Hi! Here's my essay for the stanford question: Stanford students possess an intellectual vitality. Reflect on an idea or experience that has been important to your intellectual development.
It makes sense in my head but I don't know if I really got the point across so any advice would be great! Thanks.
My mind is in a constant battle between the right side of my brain and the left. The artist in me comes out when I have a paint brush in hand. I fell in love with art at a young age, obsessed with design and self expression. On the other side, math has always fascinated me to no end. I have a knack for numbers and patterns, and I love the way everything seems to be interconnected. Along with my love for math and solving problems came my love for puzzles. I would spend weeks upon weeks putting puzzles together. I bought out every variety from the store. I stacked them. I timed myself and took them apart and put them together again. And then one day I did a puzzle upside down. I saw it as a challenge, I was fascinated by the shapes, the way everything fit together, the prospect of creating something from nothing. When I put that puzzle together, cardboard side up, it wasn't the same. It hit me that, as much as I loved the shapes of the pieces and putting them together, half the fun of puzzles was seeing the picture it created in the end. I went from thinking that art and math had nothing to do with each other to seeing that they had everything to do with each other. From then on I was obsessed. I saw the unique relationship between art and math everywhere ï in beautiful patterns and abstract paintings. I read about it and researched it, intrigued by things like the Egyptian pyramids, the golden ratio, and everything geometrical. Math is beautiful, art is beautiful, and I see infinite possibilities in the realm of art and math.
