As the bright light of the sun poured into my room, I woke up and got ready for the day ahead of me. I walked up to my bulletin board and stared blankly at the thousands of sticky notes posted on the miniature board. Through the clutter of pins, notes, and papers, one caught my attention. It was a bright blue colored note with the words “STEM day” written on it. Suddenly, I dashed to my calendar with a hundred thoughts going through my mind at the same time. It was STEM day, in which students can find an interesting project and work on the topic the students chooses for most of the day. After a day of hard work, the student is expected to present it to the whole school. If their project was selected they would be able to move on to the regional contest, states, and lastly nationals. I was so excited for this day as if I won my project could possibly be used for the benefit of society. By the thought of the exciting day ahead, I quickly rushed downstairs to get the supplies ready, eager to start my project. Before I was seated on the bus, I had already thought of an idea for my project this year. I wanted to help the environment by experimenting with current engines at browser headquarters such as Google for their percentage of carbon emissions released. Even if a solution was found that decreases the carbon dioxide released out of their server by a bit if all browsers incorporated this method it could change the total amount of CO2 released every year significantly.
Since today was STEM day there were only two hours of school. After I had finished my required two hours I immediately came home eager to start researching my project. I sent an email asking if I could go to Google's Atlanta Headquarters for research. After a few business hours, there was still no reply. Discouraged, I went online to try to find other solutions to my incoming disaster. Through many articles, I finally managed to gain insight into the information I needed anyway as I happily celebrated the wall I made that blocked my great disaster. During the following hours, I spent a lot of time learning from a Youtube interview about how the google physical server connects to a machine that releases the gasses into the sky. At the same time, I was also trying to brainstorm ideas to find other possible ways to get people's searches as fast and as efficiently, though at the same time, releasing a smaller amount of harmful chemicals into the atmosphere. After a long time of thinking, I found many different possible solutions, some worked very badly, and some worked perfectly just not as fast. After my brain started venturing out of super focus mode, the delicious aroma of my mom’s cooking broke through all my train of thought and reminded me that self-care exists. I immediately hurried into the kitchen gobbling down some of my mother’s homemade soup dumplings suddenly realizing how hungry I was.
After I finished eating and making sure my body was ready for more work, I walked back to my study room with the flow of ideas coming back to me. My day was split up into parts to keep everything organized. This part of the day was mainly about researching how the engineers at Google keep the entire browser running as well as possibly learning their tricks to keep the search engine from being hacked. During those hours I also made sure my plan B was ready. Like any other good planner, I had learned from experience to always have a plan B just in case something went wrong. Therefore, I planned one that was not too off-topic from my project, so it was easy to prepare. For my other plan, I was researching how the analysts help keep Google safe by keeping viruses and trackers away, keeping the 3.4 billion people that use Google safe on the internet. Though while working on my other project, I found research from the analysts that had various pieces of information that were key in my research. From their studies, it was revealed that one Google search is equivalent to about 0.2 grams of CO2. According to a study from 2015, there are around 3.4 billion searches per day. The total carbon released every single day by the server would then be 680 million grams. The important message behind this project was to find a solution to this big carbon problem. If people were careful about their carbon footprint then this giant global warming issue could have been solved long ago.
Generally, when I share my experience with others they always ask, how do you already have an idea of how you’re going to pave your pathway when some people are still stuck not knowing how to use the shovel? I always answer the same thing, the longing for the feeling of new discovery. This mysterious force has always been pushing me to do multiple tasks educationally that people my age would have been scared to do. My feeling of new discovery was only created when I had seen my parents and ancestors push themselves to their educational limits because of this unseen force. I had also experienced my mom and dad working night and day trying to find the solution to the mysterious Riemannian Geometry in math, hoping to leave a footprint in history, hoping to help out the future generation. Doing this project was half motivated by my feeling of discovery, the possible prize of changing the world even by a bit was the motivation behind mostly every single move that I make. The other motivating factor that has helped me accomplish many things in STEM is Grace Wahba, a famous statistician who is one of my absolute role models. Grace was one of the few people in the 1900s who was working in the STEM field, she single-handedly founded the Wisconsin School of Spline, and the trainees produced by her were very outstanding and among the top statisticians today. She was also one of the key inventors behind the smoothing spline, a powerful approach for estimating functional relationships between a predictor X and a response Y.
Grace also happened to be one of the first people who bonded me with the 4 areas of STEM. Her entire career all makes up a story to me and that story has gained a huge significance and meaning over time. This story has pushed me and motivated me to do many tasks that were key in my pursuit of science and math. Though to be like my role models, I need to go on a quest to find anything that will help the future generations, something to leave a mark in the history of science, technology, engineering, and math. If I possibly complete this task, then the future generations could ascend homosapiens to the possible, most superior race in the universe.
References: Nychka, D., Ma, P., and Bates, D. (2020) A Conversation with Grace Wahba , Statistical Science, 35, 308–320.
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