Whenever I get clear weather, I set up my 10” Dobsonian telescope. Amateur astronomy has a completely different flavor than my science classes: there are no tests, no stakes. It’s just me, my thoughts, and the universe. With my telescope, I’ve seen wisps of nebulae silhouetted against a sea of newborn stars, watched the shadows of Jupiter’s moons crawl across the planet’s clouds, and stayed up until 4:00 a.m. viewing a lunar eclipse even though I had a biology test the next day—totally worth it! The faint gray smudges look nothing like Hubble photos, but that’s the point: I’m seeing a real galaxy, whose light traveled an unimaginable distance just so I could get a hint of its structure. I’ve been interested in astronomy for pretty much my entire life, and I spent a large amount of my elementary school years reading every space book I could find. That said, I’ll never forget when I got a 70mm refractor for my eleventh birthday and looked at the Moon for the first time, seeing another world that was real in a way that no book could ever capture. Physically seeing the Moon and the planets deepened my appreciation for the universe, and the experience pushed me to independently learn physics and math throughout middle and high school. Now, I’ve finished my first year pursuing an undergraduate degree in physics at Colorado School of Mines. College has been a blast, and I’ve taken every opportunity to prepare myself for a future career as an astrophysics professor. I’ve started researching extragalactic cosmic ray propagation under Dr. Eric Mayotte by coding simulations of cosmic rays originating from the Large Magellanic Cloud. The research has been difficult, as I haven’t had much experience programming, but it’s very satisfying when the code works. In addition to research, I’ve had the opportunity to teach my general chemistry class on two separate occasions. First semester, I talked about why treating electrons as waves leads to discrete energy levels in the hydrogen atom. Second semester, I talked about entropy, leaning into astrophysics-adjacent topics like the fate of the universe, Boltzmann brains, black hole thermodynamics, and how the reason life on Earth is even possible is because sunlight is lower entropy than the waste heat generated by the biosphere. Both lectures were very well received by my professor and my class. Finally, I restarted the Astronomy Club at Mines after learning the club had disbanded the year before I arrived. I now have access to more telescopes than ever before, and I plan to use this summer to develop meeting topics for the upcoming school year. I’m also excited to learn astrophotography, since I haven’t had the resources to get into it before. My experiences with the Astronomy Club and my chemistry lectures taught me that while I love learning science, I love teaching science even more. I find it so satisfying to learn a topic to its fullest, only to distill that knowledge into creating the most intuitive explanation possible. I love seeing the awe on people’s faces when the science clicks, whether it’s seeing the Moon through a telescope for the first time or understanding the deep connection between entropy and hidden information. In ten years, I want to be the kind of professor that inspires students to explore the unparalleled beauty of the natural world.

Here’s a fun pattern: 1=1 1+3=4 1+3+5=9 1+3+5+7=16 Adding up the first n odd numbers gives you the nth square number. At first, it’s a cute little fact, discovered by accident while doing homework, and you’re about to move on to an actual problem—but then you wonder: why is it that way? The pattern becomes a mystery, gnawing at your brain, demanding your full attention. At first, you scramble into dead ends, but with some luck and a bit of insight, you decide to represent the square numbers as literal squares. The odd numbers become “L” shapes, Tetris pieces that fit snugly into the greater square, and the pattern you’d discovered goes from being an enigma to being so self-evident you can’t imagine it being any other way. Curiosity to mystery to obsession to obviousness: that’s the life cycle of a good math problem, chaotic as it may be. I’ve loved math my whole life, and that obsession has only grown as I’ve learned more math. People sometimes joke about math losing them “once the letters appear”—which is so sad, since math starts to shine when you can abstract away from numbers and look at the patterns behind the patterns. Summing odd numbers is just the start: if you want true beauty, just look at the surprising divergence of the harmonic numbers, the infinite complexity of the Mandelbrot set, Euler’s formula unexpectedly tying together exponents and trigonometry, Cauchy’s residue theorem evaluating integrals by looping around singularities, or the many patterns lurking in Pascal’s triangle. Yes, math gets harder, but behind every line of hairy algebra is a deep insight discovered through nothing but pure logic. Math, with its objective nature and appeal to rigor, is often touted as the opposite of art—but nothing could be further from the truth. There are often multiple routes to uncovering mathematical truth. Even if the end result is objective, the art in math is choosing the proof that best captures the soul of the idea, which requires a touch of subjectivity. You can write out musical chords as ratios between frequencies, yet the beauty is apparent the second you listen to the music. Both present the same structure, but only one reveals the soul. Therefore, it’s our responsibility as mathematicians and scientists to teach students to hear the music behind the symbols.