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.

One aspect that draws me to math is its reliability. The answer to a math problem will always be the same. If I’m given an equation and asked to find its derivative, there are several methods I could use, but they would all give me the same answer. No other subject is like this. Science has multiple hypotheses for each problem; historical events vary depending on whose point of view you’re seeing; literature is interpreted differently by every reader. Math is the only field that remains consistent, and this dependability is comforting to me. Despite being challenging at first, solving math equations can be satisfying once you get the hang of it. Though I often feel frustrated when first learning a concept, I find myself having fun after a few problems. Nothing beats the feeling of satisfaction I get after taking a complex equation and simplifying it. However, I didn’t always enjoy math. Growing up, I always felt neutral about it. I didn’t hate it or struggle as other students did, but I didn’t particularly care about it either. That changed in junior year when pre-calculus became the bane of my existence. The unit circle, and my inability to memorize it, became my worst nightmare, to the point that I dreaded going to class every day. The following year, I had to take either AP Calculus or AP Statistics, and I, terrified after my horrible experience with trigonometry, chose statistics. Little did I know that this choice would change my entire attitude about math. Statistics intrigued me in a way no other subject ever had, and I fell in love with it. Every day I looked forward to learning more about statistical significance and how to calculate it. I loved that I could learn so much from conducting studies and analyzing data. I found myself having more fun than I knew possible in a math class. I even found myself excited to do homework. Statistics ignited an excitement in me that I had never felt in school before. This excitement inspired me to minor in applied mathematics and explore the field of data analytics. After starting college and taking a few calculus classes, I realized that I didn’t hate calculus like I previously thought. I also realized that math is omnipresent in our world and crucial for understanding every aspect of life. The applications are endless: calculating tax when shopping; figuring out how much storage is left on your phone; determining travel times; the list is endless. No matter what field I end up in, I will need math.