Mathematics isn’t just a boring class to me, it’s a language used to explain the universe, and my journey with this language began in my sophomore year Pre-Calculus class. I had learned algebra and geometry in middle school, and while I did well in them, I always felt like something was missing: some fundamental piece that connected all these topics. Pre-Calculus showed me how to apply these topics such as trigonometry, exponential growth functions, and inverse functions. All my questions of "why?" were answered in that class. It felt like all the topics I had struggled to visualize in the real world were all explained and connected in that class, and I was a detective piecing all the parts together. My love for math made me start considering math as a career path, but I knew I had to have experience first. The day I turned 16, I started applying to jobs in my area, and the first place I applied was Mathnasium, a math tutoring center for K-12 education. I was nervous I didn't qualify for this job, but I applied anyway. Fortunately, I got the job, and that is when I solidified my career plans even further. I work there around 12 hours a week and have been there for the past 2+ years. My life has felt like an exponential growth function ever since, because of how much this responsibility has changed me in good ways. I have even gotten multiple promotions because of positive feedback from students and parents about my performance. This job has shown me that I have a passion for teaching: for explaining things and re-wording them and personalizing the education experience to different styles of learning. I love drawing diagrams, using physical objects, and relating problems to kid's favorite topics to help them understand. I try to give as much explanation as to why we have to do things a certain way, so the kids can feel what I felt taking Pre-Calculus. Seeing a kid’s eyes light up when they finally understand a complex problem will always feel like a gift to experience. My passion for math also brought me to enroll in Running Start, a program that allows me to take college classes full-time as a high school student. I have immersed myself in the community college experience, meeting friends and study partners and taking high-level math and physics classes. Some of these people I have met at community college have become long-term friends, and have introduced me to new experiences such as music and art. I go to jazz band concerts, art shows, and theater performances at the college, as well as my STEM-focused interests. When I think of all these experiences together, I find that I truly only have one career goal, and one passion to pursue. I need to become a college math professor, to combine all the things I love and to be able to work with students who are passionate about learning. I want to focus on individualizing the learning experience for students, to make learning math feel like discovering mysteries of the world, and to cater my lessons and lectures to the needs and learning styles of everyone. My experiences as a tutor and a learner have shown me the joy of unlocking the mysteries of math for others. I am eager to continue this journey, to work towards a more accessible learning environment for students, as I pursue my dream of becoming a college math professor

Math is the language of the universe, and it understands me more than most people. There are steps to be taken, laws and theorems and formulas that can be applied to different scenarios to find a solution. I love learning in general, and find great joy in reading a writing, but it feels different than math. In the first 18 years of your life, math is presented as static, as equations with no grace that you either get right or wrong. And while I love this side of math, I also appreciate the more creative side of math. Proofs and research, where you don't just get the right answer or not, but where you have to argue your point and use logic and write out pages to communicate your ideas. Math, people say, is not the most applicable field, except it really is. Research done by mathematicians many years ago is just finding use today in fields like machine learning and cryptography. People have told me that I shouldn't pursue pure math because it has no use in the real world, but because of these examples, I know that it does. Math describes so many different systems in the world, and we don't even know all the uses for it now. In 100 years, who knows how math research done today will effect the world? The idea of being part of that, of being able to work with colleagues and create new theorems and test ideas and write papers in this language of the universe excites me more than anything else.

I was raised in a household that adamantly disbelieves in the existence of God. My dad has always said something that really stuck with me, "I am not lucky enough to have a belief in God". People with faith have a goal to work toward, a written list of what to do and how to interpret life, and a community. I was not raised with those things, and so if asked, I would say I do not believe in God. However, I think science and faith have a bigger connection than some people think. There is this stereotype of the atheist scientist, with big slogans on their shirt saying things like "science doesn't care what you believe" or "science: because you can't pray your way into space". I think people like that are missing a bunch of nuance, and I think a lot of atheists aren't ready to actually listen to what religious people and texts have to say about the world. I believe in the scientific method, and that includes creating a testable, quantitative hypothesis and then testing it multiple times to prove or disprove your theory. I think that the issue with believers and non-believers both is that the idea of God is not a quantitative hypothesis. People are arguing about the mere existence of something, and that is a lot harder to prove than most hypotheses. The atheist side has to just sit there and say "God isn't real", while people with faith have to come up with concrete evidence. That makes one side a lot harder to "prove" than the other. Because of how I feel about this, I think I would describe myself as agnostic instead of atheist. That means that while I don't actively believe in God, I am very open to new ideas and arguments for believing in God. I can't force my brain to believe in something just because I want to, but I really appreciate the ideas created by religious scholars about the world. The fact that computers function, that there are laws of this universe that can be described in just equations, the fact that the Earth spins and that animals can survive and have such complex lives is almost incomprehensible to me. The idea that those things could happen by accident sounds almost impossible to even my non-believing ears. I want to believe in God, I want to experience faith and have an explanation for the non-explainable things in this world, but I can't. Not without any solid proof. And unfortunately, that proof may never come, but not of the fault of God: of the fault of my mind that won't let me believe.

Mathematics isn’t just a boring class to me, it’s a language used to explain the universe, and my journey with this language began in my sophomore year Pre-Calculus class. I had learned algebra and geometry in middle school, and while I did well in them, I always felt like something was missing: some fundamental piece that connected all these topics. Pre-Calculus showed me how to apply these topics such as trigonometry, exponential growth functions, and inverse functions. All my questions of "why?" were answered in that class. It felt like all the topics I had struggled to visualize in the real world were all explained and connected in that class, and I was a detective piecing all the parts together. My love for math made me start considering math as a career path, but I knew I had to have experience first. The day I turned 16, I started applying to jobs in my area, and the first place I applied was Mathnasium, a math tutoring center for K-12 education. I was nervous I didn't qualify for this job, but I applied anyway. Fortunately, I got the job, and that is when I solidified my career plans even further. I work there around 12 hours a week and have been there for the past 2+ years. My life has felt like an exponential growth function ever since, because of how much this responsibility has changed me in good ways. I have even gotten multiple promotions because of positive feedback from students and parents about my performance. This job has shown me that I have a passion for teaching: for explaining things and re-wording them and personalizing the education experience to different styles of learning. I love drawing diagrams, using physical objects, and relating problems to kid's favorite topics to help them understand. I try to give as much explanation as to why we have to do things a certain way, so the kids can feel what I felt taking Pre-Calculus. Seeing a kid’s eyes light up when they finally understand a complex problem will always feel like a gift to experience. My passion for math also brought me to enroll in Running Start, a program that allows me to take college classes full-time as a high school student. I have immersed myself in the community college experience, meeting friends and study partners and taking high-level math and physics classes. Some of these people I have met at community college have become long-term friends, and have introduced me to new experiences such as music and art. I go to jazz band concerts, art shows, and theater performances at the college, as well as my STEM-focused interests. When I think of all these experiences together, I find that I truly only have one career goal, and one passion to pursue. I need to become a college math professor, to combine all the things I love and to be able to work with students who are passionate about learning. I want to focus on individualizing the learning experience for students, to make learning math feel like discovering mysteries of the world, and to cater my lessons and lectures to the needs and learning styles of everyone. My experiences as a tutor and a learner have shown me the joy of unlocking the mysteries of math for others. I am eager to continue this journey, to work towards a more accessible learning environment for students, as I pursue my dream of becoming a college math professor