“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” as Charles Dickens wrote in, A Tale of Two Cities. My story started six years before I was born when my parents had their first child, Annie. At that time my mom stopped teaching high school and stayed home to care for our family. Two brothers later and then I came into the world. Just before my birth, my mom started home-schooling my older siblings. In just a few short years, she taught me. Learning at home was the best; it allowed each of us to dive into deeper areas of interest while also learning the basic skills we needed to be successful in academics. School didn’t seem like school and we loved it. It was the best of times… My parents knew that at some point we would enter public school. For me fifth grade was the right time because of my love of music and wanting to be involved in band. For the next six years, it was the worst of times... School didn’t challenge me. It felt more like a factory than a learning institution; data in, data out. I truly missed the times when I could explore and move beyond the curriculum. Then everything changed! It happened in chemistry class. Everything I learned felt new-- like I was Prometheus. Except I wasn’t stealing the fire, I was making it. I would have happily sat in that class all day learning new things, doing new experiments, and figuring out how those experiments worked. This feeling only expanded when I entered advanced placement chemistry. We never repeated past learning but moved deeper into the weird parts of the world that I wanted to hear all about. Again I experienced the best of times. Through my teacher’s guidance I learned so much more. He had a “figure it out yourself” mindset when it came to learning, so we would spend all our time answering our own questions with only slight guidance about what to do. That type of investigative learning made me realize what science was all about. It is not just using some formula to answer a question that means nothing to you. It's all about using theoretical science to answer questions and solve problems in the real world that matter to you and the world. When you see acid melt something right in front of you, for example, you can only wonder how and why. It’s a similar feeling with nuclear physics. When I walked into my physics class and the board read, “Nuclear Physics,” I was instantly captivated. The very small has always fascinated me. When you look at tiny particles, things never work as you would expect them to work. Everything is always pushing and pulling on each other and it's one big mess. Learning about the forces in even a single atom makes the world feel controllable and less chaotic to me. In the first semester of my senior year, I attended the University of Wisconsin at River Falls. It has shown me the way to move forward in my education. At UWRF I took a neuroscience course. In that course I felt that I could never learn enough. The neurons in our brains are so complex and confusing that I could spend years learning about them. I now realize how much I want to learn and that I need to do it at a place where I can continue this journey, either UW-Madison or U of M-Minneapolis.