PROMPT: Stanford students possess an intellectual vitality. Reflect on an idea or experience that has been important to your intellectual development.
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ANY comments or feedback would be greatly appreciated. I struggled with coming up with a topic because I was looking too much into it. At some point or another, I said heck with it and just went with a childhood memory infused with a bit of the present me. Tell me what you think!
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As a child, Santa, and later my parents, always made a point of giving my brother and me an academically oriented present or two for Christmas. Often in lieu of G.I. Joe dolls and other quintessential toys of boyhood, these gifts became something we looked forward to. Magic science kits, tadpole habitats, and Rubik's Cubes quickly became the focal point of the holiday. We looked forward to learning, a foreign idea to me at the time, and the novelty that came along with it.
One year I received a book on the interworkings of the world. Aptly named, The Way Things Work, it mapped out and explained how modern technology worked, from the inclined plane to photography. Each chapter marked a new invention-gears, pulleys, levers-and their relation to science, namely Physics. Eager to soak up the encyclopedia of knowledge and entertained all the while, I lugged the book around with me for weeks, perhaps well into February of the following year.
One night, years later, perusing around the entity that is YouTube, I came across a channel by the name of "Minute Physics." I recalled one of cherished Christmas presents of my past. Physics, I came to learn in high school, wasn't always fun, or easy for that matter. In fact, my close friends and I often referred to it as a subject devoted to Harry-Potter-esque wizardry; because, however interesting, it was undeniably complicated. Reflecting on my love-hate relationship with the subject, visions of equations scrolled on whiteboards like calligraphy, elegant and complex, came into my head. Though, on this particular night, finding myself in some sort of cyber limbo, it wasn't the fond memories of velocity and projectile problem, nor memories of reading The Way Things Work that compelled me to see what this channel was all about. The illustrations and diagrams were what caught my eye; that, and a longing for anything slightly interesting to quell my boredom. With the click of my mouse, I plunged into the world of matter and energy.
Time passed quickly as I continued from one video to the next. With each click of the mouse came an influx of interest. Nearly half an hour later, after watching a series of videos, my piddling on YouTube was no longer in vain. I learned a handful of principles, equations, and theories-from the origins of Quantum Mechanics to why the speed of light varies between glass and air. I now understood the meaning behind the proverb "curiosity killed the cat," from the paradoxical Schrodinger's Cat experiment-how observation leads to reality collapsing into one possibility or the other. Crazy, right?
No longer was I trying to cram acronyms into my brain, or memorizing which equation went with which topic as I had in high school. The subject of Physics had been explained simply, in a way that illuminated something I had previously found difficult to grasp, and thus dismissed its value altogether. Physics jargon aside; I had experienced learning with a child-like fervor. My experience made it clear that while academia can be likened to a cafeteria line; it's all, in its own right, captivating. It may just take a few cartoon drawings to lure in the skeptics.
