Learner Education Women in Mathematics Scholarship

When I was 13, my mom told me about her friend’s daughter who was on a robotics team at Carnegie Mellon University. She told me that it was an all-girls team and they traveled all over for competitions. As she was telling me this, I was thinking “would this be for me?” because I wanted to be a lawyer at the time. A year later, I was sitting with my parents at the 2018 Girls of Steel Symposium surrounded by girls who talked about their great experiences on the team. I saw videos of FIRST Robotics competitions that had bleachers alive with excitement as if they were watching hockey. My true love had appeared before my eyes and it was the fascinating world of STEM. I applied to the program that same year and on my birthday, I got the email that I was accepted to Girls of Steel. I ran into my parent’s room to tell them the good news. In my first year, our small team of six competed in the FIRST Tech Challenge competition and built our first robot together, affectionately named Wheelson. I learned how to make something from a pile of parts, and as our 20-pound robot came to life before us, I thought back on that kid who wanted to be a lawyer and realized that kid was gone. This kid wanted to be an engineer. The next year, I joined the FIRST Robotics Competition team for Girls of Steel. My rookie season was spent learning from all of the seniors on the team and hand-tapping standoffs for hours on end, but I also started learning what it was about STEM that I truly liked. I was drawn to the hands-on building our team did, but I really enjoyed watching our older members and mentors work through calculations to figure out what gear ratio we needed or where we needed to mount different parts to make a balanced robot. Math was calling to me. Around this same time, I started volunteering as a math tutor at Anchorpoint Counseling Ministry. I was paired up with local elementary students and helped them complete homework and study for upcoming tests. It was so weird seeing problems I hadn’t done since elementary school, but I had so much fun re-learning alongside the kids. The kids I tutored were awesome, and there was nothing more rewarding than seeing them smile as they showed me their latest test with a greatly improved score. I started looking forward to those hour-long sessions all week. Meanwhile, at school, my calculus teacher and my physics teacher cemented that math was what I wanted to pursue. Calculus just made sense to me. It seemed like a way to solve any problem, and it combined every previous math concept I’d learned. In physics, I was able to apply all I had learned in calculus. Calculus became my favorite subject as it was the first math I’d taken that I understood the purpose of. At robotics, before meetings officially started, some of us would work together on whatever challenging math problems were assigned for homework that night. At one meeting, we filled up an entire whiteboard trying to figure out an integral problem someone was stuck on. We sat there for half an hour pointing out where we may have made a mistake or what other ways we could try to solve this problem. It was so much fun and I’d never known math could be so interactive. I will always be interested in robotics, but I realized math was my true passion at that moment.