Assignment 6 - Anna Baskin

I love learning. That’s a trite and often pretentious statement, I know. When a gushing student writes on a college application that they just love to learn, I have a hard time believing the college admissions counselor doesn’t roll their eyes (I know I would). But that doesn’t make it any less true. Learning is frustrating and tedious, but the satisfaction of understanding something new is worth it. The “Eureka” moment when you comprehend something for the first time, when the confused scrunch of your eyebrows smooths over and you nod to yourself because, finally, that makes sense is one of the best feelings in the world.

All of this is to say that I can’t tell you any one intellectual experience that has been meaningful to me. I can tell you thousands. In every subject, in every class, there’s something to broaden your perceptions. In 8^th grade I did a science fair project studying the effect of free radicals on cell membranes. Do I remember the results? Nope. But I do remember my fascination with how researchers could study the effects of chemicals on a microscopic part of our body, and apply it to medical solutions. Suddenly I understood how we learned about the human body. Last year in AP Seminar I wrote a paper analyzing the effect of long working hours on businesses. In the process, I learned how we use research to shape corporate policy and laws. It was intriguing, analyzing the thought process behind these policies. Just this month, I was bewildered by Mrs. Dewees’s explanation of derivatives; why would we need to take the slope of a tangent line? Happily, I found there was a practical explanation: we learned the next day in physics how to find velocity and acceleration using the slope of a point.  In, the end, I find learning a whole to be my biggest interest, not just one project.