I Believe In Love With Math

I have always loved puzzles and riddles. One of my favorite feelings is being faced with a challenge and having no idea of where to start. While this frustrates some people, it excites me because I get to try something brand new. This excitement pushes me on no matter how hard the puzzle; I refuse to give up on any riddle. This passion for problem solving lead me to fall in love with math because to me math is a giant series of puzzles. When writing proofs for homework assignments I would approach them as if they were riddles. I had theorems and lemmas, just like I would have clues and hints in a riddle. Even when I had to take a break and work on other homework, the proofs would be burning a hole in the back of my head as I constantly tried

I come from a family with many college professors, I am very active in doing outreach to local elementary schools through the Physics club, and I have been a teaching assistant for a mathematics course. All of this lead me to believe that I would love to be a college professor, But I realized that I had never experienced what a life with math outside of academia would look like. To fix this I obtained a summer internship that was less academic. This lead me to my position at AMRE at the College of Wooster where I worked on a team consulting for a local business: ArtiFlex, a car part manufacturing plant. I loved this experience so much that I came back to AMRE the following summer. That summer I worked for Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company. Seeing what a math-based industry job looked like opened my eyes and caused me to be torn between going into industry or going into

First of all, the research being done at Case Western matches my personal interests really well. Having a real interest for mathematical modeling, the large-scale scientific computing research being done at Case Western is really exciting to me. I would love for the opportunity to learn more about scientific computing while researching and working on intricate and complex computational models. The probability and statistics research also matches my interests very well. The senior capstone project done by Kirk Walford in 2015, \textit{A Titanic Analysis}, is very similar to a project I did for my probability and statistic II course last year. Where Kirk Walford studied survivability aboard the Titanic using historical data, I studied survivability in a campus wide game of tag using data that my partner and I collected. This project was really engaging and exciting to me, and the fact that a similar project was done by a Case Western undergraduate makes me excited for the potential graduate research I could do at Case