I’m from Tacoma. I grew up two trafficless hours from UW, visited the cherry blossoms every springtime, walked past a row of eleven husky flags on my way to my eighth grade classes. My favorite libraries were in the king county library system--Seattle is in King County, for any out-of-staters. The UW was so close I practically lived there--and you know that library I was talking about? I've never liked stories where people grow where they're planted. I wanted an adventure. UW was nice and all, but I was going to school in New York.
Of course, freshman year came, and with it good sense and in state tuition and all the other things teetering piles of books leave out. I found myself, to my own surprise, in Terry hall, clutching a goodie bag from whoever it is that introduces new students—I don’t remember who, but my roommate and I tacked the lists of UW resources to our cork boards as we talked about our upcoming classes. I had missed the last orientation by a day, and got signed up for my first choice classes by virtue of having weird first choices. My roommate, who had attended both orientation and early fall start, seemed incredibly knowledgable as she told me about red square, and the quad, and Paccar hall, which she pronounced Pacc-err, like the few students I’d met.
At this point all I wanted was to find something to get lost in, in this big familiar world. I took a wide range of classes that quarter--I loved intro to law, was interested in my biology class. I didn't like economics, but I could imagine doing it. I liked UW, and I liked my classes, but something was missing.
Conveniently enough, for this learning statement's narrative, that something came that very year. I took my first chemistry class with the best lecturer I'd ever had, and in it, we talked about light.
I’d been told, in high school, that light was both a particle and a wave, and that it was like nothing else, and this was just how things worked—but see, there's a concept used to great effect in fantasy books: if your rule has exceptions, you have the wrong rule. In that first introductory chemistry class, they taught us about the de Broglie wave equation, which quantifies (kind of) the wave-like behavior of matter. For those who didn't take that class, it basically says that all matter exhibits wave like properties--you just don't notice because most of the matter you see is really big. It starts to matter for tiny things, like light.
In other words--a rule without exceptions. A tie, between everyday classes and adventure novels. Something to explore, and something to get lost in.
So, as our short acquaintance has no doubt led you to expect, I (predictably) fell irrevocably in love with chemistry. And, (also predictably), I didn't become more decisive, waffling between potential majors until that summer, when I studied abroad in Zimbabwe. Following the model of every American coming of age cliche, it changed my life. By the end I was decided—I would be an engineer.
I applied to chemical engineering, and I found it was something to get lost in--and the rest, as they say, is history.