In my freshman year, I went on a NASA sponsored Solar Eclipse viewing trip with the Society of Physics students at Wesleyan. We traveled to Maine, and got to watch the eclipse from the path of totality. Viewing the eclipse was an amazing experience, showing me not only the beauty of nature, but the magnitude of celestial objects. During totality, the visibility, noise, and temperature drastically dropped, showing that nature and growth are reliant on the sun. It was a unique experience, one that I will remember for the rest of my life, and made me want to understand the world better than I do. I saw that with an event such as a solar eclipse, every science that I have taken could be used in some way. Astronomy, to map the path of the stars, along with math and physics to calculate when the overlap would happen and by how much, and computer science to track the sun and moon’s paths. This event made me more passionate about these sciences.
In my time at Wesleyan, I have taken Astrophysics, Electromagnetism, Multivariable calculus, Vectors & Matrices, Discrete math, and various Computer Science classes. I’ve learned numerous equations, techniques, patterns, and coding languages. My main passions, computer science and math, have led to my learning Python, Java, C, and SML, along with many techniques for coding more efficiently with less processing power and work done by the computer. My academic learnings have led to personal projects, where I create codes to solve problems I have in everyday life. I made a code for a task calendar that would display the tasks and when they were to be completed. Furthermore, I made a code that I believe could be useful to reduce storage taken up by texts. It takes letters, converts them to their ASCII number values, and then computes a decimal that represents the combined number of all the letters. In this way, we could store large texts as two numbers. In terms of physics and astronomy, I have done papers and projects of various subjects, my favorite of which was a paper on baryon asymmetry for my astrophysics class. This required learning some particle physics on top of everything that I was learning in class, and was an interesting, frustrating, and ultimately satisfying experience. My love of the sciences has only grown since getting to Wesleyan, and I hope to go on more trips that will spark continued curiosity about nature and technology.
