East County Math Scholarship

My career goals involve pursuing a degree in biology with a pre-physician assistant focus at the University of Portland. After completing my bachelor's degree and having a successful education journey, I will earn certification to become a medical assistant, which will help earn hands on clinical experience, much needed for physician assistant school. With medical assistance as a steppingstone, I can hopefully make significant connections with healthcare professionals, which could open opportunities for mentorship or shadowing. In the end, I hope these experiences will help me successfully complete PA school, so that I can finally be able to chase a career as a surgical physician assistant. The first time I learned the quadratic formula was memorable but when I really understood it that, that was unforgettable. I still remember walking into my Algebra 2 class as a sophomore to sit at my usual desk in the front right side of my teacher's room. Twirling my mechanical pencil between my fingers, the faint scratch of lead against paper as I wrote down the strange, chaotic equation: y=(−b±√(b2−4ac))/(2ac). It looked impossible at first, a forest of symbols and squares and roots. But as the teacher walked through it step by step describing how sometimes factoring can be impossible, something clicked. Not all at once, but like the slow, satisfying turn of a lock. That was when I truly started to love math. Up until then, school had felt like a race I was just keeping pace in. I was good enough at reading, okay at history, decent in science. But math, math was different. It was mine. It felt like walking into a room full of noise and finding the one voice you instantly understand. It was the first time I realized I had a strength, not just in solving for x, but in facing something that looked impossible and finding my way through it. The quadratic formula didn’t just teach me about parabolas. It taught me about patience. About trust. It showed me that no matter how complicated a problem seemed, there was a path waiting quietly beneath the surface, if I stayed calm enough to find it. And sometimes, when solving carefully enough, you can come to discover not just one way forward, but two, a heads up that life, too, can offer more than one answer if you’re willing to look for them. That small moment, just a pencil, a piece of paper, and a problem bigger than anything I’d seen before, changed the way I saw myself. Not just as a student, but as someone capable of untangling hard things. Someone who doesn’t turn away when the solution isn’t obvious. As I prepare to begin college, I carry that quiet confidence with me. Not every problem will be neat. Not every path will be clear. But I know now that I have the tools to work through them, one careful step at a time. And in the future, when I become a physician assistant, I hope to bring that same clarity to medicine and steady ability of problem-solving to people: to listen closely, to work carefully, and to help find solutions, even when they seem hidden at first.