Any help or feedback would be great!
Stanford students possess an intellectual vitality. Reflect on an idea or experience that has been important to your intellectual development.
Ever since I was young, I have always wondered about the "big" questions. How did we get here, are we alone in the universe, and why does everything just work? Because of this insatiable curiosity, I devoured ideas in books and spent countless hours watching any Discovery channel program on the universe. I thought it was all very interesting but it never clicked with me that discovering the mysteries of the universe could be a job. Then one day during the summer, a friend of mine, Chris was talking about the same questions and he uttered two words that changed everything: theoretical physicist.
Suddenly, not only had I found someone else as secretly dorky as me that was also interested in the same things but also I now knew a future goal to pursue. Because Chris and I were both on the cross-country team, we ran together a lot and suddenly our runs became like the salons of the Enlightenment. We were bouncing ideas off each other so much that our friends decided it was better to give us a wide breadth during our impassioned discussions. We talked about string theory, muons, and neutrinos. I would go home after our runs and read books by Leon Ledermann and Michio Kaku learning more and more about the mysteries of the universe. I also learned how much more there is to discover and potentially engineer helping to fuel my drive to benefit humanity in the future.
Three years have passed since those summer runs but the fire of curiosity still burns within me. In no way were all of my questions answered, and I plan to answer them one day. Their answers are just waiting to be discovered by someone, and why could that someone not be me?
Stanford students possess an intellectual vitality. Reflect on an idea or experience that has been important to your intellectual development.
Ever since I was young, I have always wondered about the "big" questions. How did we get here, are we alone in the universe, and why does everything just work? Because of this insatiable curiosity, I devoured ideas in books and spent countless hours watching any Discovery channel program on the universe. I thought it was all very interesting but it never clicked with me that discovering the mysteries of the universe could be a job. Then one day during the summer, a friend of mine, Chris was talking about the same questions and he uttered two words that changed everything: theoretical physicist.
Suddenly, not only had I found someone else as secretly dorky as me that was also interested in the same things but also I now knew a future goal to pursue. Because Chris and I were both on the cross-country team, we ran together a lot and suddenly our runs became like the salons of the Enlightenment. We were bouncing ideas off each other so much that our friends decided it was better to give us a wide breadth during our impassioned discussions. We talked about string theory, muons, and neutrinos. I would go home after our runs and read books by Leon Ledermann and Michio Kaku learning more and more about the mysteries of the universe. I also learned how much more there is to discover and potentially engineer helping to fuel my drive to benefit humanity in the future.
Three years have passed since those summer runs but the fire of curiosity still burns within me. In no way were all of my questions answered, and I plan to answer them one day. Their answers are just waiting to be discovered by someone, and why could that someone not be me?