My Perspective
Ever since I was young I have had an intense curiosity about the world. This innate facet of myself arose at an early age in a type of question that my parents came to know well and possibly even dread: a question that always started with the phrase What if. As time went on and I became more grounded in the world, these questions developed from What if’s to How’s and Why’s. Naturally, these questions led me to an interest in science. Where there was science, there came math. In these studies, I found one of my strengths, the ability to analyze. Analysis was not a new or learned skill, but simply a label I had found for the part of me that loved asking those What if’s. Now, I had a direction, a way I was able to focus and strengthen this skill of mine. However, this developing interest only led to confusion. While my What if’s fueled my analytic side, this curiosity stoked a stronger flame. It not only drove me to explore ideas but to create them. I quickly fell in love with self-expression and grew up practicing any form I could, be it music, visual art, or writing. All these served to develop the only aspect of myself that rivals (surpasses even) my passion for analysis: creativity.
Both of these aspects of myself grew and strengthened at the same pace. Trying to decide how I wanted to define myself felt like being stuck in an ever-intensifying arms race. My analytic and creative sides were what gave me a foundation to walk on, but the opposition between the two was enough to split me in half. I felt as though I was standing at a crossroad with an impossible choice of what to leave behind; I could never reconcile the duality inside me.
Now, at UCLA I am studying Physics with a minor in BioInformatics. While here, I have discovered a great interest in working with data and all the ways it can be used to explore, explain, and represent different aspects of whatever you choose to analyze. I have had a few opportunities to pursue this new interest. Over the summer I joined a team focused on visual marketing for a sustainability-oriented retrofitting company called Optima Energy. As a part of this company I got to work with data from the companies building retrofitting projects to analyze and create representative graphics to show to potential clients. At the moment, I am currently a cabinet member for the second representative of UCLA’s Undergraduate Students Association Council. In this position, I am working with a team of students to analyze and reformat the council’s budgets and spendings to bring more insight and clarity to the council’s use of money for the student population. Both of these experiences have fueled my interest in pursuing a career in Data Science or Data Analytics in the future.
To my surprise, my greatest success has come not by choosing one side of me over the other, but in the merging of my analytic and creative passions. I have become stronger in my academic and professional careers due to the broad perspective and thinking styles from both analytic and creative pursuits. Where I once had seen an irreconcilable conflict in myself, I now see an invaluable synergy. I am proud to say that when standing at the crossroads of my passions, I chose to walk between the two, leaving no part of myself behind.
STEM v. Art
One of the most common themes I have found in growing up is figuring out how to navigate stepping into my own identity. That is, figuring out how to be your own self. The hardest part of this arises in figuring out how to be authentic to yourself.
The second aspect of being authentic to yourself is learning how to separate your own identity from that which the world pushes onto you. These different pressures can come from family, friends, institutions, or general ideas from society of how a personal identity should be shaped.
My hardest struggle with figuring out how to be authentic to myself was learning to balance what seemed to be two very disparate aspects of myself. Ever since I was young, I have always had an intense passion for the arts and creating art, music, and even writing whenever I could.
I feel that authentically living can be broken down into a few simple (though difficult to figure out) aspects. The first being that you must figure out what is true to you. This can be as simple as day to day interests that you like to fill your time with but also a deep as trying to understand your own worldview and how it aligns with you.
I believe that identity is something that stands apart from the world and because of that, learning to separate yourself enough to discern what makes you unique is key.
This passion only strengthened as time went on, but started to conflict with the quickly developing love and pursuit of my analytical side. This being an intense curiosity for figuring out how the world works and all the methods we have available to describe it.
For most of my life, I felt as though I could not reconcile what I thought to be a large disparity between the two sides of my identity. As I understood it when I was younger, a person’s identity should be focused in one major direction, being some is artistic, or scientific, or socially oriented.
I feel that though the set up of the career culture that I saw imposed the idea of a single tract like where we must choose one aspect of ourselves to develop into our adult life and nothing more.
Living authentically, for myself, has been coming to the realization that there is no duality between the different parts of myself as I felt the world was telling me, but rather they are different expressions of the same underlying creativity and curiosity that is at the core of who I am.