What caused your interest in STEM? Please leave a comment with specifics!
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Total number of votes: 5
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Total number of votes: 5
Comments
My dad wouldn't give me a quantitative answer when I asked how cold it was outside. I was about four I think.
I'm gonna give one of the supplements I wrote for college apps as my answer, because I've basically already written about this question. But simplified, it would probably be the instances of support my parents gave me when I was curious about something STEM related.
Here's my supplement though.
One of my friends shared a Verizon ad with me on Facebook. She told me that it made her think of me. It followed a girl, from toddler to teen, who obviously liked science. But her parents said things like “Don’t get your dress dirty” or “Why don’t you give that to your brother?” In the end, she looks at a poster for the science fair, but uses the glass to apply lip gloss.
I compared it to my experience. I have pictures of me in my pink princess dress, standing in mud, holding a jar of bugs. I remember wading through tide pools to find anemones so I could touch each of their tentacles in turn. My first science fair project was in second grade, after I asked my dad why soap made oil come off my hand.
I rewatched the video a few times. “Encourage her love of science and technology, and inspire her to change the world,” the video ends. Yes, it’s a little cheesy. However, if she’s the example of what happens when someone is not encouraged, then I could be the poster child for someone who was. I’ve grown up in an environment where I could have fallen in love with anything, and my parents would have supported me all the same. The fact that it was science was all my doing.
I hold their support so close to my identity that I can’t imagine where I would be, who I would be, if I hadn’t been given the encouragement I got.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XP3cyRRAfX0
I remember being around 10 years old and I was being bad staying up late to watch television. I was flipping through the channels and stumbled up a PBS special hosted by Brian Greene, "The Elegant Universe." It was about quantum mechanics, string theory, quantum gravity, and just wonderful physics that was way above my head at the time, but I was fascinated. Not even a teenager, after that I insisted that my parents rent me the rest of the multi-part documentary and I went to the library and read every Brian Greene book on the shelf. The idea that things could interact yet be light years apart, that something could be a wave or a particle depending on the way you looked at it, and that Physics itself was broken along the lines of Quantum Mechanics and Relativity just captured me and drew me into asking questions much more difficult that I would have thought I could answer. In 7th grade I remade the infamous double slit experiment and then decided to see what would happen with triple, quadruple, and even more slits. And from then on I knew that wanted to be a scientist. Maybe not a physicist the would directly correlate with my inspiration, but from then on I simply wanted to learn more about the world around me - how and more importantly why stuff works the way it works.