Personal Statement: A Wrinkle In Time

Before 8th grade, I wanted to be an elementary school teacher. My plan for the future changed when I picked up and read an arbitrary book. I feel that my application would be incomplete without sharing where my passion for STEM came from, and how it continues to grow.
When I was in middle school, every student was required to participate in D.E.A.R. day, or Drop Everything and Read, once a week during homeroom. We could read anything we wished to, and I loved that we were given time to read, but I rarely remembered to bring a book of my own. One week, I chose a book from my homeroom teacher’s shelf, and I read a good portion of it during the 30 minutes allotted. This book was called “A Wrinkle in Time” by Madeleine L’Engle. A Wrinkle in Time

is about a pre-teenaged girl, Meg, who travels by tessering, or 5th-dimensional travel, to a fictional planet, Camazotz, with her friend, Calvin, and her kid brother to save her father from the Darkness of the planet. Simply reading the book during homeroom alone was not enough that day, and I had the book in my hands during every bit of my free time; I finished before school even let out. Even at that age, it wasn’t a terribly challenging book to read, but at 13, I was intrigued by every part. It became my favorite book for a long time. I felt a personal connection with Meg, as she was another young girl with exceptional math skills and not-so-exceptional people skills, and she helped to inspire me. An essay in the back of my copy of the novel was what truly inspired me, though. The essay told of the parallels between simple fiction and genuine possibilities of the novel, and the scientists in charge of this discussion were called physicists. At that moment in time, I was unfamiliar with this term, but I already knew I wanted to be a physicist..
Then, when I went to high school and my guidance counselor asked me what I wanted to major in, I told her “physics,” and she suggested I take all the science and math courses that were available. During my freshman year, I didn’t yet have any physics related classes, so I read books on theoretical physics and researched deeper into what I was already so passionate about. Over the next two years, I joined Science Olympiad as a sophomore, took AP Chemistry as a junior and signed up for AP Physics and AP Calculus for senior year. Science Olympiad was an enjoyable experience where my partner and I made a bottle rocket that was designed to protect an egg; my first taste of real-world physics. While I was in AP Chemistry, my interests expanded immensely and I started to consider majoring in chemistry, since I was loving chemistry so much more than I had expected. Over the summer between junior and senior year, I went to an aerospace engineering camp and fell in love with physics all over again, and engineering for the first time.
Now, I’m a only a month into this last year and my rigorous STEM classes continue to fan the flame of passion I have for science. This passion was ignited by reading an admittedly simple book in middle school, but it continues to grow with each day I learn more. I still haven’t pinned down which field of science I plan to pursue, but I’m confident that it is my true purpose to find out, so I can achieve great things one day.