Describe your favorite academic subject and explain how it has influenced you.
Like many other children, it was my dream as an innocent elementary schoolboy to one day become an astronaut. My mother read me picture books each night, cultivating within me a growing appreciation for how little we knew of our beautiful universe by introducing me to the world of Outer Space. I wanted to visit the planets and stars and black holes I saw and see them not as printed dots on a piece of paper, but as the ethereal entities they truly were.
My childhood dream to explore the universe only grew with time. As I took more advanced math and science courses, I realized that simply observing would not quench my desire, because I craved knowledge. I had to understand how planets and stars and black holes worked; I wanted to predict their movements, document their surfaces and hypothesize the alternate dimensions that could lie beyond the twisting nether of a black hole. Merely admiring them would never be enough. This desire motivated me to start tailoring my life to fit the pursuit of astrophysics, a field that remains nebulous to this day, but nonetheless one that truly encapsulated this desire to enlighten myself on the workings of the unknown.
My desire to understand was by no means limited to space, however, and I quickly discovered the curiosity I had nurtured since I was a child had evolved into something greater - a ravenous hunger for knowledge and comprehension. Following the initial wonder and rush after a particularly explosive chemistry lab, I felt a restless gnawing inside myself, and I couldn’t settle down until I knew why Potassium burst into flame in water. I strove to familiarize myself with the mechanics behind a problem instead of using a given list of formulas and plugging them in one by one. I wanted to understand how sequences of seemingly innocuous actions could lead to huge events in history, because I would be sated by proficiency alone. Ignorance was redundant. I needed to learn, constantly.