WISE Application Essay

When I was in elementary school, I entered the school science fair. My experiment tested the effect of different liquids on plants including Windex, Coke, and Orange Juice. At the time, I was amazed to discover that the plant watered with Windex grew taller and brighter than the plant nourished with water. This surprise exemplifies the reason I find science fascinating. No matter how much someone may think they know about how the world works, it could always turn out to be a little bit different.

I remember having that same feeling in ninth grade when I took biology. When we first began learning about photosynthesis, I was completely shocked that it was such a complicated process. Biology opened my eyes to how miraculous and intricate the natural world is; it proved to me that everything is not quite as it appears. I never could run a mile the same way again. Now when I run, I cannot help but think about my heart pumping blood into my veins as I breathe deeply, the lactic acid building up on my muscles as I push harder and harder. I love understanding why something happens; it makes it so much easier to appreciate.

The next year, I took chemistry and I liked it even better. I have always enjoyed math and the synthesis of the two was incredibly appealing. I liked watching chemicals react, creating gases and solids, changing color and temperature. But I liked knowing why that happened even more. I would watch a solution start to fizz and imagine the atoms dancing and switching partners. It was so strange to talk about the actions of matter that we could not even see. To make up for it, I imagined whole lives for my little atom friends. When I was studying, I would make-up interpretive dances about ionic and covalent bonds that, I have to admit, were more theatrical than scientifically accurate. While the raw numbers and innumerably laws of chemistry may not have seemed exciting, in my mind they were the biggest soap opera of all.

However, my favorite science class so far has to be physics. As Mr. Lawler often says, “we have to rise above Aristotelian thinking to Newton’s”. Physics has definitely blown away my previous assumptions about how the world works. Ever since I took an existentialism class one summer, I have been interested in philosophy and its goal to try to explain the universe. Until I began learning about physics, I had never found those answers anywhere else. Now, I can hardly separate the two in my mind. Only in physics have I sat down and thought about the mechanics of force and then built a bridge to physically explore my understanding. That application of the abstract idea reminds me of Kierkegaard, considered one of the first existentialists, and his theory that it is not enough to talk about philosophy; it is a way of life. For me, science is a way of life. It is a way of looking at the world and perceiving the way it interacts. For me, life and science are inseparable.