Hobbies
Tennis, Pickup Basketball, Ultimate Frisbee, Playing Guitar, Pool, Reading, Writing

Clubs
N/A

Experience
Axline Scholar at Caltech University, Destination Imagination, Research Science Institute at MIT

Biography
I was born in Brooklyn, NY, and have lived almost half my 18 years in Montgomery County, MD. By heritage, I am a second-generation Shanghai-nese from China; by faith, I am a born-again Christian; by training and education, I am a mathematician and scientist; by profession, I am a tutor; by interests, I am a musician, writer, sociologist, and an experimenter. I am very excited to attend the 2004 U.S. Physics Team Training Camp at the University of Maryland.
I have long considered physics to be my most intellectually stimulating pursuit. I owe my habit of questioning how things work from discussions with my father, a civilian scientist working at the Army Research Laboratory in solid-state physics and photonics. In 8th and 9th grade, I participated in Destination Imagination, a creative, holistic engineering, improvisational, and performance competition. The experience bolstered my creative drive to tinker and wonder, and while we were ultimately unsuccessful in the competitive arena, I remember that time as the beginning of my independent growth as a physicist, collaborator, and thinker. Since then, I have gained much recognition for the cultivation of my talents in science. I have most recently been named an Axline Scholar to Caltech University, which is tentatively my college of choice. In addition, I attended the 2003 session of the Research Science Institute at MIT, where I completed a high-energy physics project concerning the detection of a new state of matter, the quark-gluon plasma. I also participate in several physics, chemistry, computing, and mathematics competitions and olympiads on the local, state, and national level, the acronyms of which I can never remember.
In between the emergence and the fruition of my career as a “professional” student, I have acquired and developed other hobbies that I still enjoy. I have benefited most from my experience as a musician. When I began learning the guitar, I was an introverted, modest teenager. Five years hence, I am no longer shy and I have learned the art of expression through music. By degrees, guitar playing is physics and performance, mathematics and music, and I relish the combination of harmonics and consonance in a good song. In addition to music, I am an unabashed dabbler, although I always look at new interests through the lenses of a physicist. For instance, I have pursued debate and international politics in extra-curricular activities to sate my curiosity in social science. In my first (and last!) debate, I defended the precedence of academic freedom in high schools by citing historical classroom discoveries. I explained Oersted’s classroom discovery of the relationship between electricity and magnetism, as well as the more recent and controversial Mpemba effect, so named for a Tanzanian high school student who discovered that hot water freezes faster than cold water. Unfortunately, I found few sympathizers of my impassioned yet misleading arguments. When not involved in science, I love to read and write. I keep my own webjournal to hone my writing skills, and for fun. I also tutor elementary and middle school students, which oftentimes feels more akin to babysitting with a workbook and a sharp pencil. I enjoy tennis, pickup basketball, and Ultimate Frisbee, in increasing order of athletic ability, as well as pool; frisbee and pool both share the language and dynamics of rotating bodies, which amuses the friends who witness my flubs. I’ve heard variants of the line “He’s busy working out the trajectory” too often as I focus on a catch, throw, or shot.
With the rest of my free time, I attend to my homework, which I will hopefully escape when I graduate in early June. I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I did writing it.