hard questions, and have the time of our lives answering them.

tags: life